Not only am I an avid reader of obituaries but I am also a keen reader of biographies and entries in biographical dictionaries, preferably those written after the death of the subject and with full access to their papers, etc. Some of my favorite books are biographical dictionaries, either national or more specific. The notable Dictionary of National Biography, first edited by Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Wolfe, remains an amazing repository of human knowledge. Many decades ago Oxford University Press took over its publication and every so often issued a new volume with entries on the relatively recently deceased. In 1991 OUP decided to commission a very largely new text. This September the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography will be published simultaneously in sixty print volumes and electronically. The editorial policy is to include everyone who was in the old DNB together with many people who had been omitted, including George Washington (after all he was once a British citizen), and the recently deceased with a cut-off date of December 31, 2000. Among those included are such legendary characters as Robin Hood and families and groups, such as the Cecil family--read about Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, here--or the Tolpuddle Martyrs here.

The policy of including everyone who was in the old DNB is in welcome contrast to that followed by OUP in New York when in 1999 it published the American Dictionary of Biography under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies as a replacement for the Dictionary of American Biography. The editors chose to exclude a good many people whom they deemed were no longer important enough to be included. Such was the fate of Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939), and other principled individualists and many more not-so-principled politicians who were swept aside to make room for a host of newcomers, including a great many women and minorities, some of whom certainly deserved to be included for their contributions to American life and some of whom may eventually be discarded when a new edition is commissioned and the particular sort of political correctness that currently rules academia is no longer fashionable.

All of you who are interested in intellectual dissent should search out Joseph McCabe's A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (1920/1998). There you can read fascinating entries on the freethinking views of celebrated and not-so-celebrated men and women and refutations of those alleged deathbed conversions with which priests would harangue their congregations. McCabe (1867-1955) was a former Jesuit who renounced his faith to become a leading propagandist for secularism. Perhaps his most celebrated book is Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897, 2nd edition 1903). As you might imagine, his intellectual conversion didn't make his fortune but rather led to his penury. But it also led him to write hundreds of books and pamphlets on every subject, including numerous Little Blue Books published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951), a journalist and publisher in Girard, Kansas, and a celebrated translation of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919)'s The Riddle of the Universe (1900).

Having mentioned Joseph McCabe, I should now make reference to John Mackinnon Robertson (1856-1933), a self-educated scholar, whose books A History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern, to the Period of the French Revolution, 4th ed. (1936) and A History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (1929) remain unsurpassed for their comprehensive and erudite coverage of courageous individuals and their writings.