My brother Tom gave me a collection of essays on the writing of biography, to help in the work I am at present engaged in. There's a lesson for all of us, I think, in this paragraph from an essay written in 1932 by Claude M. Fuess, headmaster of Phillips Academy: "If [Gamaliel] Bradford [a famous biographer] were, in some whimsical mood, to turn his analytic gaze in my direction, what should I like him to notice: that golden Phi Beta Kappa key or that unpaid laundry bill; that ten-dollar check sent to an indigent cousin or that towel pilfered from the Pullman Company; that unprinted ode to spring or that kick furtively bestowed upon a stray cat?"
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