Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography by William Zinsser

Author:William Zinsser [William Zinsser]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Military, Biography & Autobiography, Biography and Autobiography/Historical, Historical, General, history, Presidents & Heads of State, Royalty
ISBN: 9781612309354
Google: VA1iCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: New Word City
Published: 2016-01-15T23:40:33.820520+00:00

Helen died in February 1974. Lippmann’s own life after that was very short - he died in December, at the age of eighty-five. But in the meantime, his life took a final turn that was surprising to me. It was as if a terrible burden had been lifted. I think Helen’s inability to deal with him made him feel very sad, and it was a relief not to have to deal with her anxiety about him. He became almost rejuvenated in a strange way. In the fall of that year, he went up to Yale for the first time since he had given the university his papers ten years earlier. He went to look at the Walter Lippmann Room at the library and to reminisce about all the people who had been such an important part of life: William James and Santayana and Lincoln Steffens and Woodrow Wilson and Mabel Dodge and John Reed. He was very touched by that visit.

His host during the visit was Robert O. Anthony, a man to whom I am enormously indebted, as was Lippmann. A former telephone company executive, Anthony, in the early 1930s, as a student, had begun collecting almost everything that Lippmann had ever written. In the 1960s, when Lippmann gave his papers to Yale, Anthony gave his own collection of Lippmann’s published material to the university. It was he who achieved the enormous task of classifying not only Lippmann’s published material, but his voluminous correspondence as well. Without Anthony’s labor of love, and his generous cooperation, my own work would have been immensely more difficult, if not impossible.

That same fall, Lippmann also received the Bronze Medallion from the city of New York. And he did something that was really quite remarkable, for him. The award was presented at Gracie Mansion by Mayor Abe Beame, who was, of course, New York’s first Jewish mayor. Lippmann said to Mayor Beame, “I was born only a few blocks from here, but my ancestors, like yours, were immigrants.” I think that’s something he couldn’t have said some years earlier. He seemed to be engaged in an effort to reassemble his past and to come to terms with it.

For me, Lippmann became not just an intellectual subject, but somebody whose life I became very involved in as part of the effort to understand it. I came to respect Lippmann enormously, even though I didn’t always agree with or even admire everything he did. I learned a great deal from a man who was not perfect, but who set the highest standards for himself. He was a man who understood, as he once wrote, that “if the moralist is to deserve a hearing among his fellows he must set himself this task, which is so much humbler than to command and so much more difficult than to exhort. He must seek to anticipate and to supplement the insight of his fellow men into the problems of their adjustment to reality.” Walter Lippmann made that adjustment to reality his life’s work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.