There were a number of books about Bill Wilson, and by him, but a lot of the basic biographical tasks had not been done.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
After 'Lindbergh,' my publisher asked whom I wanted to write about next. I said, 'There's one idea I've been carrying in my hip pocket for 35 years. It's Woodrow Wilson.'
For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.
I obtained a Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Fellowship and entered the graduate program in History at the University of California. With no Greek or French and minimal Latin and German, I was in no position to pursue my classical interests, so I began work at Berkeley with little more than an open mind.
The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.
There are hundreds of books about Woodrow Wilson, but I have an image of him in my mind that is unlike any picture I have seen anywhere else, based on material at Princeton and 35 years of researching and thinking about him.
I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.