Melville House Books

Howells: Perfected the campaign bio

Campaign biographies were invented to facilitate a major change in the course of American history: the moment when the very notion of a political campaign for president was concieved. It occurred when military hero Andrew Jackson decided to run against incumbent John Quincy Adams. Up until then, the first five presidents had decided that it was unseemly to appear desirous of the office. Jackson commissioned biographers to create an image of him that would overcome that, and history has never been the same since. As Jill Lepore notes in this overview for The New Yorker, the form has been practiced by notables such as Nathaniel Hawthorne (Franklin Pierce) and was perhaps perfected by William Dean Howell‘s campaign bio of Abraham Lincoln, which Lincoln checked out of the Library of Congress twice. But, she says, the form has changed little since that first Jackson bio. She includes books by and about John McCain and Sarah Palin in the survey as perfect examples of the form, but Barack Obama‘s Dreams of My Father, she says, is “too searching for the genre.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.