Most biographers are apt to be discouraged by the sheer volume of papers left behind by their subject.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.
I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.
It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.
Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.
Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles.
You do not give a great biographer a timetable. You let them do their work and, in due course, publish it.