Excerpt from Strenuous Americans

Americans have commonly been too much engrossed in living to reflect much about life. As a consequence, although many books have been written about America's most eminent sons and daughters, we have relatively few genuine biographies, for our biographers, also, have in most cases been strictly indigenous in temperament. Like the persons whose careers they record, they too have generally been representative specimens who illustrated the particular whims and foibles of a particular race, living in a particular nation, during a particular age. With distressing frequency, their literary efforts are characterized by lopsided emphasis, by sprawling incoherence, by parochial banalities, and by maddening prolixity, above all, most of these authors have constantly employed a tone of tombstone panegyric. They have buried their subjects under heavy slabs of adulation - hardly less ponderous, and rarely more artistic, than the granite slabs that now mark the graves of those subjects. But these weighty tomes, whether single, twin or triple, have led to at least one happy result - almost nobody reads them.

The dangers of brevity In biography are perhaps as many as are the dangers of length, of interminable facts that do not Illuminate, of uninforming information.

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