Craig Fehrman: Ghostwriting and the Political Book Culture
[Craig Fehrman is an English PhD student at Yale and is working on a book about presidents and their books.
In the spring of 1949, Eleanor Roosevelt turned in the manuscript for her second memoir — this one on the White House years — to her editors at Ladies' Home Journal. "You have written this too hastily," came the reply, "as though you were composing it on a bicycle while pedaling your way to a fire."
Roosevelt's editors asked her to revise the manuscript with the help of a ghostwriter, but she refused. "I would have felt the book wasn't mine," she said. She ended up selling her book's serial rights to the Journal's biggest rival, McCall's, for $150,000. "This I Remember" became a bestseller, and provided McCall's with a nice boost in its battle for the hearts and souls of America's housewives.
This might seem like a story designed to rally supporters of serious writing and thinking: A political figure who actually crafts her own words, who stands up to lazy editors and stands on her convictions. But what would those supporters make of Roosevelt's various assistants? To complete "This I Remember," she relied on them not only to edit and offer advice but to dig through her files for anecdotes and stories, to compile questions to spur her memory — even to organize and outline her responses....
There's an irony in all of this: People fixate on ghostwriting for the same reasons they fixate on authors. Over the last 200 years, we've invested a lot of time, energy and emotion in a particular idea of The Author, alone and inspired. It makes sense that, when confronted with the complex systems that produce, promote and sell books, we need to isolate one element: whether to idolize (The Author) or condemn (ghostwriting)....
With all of these external factors (and this is just a partial list), political ghostwriting becomes a byproduct not of laziness but of logistics. It's a symptom, not a disease. After all, Laura Bush, one of our more literate and literary first ladies, turned to a ghostwriter while working on her new memoir, "Spoken from the Heart." Lyric Winik, Bush writes in her acknowledgments, "helped me put my story into words." If Bush needed the help, what political figure wouldn't?
Just last month, it came out that Winik also will be helping Scott Brown with his new book (due in early 2011). But it's far more telling that Bush and Brown share another connection: Robert Barnett, the D.C. mega agent who has secured multimillion-dollar book deals for Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, both Clintons and many, many more.
Read entire article at LA Times
In the spring of 1949, Eleanor Roosevelt turned in the manuscript for her second memoir — this one on the White House years — to her editors at Ladies' Home Journal. "You have written this too hastily," came the reply, "as though you were composing it on a bicycle while pedaling your way to a fire."
Roosevelt's editors asked her to revise the manuscript with the help of a ghostwriter, but she refused. "I would have felt the book wasn't mine," she said. She ended up selling her book's serial rights to the Journal's biggest rival, McCall's, for $150,000. "This I Remember" became a bestseller, and provided McCall's with a nice boost in its battle for the hearts and souls of America's housewives.
This might seem like a story designed to rally supporters of serious writing and thinking: A political figure who actually crafts her own words, who stands up to lazy editors and stands on her convictions. But what would those supporters make of Roosevelt's various assistants? To complete "This I Remember," she relied on them not only to edit and offer advice but to dig through her files for anecdotes and stories, to compile questions to spur her memory — even to organize and outline her responses....
There's an irony in all of this: People fixate on ghostwriting for the same reasons they fixate on authors. Over the last 200 years, we've invested a lot of time, energy and emotion in a particular idea of The Author, alone and inspired. It makes sense that, when confronted with the complex systems that produce, promote and sell books, we need to isolate one element: whether to idolize (The Author) or condemn (ghostwriting)....
With all of these external factors (and this is just a partial list), political ghostwriting becomes a byproduct not of laziness but of logistics. It's a symptom, not a disease. After all, Laura Bush, one of our more literate and literary first ladies, turned to a ghostwriter while working on her new memoir, "Spoken from the Heart." Lyric Winik, Bush writes in her acknowledgments, "helped me put my story into words." If Bush needed the help, what political figure wouldn't?
Just last month, it came out that Winik also will be helping Scott Brown with his new book (due in early 2011). But it's far more telling that Bush and Brown share another connection: Robert Barnett, the D.C. mega agent who has secured multimillion-dollar book deals for Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, both Clintons and many, many more.