This biographer’s mantra: ‘Every life is a gift’

As an avid people watcher, I try to consider the lives of those whose paths cross mine. I devour biographies with an an identical must know the small print of someone’s life: what fashioned their pondering, how they grew to grow to be who they’re, and notably how they overcame obstacles. I relish nonfiction books that take an sudden tack on a well-known decide (see “Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet,” reviewed proper right here). 

Earlier this spring, I had a chance to speak with Megan Marshall, this yr’s winner of the Biography International Organization Award for her physique of labor, which contains three biographies, all of extraordinary ladies. Her 2013 e-book, “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life,” acquired the Pulitzer Prize. She spoke regarding the place of a biographer as “helping readers bridge the gap between their experience and a life from the past.” 

Good biographies can operate inspiration, giving readers a front-row seat on one different particular person’s struggles. In the case of Fuller, a Nineteenth-century journalist, feminist, and colleague of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “she had a vision for herself that really didn’t exist [in society],” Ms. Marshall says. “She speaks to readers today because she … developed this theory of ‘no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.’ They’re all sliding into each other. Nobody else was writing like that.” 

When readers see themselves and their events mirrored in a biography, it might give them perspective, Ms. Marshall says. “There is so much to be worried about and so much that seems hopeless. But if you go back and look at other times when there seemed to be no hope … you’ll see how people rose up anyway,” she says. “That is one of the most important things a biographer can do.”

She continues, “Just seeing how people renewed their hope, what right do we have to give up when people in extremely dire situations used whatever tools were available to them to try to make a difference?” 

Readers may shock how one particular person can change the trajectory of a society. Ms. Marshall explains the thought of a “trim tab,” a favorite considered inventor Buckminster Fuller, who by the best way was a grandnephew of Margaret Fuller. “A huge steamship or an airplane will have a trim tab, and just moving it the slightest bit can alter the direction,” she says. “I wish to suppose that somebody like Margaret Fuller or Buckminster Fuller might simply make a bit distinction within the large stream of life.

“We can take those messages of those who didn’t give up,” she says. “Alternatively, you can learn from people who didn’t make it. Everyone is worthy of remembrance and … every life is a gift. And what you do with that gift is up to you.”