You Can't Take A Lifetime To Get It Done

By JOANNE KAUFMAN - Wall Street Journal

Corbis

More than a dozen years ago, jazz critic Gary Giddins made an appointment with his editor at the publisher William Morrow. Mr. Giddins had some very good news: He'd completed his manuscript of his long-aborning Bing Crosby biography. But Mr. Giddins also had a bit of bad news: It was merely volume one.
Well, in that case the editor had some bad news of her own: The nine-year-old project was being killed and the advance would have to be returned. "She said, 'Who's Bing Crosby? Is it someone our parents knew?'" recalled Mr. Giddins, who got a far more sympathetic hearing at Little, Brown & Co., which was immediately on board with the two-volume approach. In 2001, the company published the 768-page "Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams—the Early Years (1903-1940)." As for Der Bingle's later years, "all I can say is I'm working every day," Mr. Giddins said.

It's an ever-shrinking group, the authors who are given the real estate between multiple sets of hardcovers to chronicle the life and times of their subjects. "I don't know of anyone who has gotten a contract for a multivolume biography in the last five years," said David Nasaw, a professor of history at CUNY Graduate Center, whose (one-volume) bio of Joseph P. Kennedy will be published in November. "God bless Bob Caro, but it's over."

Robert Caro, the pre-eminent practitioner of the very, very long form, has just published, to much tada-ing, the 712-page "Passage of Power," the 10-years-in-the-making fourth volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson, a project that began in 1974. The fifth and final installment is yet to come.

Perhaps the Caro fanfare will serve as a spur to Blanche Cook and Sylvia Jukes Morris. Ms. Cook is the author of a three-part biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Volume one appeared in 1992 and volume two in 1999. The third installment "is under contract though not yet scheduled," according to a spokeswoman for Ms. Cook's publisher, Penguin, who declined to say more. Ms. Morris is the author of "A Rage for Fame," part one of a projected two-part bio of Clare Boothe Luce that came out in 1997. Fans continue to wait for the sequel; it too is under contract but unscheduled, said a spokeswoman at Random House, Ms. Morris's publisher, as is the fourth and final volume of John Richardson's biography of Pablo Picasso. Meanwhile, the second half of James Kaplan's 2010 Sinatra biography, "Frank: The Voice," is due out in 2015.
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