Month: March 2010

A Brief History of Ghostwriting

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Dissertation ephemera, Features, Politics

[The American Prospect]

In the May issue of The American Prospect, I’ve got an essay on the long, distinguished history of political ghostwriting. A few recent books have touched on this subject, including Robert Schlesinger’s White House Ghosts and Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History, but it’s a rich one. My essay, for example, mentions Doris Kearns Goodwin only in passing, but there’s a lot more story to tell.

In fact, Rick Perlstein told it wonderfully in a 2002 essay for the Village Voice. That publication’s notorious website swallowed the essay long ago, but you can still find it via the Wayback Machine. It’s worth reading in full—not only as the best thing written about Goodwin’s plagiarism fiasco, but also as a great meditation on the act of writing history. Here’s a sample:

Historians must write in the grip of an abiding fear. Composing a paragraph one imagines two audiences: the everyreaders, and the three or four people who know more about what you are writing in a particular paragraph than you do, who have read any book you’re inclined to plagiarize, who, for God’s sake, may have written the book you’re inclined to plagiarize. . . . My book is about the 1964 Barry Goldwater election. And the thought of a midnight knock on my door from this guy named John Kessel (who may or may not still be alive), who published a fine academic study in 1968 called The Goldwater Coalition: Republican Strategies in 1964, accusing me of doing him any dishonor, sends chills down my spine.

I’ll add here that, in an age when plagiarists blame their sins on computers and mixed up research files, it’s fun to read Goodwin preaching about reform through “modern technology.” “I now rely on a scanner, which reproduces the passages I want to cite,” Goodwin promises. “I keep my own comments on those books in a separate file so that I will never confuse the two again.” Maybe more relevant to my Prospect essay is the reliance of Goodwin (and plenty of other pop historians) on research assistants. As of 2002, Goodwin employed four—what’s the best term here? Ghostreaders?

Accountability in Publishing

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Dissertation ephemera

[x-posted at The Rumpus]

Anyone following the fall-out over Charles Pellegrino’s Last Train From Hiroshima—here’s the definitive New York Times story—would do well to read Philip Meyer’s “Accountability When Books Make News,” first published in 1997 in the Media Studies Journal. (You can read it, through the largess of Google Books, right here.)

A terse tour de force, Meyer’s essay starts by outlining what keeps the mainstream media in line: its responsibility to advertisers and to the legal system. “Nothing works as inexorably as the twin forces of the desire to make money and the fear of litigation—the carrot and the stick,” Meyer observes in a nice phrase (and, it must be said, a better potential title for his essay). These factors don’t apply to books, of course—or, Meyer asks, do they? He goes on to discuss, carefully and thoughtfully, the audience, marketplace, and medium of books. He also shows how and where the media piggyback on questionable books—sometimes for the common good (demythologizing J. Edgar Hoover), sometimes not (the craven rumors about George H. W. Bush and a female aide).

None of this correlates to the Pellegrino situation in an A-to-A, B-to-B fashion. At the very least, though, it’s a useful antidote to the Kurt Anderson quote zinging around the blogosphere: “If book publishers are supposed to be the gatekeepers, tell me exactly what they’re closing the gate to.” Anderson makes you nod; Meyer makes you think.

One of History’s Finest Class Projects

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Dissertation ephemera

[x-posted at The Millions]

In the spring of 2006, John Unsworth taught a graduate seminar on “Twentieth-Century American Bestsellers.” It led to one of history’s finest class projects—a browsable database of bestsellers, 337 in all. As with any bestseller lists, you’ll find a range of titles, everything from Thomas Wolfe to Tom Clancy, but each entry includes an extremely detailed description of the book’s history (these were compiled by grad students, after all); a mini-essay on its reception; images of covers, page layouts, even some ads; and much more. It is, in short, bibliophilic crack.

The Real (Literary) America

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Books, Features

[The Millions]

Over at The Millions, you’ll find my “dispatch from the Borders-land,” where, basically, I ask a bunch of shoppers about their relationship to books. Lit blogs tend to take an isolated view of the literary world, and I wanted to push back against this (and also to satisfy my own curiosity). The week I did the interviews—this was back in December, and the story’s delay stems mostly from my incompetence—the New Yorker debuted another excerpt from DFW’s The Pale King. I remember being extremely excited to read the short story, then noticing that the magazine’s newsstand appendage thingy didn’t even mention Wallace. Different worlds, different priorities—and yet, among the people I talked to, fiction seems alive and well.

One caveat: I wanted this dispatch to be short and I wanted to devote most of it to the interviews, so if it seems like I’m totalizing “real” or “average” readers (or relegating them to scare quotes), that’s why. With more space, I would have liked to talk about the geographic and socioeconomic aspects to reading audiences. For example, Connecticut Goodwills tend to offer some pretty interesting books (in the last year, I’ve picked up an early edition of JFK’s Profiles in Courage and a paperback of William Vollman’s Europe Central). I don’t recall Indiana Goodwills even selling books.

“Alas poore Ghost”

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Dissertation ephemera, Politics

I’m finishing up an essay on political ghostwriting (loosely pegged to Roman Polanski’s new film), and I wanted to share this snippet from the Times:

Perhaps the extreme of ghostliness in speechmaking occurred a few years ago in Congress. One of the large lobbies had sent to various members of the House ‘background material’ and a ‘suggested text’ concerning a bill under debate. At a morning session a Representative got up and read the ‘suggested text’ verbatim, as his own speech. During that afternoon’s session another Representative, who had been absent that morning, got up and delivered the same speech—also as his own—despite other members’ attempts to flag him down.

Of course, “a few years ago” dates from the article’s publication—in March 27, 1949. I’m trying to show in my essay that we’ve assimilated the idea of political ghostwriting. The only question, really, is when this assimilation occurred.