ABSTRACT
With a few significant exceptions, biography has never secured a place in the academy. The discipline driven engine of higher education is not equipped to departmentalize biography. So biographers wander from department to department, occasionally finding a position in English, history or journalism, or in an interdisciplinary program.1 The idea of devoting a department to the genre has been implemented, albeit briefly, in only two instances so far as I know. Ambrose White Vernon established departments of biography at Carleton College (1920-1924) and at Dartmouth (1924-1967). His curriculum emphasised rigorous attention to archival research as a kind of antidote to the nineteenth-century emphasis on laudatory accounts of great men of history.2 Vernon distinguished between historical and humanistic biography, arguing that the former concentrated on events and the latter on the character of an individual life. Usually, such efforts to situate biography into the structure of colleges and universities languish as soon as their proponents move on. In the late 1990s, New York University offered a master’s degree course in biography, developed by Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Kenneth Silverman, but the course was no longer offered after he retired.3
