Getting to Know the Presidents: The Presidential Biography Project

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February 28, 2011 | 15 books mentioned 28 6 min read

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In the fall of 2009, I set out to read a biography of each American president in chronological order. So far, I’ve made it to James Buchanan (#15).

When I tell people about this project, I routinely get two questions.

The First Question: Why?

The short answer is that I want to be the kind of woman Josh Lyman would date, which in turn is a way of saying that I want to be an Aaron Sorkin character. The long answer is about context.

Living in a country with 235 years of nationhood under its corn belt, I have only a fuzzy knowledge of the men who led us here. I know who signed the Declaration of Independence, won the wars, had the prettiest or wackiest wives, and made landmark decisions or landmark mistakes. But who are all these other guys? Which of them decided to build a transcontinental railroad, sign the Equal Rights Amendment, or settle the Oregon border? Did you know Millard Fillmore’s wife established the White House library?  James K. Polk increased the size of the country by 500,000 square miles. John Tyler abandoned his own party while in office, and was later elected to the Confederate Senate. Zachary Taylor was Jefferson Davis’ father-in-law. Martin Van Buren’s first language was Dutch. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams visited Shakespeare’s home in Stratford together.

The march of American history doesn’t leap-frog from one monumental achievement to the next. When people ask me why I’m reading 44 presidential biographies, they’re really asking whether or not it’s boring, which it certainly can be (the blog where I write about the project is called At Times Dull, after all). In reading biographies rather than narrative history, my subject matter is constantly repeating. I went through the American Revolution six times, because the first six presidents were each personally involved. Reading about that phenomenal time period over and over – each time through the lens of a different extraordinary life – was fascinating. Reading about the Compromise of 1850 four times? Far less so.

But therein lies the worth of the experience. We’d like to build a national reputation around triumph and the progress of civil liberty, but we’ve spent just as much time making bad decisions. To read through American history chronologically is to give equal attention to both stripes.

I’ve just reached the end of the streak of presidents between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln remarkable for how rarely they’re remembered. They are Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, and you will not find their faces on money. Their hallmarks are the Mexican-American War, expansion to the Pacific, and the Industrial Revolution, but mainly they spent 35 years scrambling to keep the country together by any means possible. Let me tell you this: anyone who says Abraham Lincoln’s legacy is exaggerated has never spent seventeen months reading about antebellum politicians.

Reading about them is to dwell in that long, uncertain, muddy time when the most an outgoing president ever boasted was a long series of compromises. And yet, each of them got up every morning with the weight of the nation on their shoulders and worked late into the night. (Polk actually micro-managed the executive office, working so hard that he sometimes went weeks without leaving the White House.) Learning about their times, watching them navigate the unglorious periods of our history with as much wisdom as they can muster, has changed the way I think about America much more than reading the lofty words of Jefferson and Madison ever could. And much as I love Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, I have a much more personal affection for the likes of Madison and Fillmore.

Which Brings Me To The Second Question: Who is your favorite president?

How my heart swells to say it: John Quincy Adams.

JQA entered public service at the age of 14, when he accompanied family friend and diplomat Francis Dana to St. Petersburg. During Washington’s administration he was a diplomat to the Netherlands, later traveling to England to help finalize the Jay Treaty, then serving as minister to Prussia. He returned to America for a short time during which he worked two jobs – U.S. Senator and Harvard Professor of Rhetoric – before going back to Europe as America’s first ambassador to Russia. He left Russia to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, then served for two years as a Minister to Britain before being appointed Secretary of State for President James Monroe, whom he helped to draft the Monroe Doctrine.

He was a lovely old grump. He got up every morning between 4 and 6 a.m., read the Bible, translated some Latin or Greek, and went for a walk, usually culminating in a frigid swim. When he lived in Russia, he swam in the Neva, on whose banks he would frequently run into the tsar. That he was a genius is no question. Everyone from Washington to Franklin to the King of England said he was one of the keenest statesmen they’d ever known, and by the time he ran for president in 1824, he was easily the most experienced.

He was not a good president. His heart belonged more to the boulevards of Ghent and London than the muddy paths of Washington. The grand ideas he had for internal improvements, university, museums, and observatories didn’t catch the imagination of the country, and he lacked the charm and tact to win them over. Additionally, Andrew Jackson, who had won the popular vote in 1824 but lost to JQA in a House vote, was out to get him. Jackson’s supporters blocked his legislation, and then defeated him in the 1828 election.

Humiliated and depressed, he retired to Massachusetts to read the entire works of Cicero in the original Latin. Despite his glittering career, he had always suffered bouts of self-loathing, stemming from his early fears that success came to him because of his father. He was all too aware that, to an outside observer, his life could appear to be a long string of nepotism and elite cronyism that ended in botching the highest office in the land.

“I will not desert in my old age the Republic that I defended in my youth,” Cicero wrote. At the age of 64, two years after leaving the presidency, John Quincy Adams ran for Congress. He served as a Representative from Massachusetts under the next five presidents, until he collapsed during a House session at the age of 81 and was taken to the Speaker’s chambers, where he died two days later.

JQA’s 17 years as a post-presidential Congressman were legendary. He quite literally had nothing to lose. Most of his colleagues were a generation younger, and he was vastly more experienced. He became an outspoken abolitionist, an issue no one else, politically, could afford to touch. He presented petitions for the abolition of slavery in Washington D.C., and found sneaky ways to evade the Congressional gag rule (forbidding debate of slavery). He argued the case of the Amistad sailors before the Supreme Court, and he orchestrated the founding of the Smithsonian. He wouldn’t give up, and he wouldn’t be quiet. John Quincy Adams was an Aaron Sorkin character.

His unpopularity as a president felt too similar to his own self-doubt, and he set out, in the fifth act of his life, to refute it. Remarkably, it worked. He became known as “Old Man Eloquent,” the nation’s last surviving link to the revolutionary generation, and was far more respected and popular as a Congressman than he had ever been as a president.

His was one of the most eventful lives in early American history. He met Catherine the Great and Charles Dickens. He met George Washington when he was a teenager, and served in the House with Abraham Lincoln when he was in his 80s. To remember him as the one-term, sixth president of the United States is like remembering Michael Jordan as an outfielder for Birmingham.

This month we commemorated the lives of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and we are right to do so. But the slow, busy procession of history is about so much more than the wins. The forgotten presidents are so much more than seat-fillers. John Quincy Adams was so much more than a president.

The Presidential Biographies I’ve Read (So Far)

(Image: George Washington (The Athenaeum Portrait), First President (1789-1797) from nostri-imago’s photostream)

is a staff writer for The Millions. Janet is a freelance writer and semi-professional baker living in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in The Awl, The AV Club, the Chicago Reader, and Chicago Magazine. She is the co-host of YouTube's The Book Report and blogs about presidential biographies at At Times Dull. Follow her @sojanetpotter.

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The Unelectable in Literature: A Rogue’s Gallery

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November 7, 2012 | 15 books mentioned 1 6 min read
This list considers those literary political or public figures who would not have withstood much scrutiny in the modern age. In contrast to the predictable quality of even the most captivating political biography, these tales favor the eerie or the bizarre over the electable in their consideration of political life.
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| 15 books mentioned 1 6 min read
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What the Deuce: The Curse Words of Charles Dickens

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October 20, 2016 | 15 books mentioned 5 4 min read

Charles Dickens didn’t exactly have a dirty pen. This, after all, was the man who promised his delicate Victorian readers that he would “banish from the lips” of all his characters “any expression that could by possibility offend.”

Not the easiest of promises to make because, let’s face it, the Victorians were easily offended.

Case in point: These were the people who cringed over the word “trousers,” because men’s pants were worn a little too close to a certain tabooed male appendage for comfort.  But, by and large, Dickens kept his promise like a classy gent, never using outright profanity in any of his 15 novels.  But Dickens was obsessed with capturing reality in all of his writings.  It just took a bit of cleverness to pull it off, to politely wiggle his way out of that very tight corset of Victorian censorship, and here are a few examples of how he did it:

1. Gormed
[Mr. Peggotty] swore a dreadful oath that he would be “Gormed” if…[his generosity] was ever mentioned again. — David Copperfield
It’s the most famous and talked-about curse word in Dickens’s oeuvre.  In the Dickensian universe, this is as profane as profanity gets — despite the fact that no one in that universe seems to know what this “dreadful oath” actually signifies.  The long-standing theory, popularized by the OED, is that Dickens invented the word “gormed” as an even milder substitute for “gosh-darned.” Yes, they do share the same first and last letter, but Dickens played his delicate game with profanity even safer than that.  Rather than inventing the word (and thus having to later defend it), Dickens built “gormed” on an actual, though obscure, English word.  The verb “to gorm” once meant to “to stare blankly, vacantly” at something, likely related to the Irish gom, “a stupid-looking person.” Dickens’s “gormed” thus could be safely translated as something more like “confounded, stupefied” — hardly a swear word at all — and bearing no trace of any attack on the Almighty. 

2. What the Deuce!
If the Victorians were squeamish about taking God’s name in vain, they had an equal dread of mentioning the devil’s.  Sort of an awkward prohibition for them, as swearing by the devil tripped way too easily off most Victorian tongues.  Their one acceptable remedy — euphemisms.

Almost every questionable word, circa 19th century, had its polite substitute (one of the acceptable euphemisms for “trousers” was, in fact, “inexpressibles”). And most convenient of all, the devil had his own choice euphemism — namely the word “deuce” — nonchalantly inserted into popular period phrases such as “What the deuce!” and “The deuce and all!” — expressions that Dickens used freely and frequently in his writing.  There’s a lot of speculation on how “deuce” acquired its devilish reputation and, moreover, why it was acceptable to Victorian sensibilities.  Simple answer, no one really knows.

3. I’ll be De’ed
If Dickens had a favorite indecent oath, it would have been the oh-so-versatile D-word.  That’s, more or less, exactly how Dickens referred to it in his writing, as “D” something or other. That might seem cute and childish to us today, but even by dropping three letters of a four-letter word, Dickens was dangerously skirting the fringes of Victorian decency.  Everyone knew what he meant and he probably lost a few of his more prudish fans over momentary lapses of censorship like these:
He flung out in his violent way, and said, with a D, “Then do as you like.”
— Great Expectations

“Capital D her!” burst out Caroline…“I’ll give her a touch of the temper that I keep!”
— “Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings”

He says…that he’ll be de’ed if he doesn’t think he looks younger than he did ten years ago.
— “The Old Couple”

4. Oh, Merdle!
Dickens’s character names are among the most brilliant and quirky creations in English literature.

Fantastically conceptualized names such as Scrooge, Pecksniff, and Bumble read and sound like perfect incarnations of who and what these characters are at their core.  And sometimes it isn’t pretty.  Nowhere more so than with the ignominious Dickensian duo with a swear word hidden in both their names — Mr. Merdle from Little Dorrit and Mr. Murdstone from David Copperfield.

Didn’t catch the dirty pun? Perhaps it will help by explaining that Dickens was a Francophile for most of his life, reveling in all things French, especially the language, which he gushingly described as “Celestial.” But even celestial tongues have their crudities and Dickens would have known one of its most popular: merde, literally “excrement,” the French equivalent of our s-word.  And boy did that word came in handy for Dickens!  Nothing sums up Mr. Merdle’s character better than saying that he is, well, full of merde.  He’s one of literature’s biggest financial fakes, erecting the Victorian equivalent of a massive Ponzi scheme that ends up ruining countless investors. The same goes for Mr. Murdstone, though his poop-fullness is of a different sort.  Namely, Murdstone is convinced that “all children” are “a swarm of little vipers” needing to be relentlessly beaten into submission.

5. Bleepin’ Grammar
Avid readers of Dickens often get the feeling that Boz routinely got bored with having to perform this prim circumlocution with profanity.  It’s obvious that sometimes he simply didn’t want to invent a curse word, swap in a euphemism, or use a clever pun, sometimes he just wanted to let his seedier characters say exactly what they mean — to let that loose old language rip.  And actually, on occasion, he did exactly that by doing what TV producers do today.  He bleeped out bad words (but kept in the bleeps, of course, so we wouldn’t be robbed of all the fun).  Dickens’s “bleeps” are actually quite funny indeed, relying on innocuous grammatical terminology to delicately remind his readership that not everybody spoke with such polite decorum, that some Victorian characters’ “parts of speech are of an awful sort.”  Here comically recorded in Dickens’s article on crime, “On Duty with Inspector Field:”

I won’t, says Bark, have no adjective police and adjective strangers in my adjective premises! I won’t, by adjective and substantive!  Give me my trousers, and I’ll send the whole adjective police to adjective and substantive!

Notice Dickens’s rare slip-up with the use of “trousers.”  A double indecency!

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

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| 15 books mentioned 5 4 min read
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28 comments:

  1. Thoughtful and insightful post. Those Adamses were consistently amazing, though not so easy to like. I’ve always had a weakness for Zachary Taylor, particularly since I learned that Ulysses Grant modeled his military leadership on Taylor’s.

  2. Great post. The part about being the kind woman Josh Lyman would want to date made me laugh out loud. I think I want to be that kind of woman too! But I aspire to be smarter than Donna! You mentioned who your favorite president is so far. What has been the best-written, most interesting book of what you have read? (Not sure if that is mutually exclusive.) Please keep us posted on how your project comes along. I would love to hear an update in a few months.

  3. Hi, this is great. How do you chose which biography to read? For some of these men there will be many to chose from. Also, please add later posts with the books you’ve chosen – I’d love to keep track.

  5. Thanks for your questions, I’m glad you liked the essay.

    The best written and most interesting biography so far has been John Adams by David McCullough, which shouldn’t be a big surprise. McCullough is as much a novelist as a historian, and he provided the most atmosphere and personality. I’m excited that I have his Truman biography to look forward to.

    However, Ralph Ketcham’s biography of James Madison was the most valuable to me in understanding American government, because Madison had the final say in constructing it. There are great stories of later presidents who, when faced with a question of whether or not something was constitutional, simply went and asked Madison, its author.

    It’s a great day when I get to choose between possible biographies. Many of the early presidents only have one or two biographies still in print, if that. When there are several to choose from – as was the case with Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson – I go for the best combination of scholarship, reputation, and length. If you know you want to read a well-respected book, and you’re willing to read between 400 and 600 pages, that normally narrows it down to 3 or 4. After that I read reviews of the candidates or, better yet, ask a good bookseller.

    I may write more for The Millions on the presidents at some point, but you can also follow the project’s blog at http://attimesdull.blogspot.com

  6. What an outstanding, ORIGINAL idea! I’m going to follow in your footsteps. How do you select which biography to read?

    I can’t argue with your selection of JQA, but before your ideas I wrote a blog post offering Grover Cleveland as my favorite President.

    I’m officially a fan of yours!

  7. I was speaking with a group of high-schoolers recently, and was shocked to hear about their US History curriculum. It essentially ignored everything prior to the Revolutionary War, then allotted an astonishingly skimpy amount of coverage to the first one hundred thirty-some years of “official” American history before plunging into a decade-by-decade exploration of the twentieth century. I mean, can we give our high-schoolers a little more historical context please? Sheesh…

    Anyway, back to your post: thank you for demonstrating how one can break out of the box of common US history knowledge by exploring it on their own, and in such a creative yet systematic way. I wonder if your system could be applied to other areas of American history. A ‘biography’ of each of the fifty states? Each decade?

  8. I am doing this too! I’m currently about 3/4 of the way through the Nagel biography of JQA. I don’t know that I would have liked Adams if I encountered him, but I also see so much of myself in him. He’s really an interesting character.

    I’m really looking forward to TR and Jimmy Carter (I’m young enough that I was born soon after Carter left office).

    Will you be reading any presidential autobiographies?

    I look forward to reading more of your reflections on your blog.

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  10. I love you and your brilliance Janet Potter! You make me want to follow your footsteps and pick up a biography

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  12. I think it is a great idea to read about all of the presidents and how they affected America in their time. America is like it is today because of each and every one of them. We can lean a lot from their life and the experiences they had.
    I think the presidents today are nothing like the presidents we had in the past. Number one, the effect the media has today on what the president says in amazing. Everyone wants to look good to the world and society. However when it comes to a person like the president its a hundred times worse. They are thinking at all times about how they appear and what people are thinking about them. I can’t ruin my reputation. It all turns in to arrogance and they don’t put the nation and their people first. We have a democracy and the people govern America however, sometimes I think that it ends up being governed by the presidents’ reputation and not always on what is the best for the people.
    This problem that we have can be changed if worked on. The presidents today can learn a lot from the presidents of the past.

  13. What a great idea for a project, and a fascinating post on your progress. As a non-American, I have possibly even less idea about those “lesser” names. There seems to have been an extraordinary range of characters and abilities occupying the Oval office in the 19th century, from the highest calibre to people who you wonder how they could have achieved such a level.

    Certainly a great way to understand your country’s history and politics. Like other commenters, I’m inspired by your approach to try something similar myself. Thanks!

  14. Well done! I’m glad that you’re framing the experience through overall events, since it’s not like the president was always the most powerful person in the country.

    I’m also not surprised at the Adams choice with the exception of the differences in your (probable) politics. Now, to see how you react to a Chester Arthur (hack to incredibly honorable person, lowbrow to highbrow, no power to, well, some power and some success).

  15. Funny you should mention this. I recently worked out an itinerary taking in all the presidential birthplaces, starting in Quincy, Mass and ending in Yorba Linda, CA (after which I guess one could board a plain to Hawaii). Not sure why I felt compelled to do this – no idea whether I’ll ever actually go on the trip (certainly not while I have small kids and limited vacation time) – just a daydream, and a chance to learn obscure but telling facts about where these guys came from.

    Maybe many of us are suddenly interested in the presidency because, for the first time in our lives, we aren’t embarrassed by the incumbent?

  16. anyone who says Abraham Lincoln’s legacy is exaggerated has never spent seventeen months reading about antebellum politicians.

    This is very, very true. That said, I’ve always admired Polk, and Crapol’s John Tyler biography was surprisingly interesting.

    Did you consider reading George Pendle’s The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: The Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President for your Fillmore biography? It’s pretty good, and more accurate than you might think given that he’s shown on the cover riding a unicorn.

  17. You immediately won my heart and abiding support for this project by admitting to your love of Sorkin and wanting to be Josh Lyman’s girlfriend. Even *I* want to be Josh Lyman’s girlfriend. And I’m a dude.

    Fantastic project, envious of your focus and concentration. I’d love to do this someday. Keep us up to date!

  18. My wife passed this link to me. I too started this project last year.

    I am a naturalized US citizen. I became a sparkling new American last year and although I have a reasonably good grip on the big events in history of my new country, I wanted to get a much more in-depth perspective on how the US has become the country it is today. While there are many history books I could read (and I have read a few), I thought it would be interesting to read about the Presidents, to get a feel for the issues of their day that have gone on to shape the nation.

    I started with Ron Chernow’s great biography of Washington that was published in just the past year or so. At 900 pages it is long, but he has kept it interesting and the chapters are all about 10 to 14 pages long which is a perfect length to read each night before bed. I have decided to take a slight deviation to read Chernow’s biography of Aleaxander Hamilton, and I’m also on the look out for a good biography of Benjamin Franklin. Although neither of these men served as President, I think they were very influential in the forming of the early US Government and its policies.

    Beyond that I am looking forward to McCollough’s books on Adams and Truman. I have read a few of his books and love his writing style. Thanks for posting the books you read. I’ll need your list for good suggestions on some of those lesser written about Presidents.

  19. Thrilling stuff…! I was a presidential nerd as an elementary schooler, and have carried this torch ever since. The specific focus on a case-by-case understanding is a laudatory endeavor. Can’t hardly wait for the Taft/Bush narrative, the Harding intrigues and the Roosevelt saga. Presidentia rocks!

  20. I was so pleased to see that Janet and I share a
    favorite in David McCollough’s John Adams. It
    may be impossible to choose a favorite President
    – they are such a varied group. I love Alexander
    Hamilton for a lot of reasons. Though he did
    not run for President I always think of him as
    a NY superstar. Great series. More of the
    same, please.

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  22. Thank you, Janet, for this wonderful essay – so original, insightful and enlightening. I’ve got some good news for you. You’re in for a treat when you get to the president who makes Millard Fillmore look positively memorable. I’m talking of course about Gerald Ford, who, as you’ll soon learn. was born Leslie King Jr. in Omaha, Neb., where his mother fled from her abusive husband and took her infant son to Grand Rapids, Mich. There she married a solid citizen named Gerald Ford Sr., who treated the boy like own son. It’s positively biblical, and I predict you’ll find yourself thinking about Moses in that basket beside the Nile. Much later, you’ll think back to those antebellum presidents who spent their time in office scrambling, as you put it, “to keep the country together by any means possible.” Sometimes, on the eve of a calamitous war or in the aftermath of a national trauma, that scrambling can be a memorable achievement in itself. Please give us more as you read your way through the rest of the presidents – especially the ones whose faces will never appear on money. Again, many thanks.
    Bill Morris

  24. Great idea. In fact I’m doing the same thing myself. Just finished a biography of John Tyler. I’m currently in the middle of Henry Clay: The Essential American. I’ve decided to add bios of non-presidential statesmen, as well as general histories of the period. Walker Daniel Howe’s What Hath God Wrought has been my favorite of those thus far.

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  26. Just wondering – and maybe I missed it here somewhere – about your choice of each biography. How did you choose each one, and when did you do so – overall in advance, along the way, or only choosing each one in sequence as you’ve concluded the prior one? Have you ever begun a biography, then changed to a different one (and if so, why?). I find this a fascinating process and did something years ago – but for some odd reason I read two at a time, starting with Washington AND the incumbent, then reading toward the middle. Made no sense and I’ve decided to begin again – in order this time. Just curious about the process and administration of building a reading list.

  27. Hi, I am reading Killing Kennedy and got to thinking that I don’t know very many details about the past presidents. Then I thought I would like to read a good biography about every president. So I googled good authors for biographies of U.S. presidents and I would your website. Do you think the biographies you chose so far are good? How did you decide what book to read. Since there are so many books out there.

  28. Pingback: “We are the Mediocre Presidents” | Fatherhood Etc.

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What makes a book good

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January 10, 2006 | 15 books mentioned

Following her post about her favorite books she read last year, Laurie sent me another e-mail about her criteria for what makes a book good. It’s a great list and I thought I’d share it.Trying to figure out what I liked best got me thinking about what my criteria were. Just “I liked it a lot” didn’t cut it, because I liked a lot of stuff and it became hard to prioritize. So here’s my tentative criteria for choosing a “year’s best” (other readers will likely think of other criteria). Anything that scores 4 or more from these criteria probably makes it into my “year’s best”:The book was:Hard to put down.Quotable.Fast, fun to read (not a slogging chore).CompellingAlso I:Kept reading bits out loud to anyone who’d listen.Will likely reread it.Can recommend it to a lot of people.And it:Elicits a strong gut reaction (laughter, tears, shivers, outrage, etc.)Makes you think.Sticks with you long after it’s done (you keeprecalling parts of it months after you’ve read it, or you keep mentioning it to people in the course of conversation).By this set of criteria, Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala scored a 4 (checks next to criteria #4, 8, 9 and 10) whereas Knee Deep in Blazing Snow by James Hayford scored a whopping 5 points because I could put a check next to items #2, 3, 5, 6 and 7. But that’s just me. Maybe after a year of horror and complexity in the news and literature, I was just ready for simple, happy observations about goats and weather.Thanks again, Laurie!

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| 15 books mentioned
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Hard to Pronounce Literary Names

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August 22, 2006 | 15 books mentioned 94 3 min read

Update 3: Thanks to some friendly advice, and seeing competing pronunciations flying around in the comments, especially for that pesky Goethe, I decided to go to the library and to do a little more Internet research to try to get some definitive pronunciations for these names, specifically printed references where available. So here is a new updated post on Hard to Pronounce Literary NamesAsk the Internet any question you want, and usually you’ll be able to learn the answer, but for some reason it’s not very good at helping people find out how to pronounce words and names. I’ve noticed, looking at my visitor logs, that people show up here again and again trying to find how to pronounce a handful of difficult literary names. Sadly they’ve found no answers here… until now. So on to the pronunciations.J.M. Coetzee – the Nobel Laureate’s name is pronounced “cut-ZEE-uh” according to this Slate article and a number of other news items.Paul Theroux – This well-known travel writer’s name “is pronounced ‘Thor-ew,'” says the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “not like the dude from Walden Pond” (which would be Henry David Thoreau, whose name, according to the “Pronouncing Thoreau” sidebar to this NPR story is frequently mispronounced; it is supposed to sound like “thorough.”)Spy novelist John Le Carre is pronounced “luh KAR-AY” or “luh kahr-AY,” according to this site, which lists pronunciations found in the Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names (who knew that such a book existed?). Incidentally, Le Carre is actually the pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell.Contemporary novelist and short story author Dan Chaon is pronounced “Shawn.” So says my friend Edan, who was a student of his at Oberlin.Pulitzer, as in the prize and newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer – Number 19 in the Pulitzer FAQ: “The correct pronunciation is ‘PULL it sir.'”If anybody else has other ideas for hard to pronounce literary names, leave them in the comments and we’ll add them to the list. Meanwhile, here’s a bonus link. The BBC has launched a pronunciation blog (via LanguageHat).Update: Some great suggestions are rolling in from the comments. Kyle’s got some classic problem names:Donald Barthelme = “Bartle-may” not “Bar-THELM” as I had originally heard. Michael Silverblatt solved that one for me.Michael Chabon = “SHAY-bun” not “Sha-BON” like my friend has said.Thomas Pynchon = “PIN-chawn” not “PIN-shin” or “PIN-chin” etc. etc….and for kicks here are two German oldies that need some respect…Rainer Maria Rilke = “RILL-kuh” not “RILL-kee”and Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe = “GOO-tuh” not “GARE-tuh” like we smarmy Americans like to think it is. I have heard it as “GO-thee” and all kinds of botched up ways, but yesterday I asked a German woman who is a Lit. major and she straightened it out. Apparently, here in the states we overemphasize the umlaut to an R when it isn’t as harsh as that. [Bud contends that you don’t “ignore the r sound altogether in Goethe.” In Chicago, there is a Goethe Street in the Old Town neighborhood, which the locals apparently pronounce Go-EE-the, though I could never figure out if they were just pulling my leg. –Max]Laurie adds Ngugi Wa’Thiong’O, the Kenyan author whose latest book Wizard of the Crow just came out and Eoin Colfer, neither of whose names I know how to pronounce. Any help? She also suggests Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate, which The Traveller tells us is pronounced SHAY-mus HEE-knee.Update 2: Some debate about Seamus Heaney in the comments, but this NY Times article seems to confirm it: “SHAY-muss HEE-nee”. Kyle, meanwhile, informs us that Eoin Colfer is pronounced “Owen”. My favorite unpronounceable book title, by the way, is James McCourt’s Mawrdew Czgowchwz, pronounced “Mar-dew Gorgeous”.

Lists
| 15 books mentioned 94 3 min read
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