CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I.--A TALK ABOUT BIOGRAPHY
II.--THE BEGINNERS
Summary to Chapter II
III.--WASHINGTON TO LINCOLN
Summary to Chapter III
IV--LINCOLN AND HIS SUCCESSORS
Summary to Chapter IV
V--STATESMEN
Summary to Chapter V
VI.--PIONEERS
Summary to Chapter VI
VII.--GREAT SOLDIERS
Summary to Chapter VII
VIII.--GREAT SAILORS
Summary to Chapter VIII
INDEX
* * * * *
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Washington _Frontispiece_
Columbus
Jefferson
Jackson
Lincoln
Cleveland
Franklin
Webster
Boone
Grant
Lee
Dewey
* * * * *
AMERICAN MEN OF ACTION
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
A TALK ABOUT BIOGRAPHY
No doubt most of you think biography dull reading. You would much rather
sit down with a good story. But have you ever thought what a story is?
It is nothing but a bit of make-believe biography.
Let us see, in the first place, just what biography means. It is formed
from two Greek words, "bios," meaning life, and "graphein," meaning to
write: life-writing. In other words, a biography is the story of the
life of some individual. Now what the novelist does is to write the
biographies of the people of his story; not usually from the cradle to
the grave, but for that crucial period of their careers which marked
some great success or failure; and he tries to make them so life-like
and natural that we will half-believe they are real people, and that the
things he tells about really happened. Sometimes, to accomplish this, he
even takes the place of one of his own characters, and tells the story
in the first person, as Dickens does in "David Copperfield." That is
called autobiography, which is merely a third Greek word, "autos,"
meaning self, added to the others. An automobile, for instance, is a
self-moving vehicle. So autobiography is the biography of oneself. The
great aim of the novelist is, by any means within his power, to make his
tale seem true, and the truer it is--the truer to human nature and the
facts of life--the greater is his triumph.
Now why is it that everyone likes to read these make-believe
biographies? Because we are all interested in what other people are
doing and thinking, and because a good story tells in an entertaining
way about life-like people, into whom the story-teller has breathed
something of his own personality. Then how does it come that so few of
us care to read the biographies of real people, which ought to be all
the more interesting because they are true instead of make-believe?
Well, in the first place, because most of us have never tried to read
biography in the right way, and so think it tiresome and uninteresting.
Haven't you, more than once, made up your mind that you wouldn't like a
thing, just from the look of it, without ever having tasted it? You know
the old proverb, "One man's food is another man's poison." It isn't a
true proverb--indeed, few proverbs are true--because we are all built
alike, and no man's food will poison any other man; although the other
man may think so, and may really show all the symptoms of poisoning,
just because he has made up his mind to.
Most of you approach biography in that way. You look through the book,
and you see it isn't divided up into dialogue, as a story is, and there
are no illustrations, only pictures of crabbed-looking people, and so
you decide that you are not going to like it, and consequently you don't
like it, no matter how likeable it is.
It isn't wholly your fault that you have acquired this feeling.
Strangely enough, most biographies give no such impression of reality as
good fiction does. John Ridd, for instance, is more alive for most of us
than Thomas Jefferson--the one is a flesh-and-blood personality, while
the other is merely a name. This is because the average biographer
apparently does not comprehend that his first duty is to make his
subject seem alive, or lacks the art to do it; and so produces merely a
lay-figure, draped with the clothing of the period. And usually he
misses the point and fails miserably because he concerns himself with
the mere doing of deeds, and not with that greatest of all things, the
development of character.
