Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. By Scott E. Casper. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999. xiv, 439pp.

Reviewed by Michael J. Kiskis

Those familiar with the canonical autobiographies of the colonial and early republic periods have long held autobiography as a force in shaping an American self. Most notable are Puritan conversion narratives, captivity tales such as Mary Rowlandson's or, in another form, Elizabeth Ashbridge's or instructional/inspirational inventions of business and political entrepreneurs, most famously Benjamin Franklin's multi-part autobiography. In Constructing American Lives Scott E. Casper offers a panoramic study of American biography through the nineteenth century, a time when the basic purposes of biography were being formed and debated within literary and historical, public and private spheres. He argues persuasively that specific and careful attention must be paid to biography's pivotal role in the creation of an "American" idea of both national and individual/personal character. In Casper's words: "The story of nineteenth-century American biography--not just the now forgotten texts but also the writing, publication, and reading of them--remains significant, for it illuminates the ways nineteenth-century American culture worked: how people explained, disseminated, debated, and transformed the meanings of individual character and national identity" (319).

How those meanings were created and presented is the key to our understanding of biography both as an immensely popular as well as an immensely influential form of American storytelling. Writers engaged in this identity project were both reflective and reactive as they gauged the value of their work in shaping the newly fused national character. Casper writes:

American magazines published myriad articles on the purposes of biography. In their diaries, women and men in all regions of the nation described reading biographies and taking useful lessons from them. Certainly nineteenth-century biographers, readers, and critics thought about form, and certainly they considered how subjects ought best to be portrayed. But execution and portrayal served larger objectives. Biography did not simply reflect culture, nor was it primarily a vehicle for meeting the insatiable demands of a public that made and dropped celebrities, Andy Warhol-style, every fifteen minutes. When it succeeded, it did so by influencing people's lives,

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not just stimulating their imaginations literary or otherwise. Biography had constructive, cultural purposes. (23)

Casper set his sights on an ambitious, deeply complex, and challenging project: "I am," he writes, "interested in recovering the American experience of biography, not simply a neglected genre" (13). That intention sets this study off from studies of a literary genre. We have here a carefully reconstructed history of how writers shaped the stories of American lives, how motivations to create, recreate, or interpret history influenced literary work as well as a history of how readers accepted and used those tales to achieve a sense of connection both to the past and to each other.

Casper offers three arguments:

First, debates over biography were microcosms of larger debates over character: what it was, where to find it, and how to portray it. Second, biography had a double-edged relationship with history. As a branch of history it could reinforce larger master narratives about the American past, but by adding neglected individuals and groups it could also challenge those narratives and suggest alternative interpretations. Third, by century's end several key seeds of our modern "culture of biography" had been sown, notably a new critical vocabulary that defined biography as literature and distinguished "good" biography from almost all the biographies actually being written and read. (6)

Recovery of the broad and varied "experience of biography" requires a longitudinal examination of the shifts in the theory and practice of biographers. Biography as a genre is not inherently "constructive, cultural purposed." Writers adopt and adapt the genre to fit purposes personal and social, political and aesthetic. Casper is very good at setting up the competing personalities and agendas. He approaches the history of American biography by starting with nineteenth-century debates between didactic nationalism and Johnsonian theory; he completes his study with the broader acceptance of biography as a full partner in literary culture at the end of the century.

The critical landscape was shaped and reshaped, he argues, by competing and conflicting approaches to and understandings of history and the role of narrative in the intellectual and emotional and social life of the society. Biographers saw their work as important to social goals. An overt example of such social intent is Mason Locke Weems's devotion to George Washington. Importantly, Weems serves as an example of the debate over definitions of privacy and the responsibility of the biographer to his subject: his work codified the biographer's interest

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in virtue as separate from any breach of domestic privacy. It was an approach that effectively set women and family life outside the realm of biography for a good long time. Casper comments: "But this omission squared with republican theory, which defined public virtues as masculine ones, much as the word `virtue' itself derived from the Latin word for `man'" (75).

Early beliefs that biography acted primarily as moral instruction gradually gave way to practices that treated biography as means to supplement and reinforce the historical record. Ultimately this idea was influenced by shifting approaches to history--from a focus on recollections and personal memory to a more "objective" stance that relied more heavily on documentary evidence, a position championed by Jared Sparks. With this more disciplined approach, biography still held to its tradition of didacticism. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the idea that the didactic strain in biography melded with social concerns, which generated efforts to include a broader variety of subjects. An overarching belief in progress and the need to find stories to support that interpretation of the American experience influenced the work of Elizabeth Ellet, who as both a contemporary and a competitor of Sparks linked contemporary ideals of domesticity and patriotism in her work on women's lives to highlight the contributions of women during the American Revolution.

Ellet's work, however, must be seen in a broader social context. According to Casper: "The most important reasons for the expansion of female biography and the specific forms it took were the increase in women's reading and writing associated with the evangelical revivalism of the 1830s and new, middle class forms of activity that offered women new avenues into prominence as agents of reform and as subjects of biography" (78). Ellet expanded the biographical franchise by focusing on the intellectual abilities of women and by insisting that the past could be used as an exemplar for the present, that the past should be valued for its impact on the present, and that the past should be preserved for its own sake. Her work was clearly made possible by the increase in social reform. In another attempt at extending the franchise, William Gilmore Simms argued for a further expansion of biographical subjects both by working to break a regional bias (he worked to include Southerners as part of the growing pantheon) and by insisting that sympathy for the subject was part of any biographer's work. Ellet and Simms helped to redefine biography's relationship to history by challenging Sparks and by insisting on a more inclusive list of subjects as well as on greater freedom in methodology.

But there were also personal considerations. William Wirt's self-interest in his telling the story of Patrick Henry--the story became a

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way for him to assure his own stature and status--serves as an early example of the personal agendas of various practitioners throughout the century. It serves, in fact, as an early example of the kind of interest that permeated the work of James Parton. Parton was perhaps the most popular biographer of mid- to late-nineteenth century, and his work can be seen as a response to the didactic strain that remained in place from Wirt and Weems to Sparks. With Parton, Casper sets the case for linking biographer and reader: "Parton answered Carlyle's key biographical questions: how did the subject influence society, and how did society influence the subject" (227). Parton personified the shift in nineteenth-century biography. For Parton, the biographer is less the disciple to historians than kin to artists--and especially novelists. The idea of character shifts away from a contributor to the social ideal of individualism to an aesthetic appreciation for and interest in individuality, which is developed as a product of the biographer's personal and interpretive vision. Here we see the beginnings of what we think of as the modern biographer: an interpreter of a life, a writer who approaches a subject with a full repertoire of literary styles, a creator of lives who ultimately becomes known for the lives he recreates and interprets for the reader. Didacticism gives way to interpretation; larger social and cultural concerns give way to the development of individual character(s). Entertainment dominates.

The consideration of Parton's abilities and practices leads to a focus on the relationship among the biographer, subject, and reader. To underscore the importance and the intimacy of this relationship, Casper presents five chapter "interludes" in which he discusses the impact of biographies on contemporary readers. These are "designed to capture moments in American's biographical experience. . . . Individually, these interludes offer snapshots of the relationship between Americans, biographers, and concepts of the genre. Taken together, they mark in microcosm many of the changes over time that the chapters explore at greater length" (17). The tighter focus of these interludes allows us to see more clearly the influence biography had on how Americans understood and accepted story as basic to their lives and relationship to the broader society in which they lived. These offer intimate demonstrations of the role of biography in the lives of real, if not always common, readers.

From individual biographies and biographers to the roles of major publishing houses (the description of the impact of Houghton Mifflin on late nineteenth-century biography is very good), from conventional biographical publication such as library series to local "mug books," from lessons in myth-making to realistic portraits of complicated lives, Casper helps us understand the symbiotic tie between biography and

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cultural identity and history. Toward the end of his study, Casper writes that the genesis of American biography has not held the attention of critics because "Twentieth-century scholars and critics missed the story of biography in nineteenth-century America because they saw biographies solely as texts, and most nineteenth-century ones as bad literature or inaccurate history" (330). His point is that we must look more deeply into the social and intellectual history of the form and intention of biography if we are to appreciate its impact on both its contemporary readers and our own twenty-first-century concepts of narrative value. In the end, present ideas about, acceptance of, and overwhelming interest in biography are directly related to nineteenth-century arguments over and approaches to life stories. Reconstructing a moment (or moments) in an intellectual, artistic, and political project whose end is the shaping of cultural expectations calls for a sensitivity to genre as well as to the intense inter-relationships of subject/writer/audience. Casper has done his work thoroughly and well.

Elmira College