Episode 238: Why Read Biographies

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, and Cindy Rollins. Thomas starts the conversation with some general thoughts on the biography as a branch of literature and as an art form. He also mentions some types of biography he does not care to read at all. Cindy brings up the tension between white-washing historical figures and dragging out every piece of their dirty laundry in biographical treatments. Angelina poses a question about the place of biographies in children’s education.

If you’ve missed Cindy here on this podcast, you can still hear her over at The New Mason Jar, as well as find out about all the things she has going on at MorningTimeforMoms.com. To check out Thomas’ webinar about Mary Queen of Scots, you can visit HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Listen to The Literary Life:

Commonplace Quotes:

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

Courage is the greatest of all virtues because if you haven’t courage you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.
Samuel Johnson

The love of flowers has this advantage over the love of the arts, that it leads to no quarrels of taste.
Robert Lynd

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with the tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i. e. the pagan stories are God expressing himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing himself through “real things.”
C. S. Lewis, as quoted by Alan Jacobs, from a letter to Arthur Greeves

Aftermath

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
      And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
      And gather in the aftermath.

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
      Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
      In the silence and the gloom.

Book List:

(Amazon Affiliate Links are included in this post.)

The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell

Things One Hears by Robert Lynn

The Narnian by Alan Jacobs

Confessions by Saint Augustine

The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley

Hilary Mantel

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson

Becoming Elisabeth Elliot by Ellen Vaughn

Being Elisabeth Elliot by Ellen Vaughn

Childhood of Famous Americans series

A Burning in My Bones by Winn Collier

P. G. Wodehouse by Frances Donaldson

John Buchan

Richelieu by Hilaire Belloc

Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear

Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert Massie

Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

Christy by Catherine Marshall

A Man Called Peter by Catherine Marshall

Antonia Fraser

Chaucer by G. K. Chesterton

Little Britches Series by Ralph Moody

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

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Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CindyRollinsWriter. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also!

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