Biographer T.J. Stiles

I've been neglectful of late, when it comes to updating this blog. I do have a defense: I've been on the road, both for business and pleasure. In fact, this last Monday I returned home to San Francisco after two weeks away, a trip that began with the Pulitzer ceremony at Columbia University in New York.

As I've mentioned before, the Pulitzer and National Book Award really have filled me with a renewed sense of humility. I'm in daunting company. And, as I often say, I don't kid myself that I was the only possible choice—far from it. But it's also really a wonderful thing, especially because it's a kind of ratification of my highest hopes for this book: that it would be a work of literature, in some way, as well as scholarship.

The irony, of course, is that the Commodore loathed writing. It has been suggested to me that he was dyslexic, which is quite possible, if impossible to properly diagnose over this span of time. He read well enough, and could write (though he spelled phonetically). Still, he didn't like to write, as he admitted in one letter. He pitched letters that he received into the fire after he read them, and left no collection of papers behind.

Lucky for me that he left a far larger paper trail behind than previous historians and biographers had suspected. Though it didn't seem so lucky when I was five years into the project, with still no end in sight...