Features of a biography year 3 anniversary

1st January 2024 and time for one of my favourite posts to do every year, compiling the list of book and author anniversaries for the year. We have books celebrating their 50th, 75th, 100th and 150th anniversaries, and authors who turn 100, 150 and 200. The lists are not exhaustive of course, just names in each category that stood out to me for some reason or other, either a favourite author or book or ones I’ve heard of. Hope you enjoy going through this as much I do putting it together!

One of my favourite authors Agatha Christie features yet again this year with books in 3 categories while others like Joan Aiken turn 100 and Wilkie Collins 200! Some childhood reads feature here as well and some children’s and fantasy authors I’ve been meaning to try.

50: Published in 1974

Turning 50 this year are a fair few books that stood out though I have limited my list to 9. A relatively recent read as part of #LoveHain hosted by Chris at Calmgrove, The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, a book that explores a range of themes from ideology, politics and political systems to questions of time and space turns 50; joining the book are Stephen King’s Carrie and John le Carre’s classic–neither of which I’ve read yet.

The book about the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein is also part of this list as is the very different All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot. Agatha Christie’s Poirot’s Early Cases was published this year as were children’s titles The Ogre Downstairs by Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper’s Greenwitch part of her Dark is Rising sequence, and Jill Paton Walsh’s historical fiction adventure Emperor’s Winding Sheet, the story of a shipwrecked boy who ends up in the court of Constantine.

75: Published in 1949

Even harder to limit were books that were publis

Augustine of Hippo…

There is admittedly something strange about posting a review of a book whose first edition was published fifty years ago. Even its second edition will soon be turning twenty. My initial thought was that Peter Brown’s classic biography of Augustine (d. 430), bishop of the North African port city of Hippo Regius, might provide one way of engaging with the surprisingly little-marked five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation’s “first year”.[1] Augustine had, of course, departed for greener pastures over a millennium before Johann Tetzel first cast his unseemly shadow upon the backwater town of Wittenberg. But as students of the Reformation will know, Augustine’s writings and––perhaps more importantly––his authority carried no small weight during the proceedings. Both Roman Catholics and the Magisterial Reformers were determined to keep the venerable Church Father on “their side”.  And was it not, after all, a cantankerous Augustinian friar that is credited with causing all that fuss in the first place?

Martin Luther was Augustinian in more than one sense, however. Evidently he belonged to an order that among other things followed a rule traditionally attributed to the North African bishop. But he was also Augustinian insofar as aspects of his thought were shaped, or perhaps empowered, by encountering Augustine’s work directly––especially the latter’s anti-Pelagian writings. Yet it is a further sense of Luther’s Augustinianism that perhaps best explains why Augustine is important not only for grappling with the legacy of the Reformation but also for understanding the very trajectory of the western intellectual tradition.

Luther, simply put, was Augustinian in the same way that pretty much any other medieval person was Augustinian. The most succinct way of explaining why, is two-fold: 1) Augustine was a prodigious thinker and voluminous writer, whose breadth and depth of er

Ask around. Contact other authors, not just biographers. Reach out to libraries, historical societies, or family members of your subject.

Know when to stop researching. You will likely have more than enough. You can always go back later and fill in the gaps.

Use your research selectively. You can always use excess material in blog posts or videos, articles, speaking appearances, or future projects.

You’ll need to devise a thesis—a main takeaway. You might instead, or also, have various themes that run through the book.

8. Start outlining.

You need an outline—early on. You can start this as early in your process as you like.

The traditional bulleted list works well for most—but others will start with a handwritten "mind map” or by writing on and rearranging virtual (or actual) sticky notes.

As you make your outline, refer to your thesis and/or themes. Refer to your timeline. Start to figure out how you might want to divide the chapters.

You will aim to have six to ten chapters, of roughly equal length, plus an introduction and a conclusion, all amounting to no more than 100,000 words. A book that’s shorter than that may be easier to sell to traditional publishers. (Click here to read my article “What’s the ideal word count for a nonfiction book?”)

Mary McVicker’s advice for biographers in The Writermagazine is sage:

“You can literally shape nonfiction. . . . Few lives have the sort of structure you’d give a novel. . . . But you can control the amount of space you give each element in your book.”

Each chapter need not cover the same number of years. Certain events may get condensed. Others may get expanded. Some of the “broader context” stuff will be amplified. Or it may get downplayed.

As Jon Collins writes, “not all biography needs to be exhaustive, or indeed should be.”

Working with people’s interpretations, amplified or missing details, confused accoun