In Small Packages

By Paul Gray

Reverse Seneca's famous maxim--Ars longa, vita brevis--and you come up with a pretty fair description of many big, fat, fact-crammed current biographies: life is long, art short. Such narrative behemoths can, of course, contain much of value, particularly for readers who are passionately curious about the subjects. Admirers of Mary McCarthy, for example, would not wish Frances Kiernan's recent, well-received Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy any shorter than its 768 pages. But what of those who are interested in learning more about the life of a notable person but unwilling to sacrifice a significant swatch of their own lives in the quest?

Such a question occurred a few years ago to James Atlas, 51, who was, oddly enough, working on a long biography of Saul Bellow at the time. (Some 10 years in the making, the book is scheduled for publication this fall.) While jogging in Manhattan's Central Park, Atlas experienced an epiphany: "It seemed to me that there should be short biographies by great writers." A few days later, he mentioned this idea, over cocktails, to an editor at Viking (a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.), and a project was born. Atlas secured financial backing from Kenneth Lipper, an investment banker and a former deputy mayor of New York City. Viking agreed to co-publish, as Lipper/Viking Books, and distribute 18 prospective titles under the generic rubric Penguin Lives.

This month the ninth and 10th volumes in the 1 1/2-year-old series will appear: historian Douglas Brinkley's Rosa Parks and novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick's Herman Melville. Atlas' original notion--short biographies by great writers--may have been tinged with a little inspired hyperbole, but as general editor he has overseen the production of short biographies (roughly 200 pages each) by some very good writers indeed, including Garry Wills (on Saint Augustine), Larry McMurtry (on Crazy Horse) and Mary Gordon (on Joan of Arc). All the authors were paid advances from $50,000 to $100,000, and those who expressed a desire to choose their subjects were often told to go ahead.

"Saint Augustine is a permanent concern of mine," says Wills. "He has been my hero and favorite writer and thinker since college. I had been looking for the opportunity to write a short life." Gordon recalls Atlas' phone call asking her if she'd be interested in contributing a Penguin Lives volume: "It was as if a lightning bolt hit me. I said, 'Yes, I'd like to do Joan of Arc.' I've been really fascinated by her since I was a little girl." Although she was teaching at Barnard College and working on a novel, she does not begrudge the year and a half she spent on Joan of Arc. "I had never really written about anybody whose life was a life of action," she said. "I thought that it would give me a chance to describe things that probably wouldn't have naturally come onto my fiction radar screen."

Brinkley also jumped at Atlas' invitation to write a Penguin volume, setting aside his work on a book about the Ford Motor Co. and a biography of Jack Kerouac to research the life of Rosa Parks. "She's become a myth and a legend," he says of the woman whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 sparked a seminal chapter in the U.S. civil rights movement. "Yet nobody knows the truth of her long, arduous saga from 1913 Tuskegee to 2000 Detroit" (Parks now lives in the Motor City). And, Brinkley adds, "I just was so excited to be part of the series."

Such authorial enthusiasm, paired with the requirements of concision, has made all the Penguin Lives published so far eminently readable and informative. Good writing seems to thrive in straitened space. Here, for instance, is the epigrammatic opening sentence of historian Peter Gay's Mozart: "The life of Mozart is the triumph of genius over precociousness." The novelistic flourish with which McMurtry begins Crazy Horse reads: "Crazy Horse, a Sioux warrior dead more than one hundred and twenty years, buried no one knows where, is rising again over Pa Sapa, the Black Hills of South Dakota, holy to the Sioux." McMurtry then describes the huge statue of warrior and horse laboriously being hacked out of Thunderhead Mountain, still unfinished after 50 years of work and hence "a shape, which those who journey to Custer, South Dakota, to see must complete in their own imaginations." Hardwick's Melville opens with a poetic evocation of whaling, in the spirit of the subject's masterpiece, Moby Dick; Gordon's Joan of Arc begins with a visit to the square in Rouen, France, where the Maid of Orleans was burned at the stake. So far, Penguin Lives invariably whet and then satisfy curiosity.

The books are not intended for experts or for those seeking expertise. People who want to learn all they can about the works and life of James Joyce must still read Richard Ellman's magisterial biography. Others, interested but not dedicated, should find Irish novelist Edna O'Brien's James Joyce in the Penguin Lives a lively and satisfying introduction. And if O'Brien piques their interest, they can always move on to Ellman.

The commercial response to the series has been good, according to Viking; customer demand has already sent a number of the early titles, particularly Crazy Horse and Saint Augustine, back for multiple reprintings. The original order for 18 volumes has been increased to 34, to be published at a clip of roughly six a year. Among the projects that Atlas and his staff of three have commissioned: Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis; Roy Blount Jr. on Robert E. Lee; James Gleick on Isaac Newton; and Hilton Als, the first African-American author to join the project, on James Baldwin.

Atlas and Lipper are teaming up with W.W. Norton to produce a series of short science biographies and are negotiating with another publisher over a proposed string of business titles. "It's now sort of become my life," Atlas says, which is a nice irony, since he stumbled into this work while writing about Bellow's. Will that be a long biography? Yes, he concedes, and gives a page estimate that equals about three Penguin Lives.

--Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York