The experience at the seminar was Richardson’s initial break with academic writing and the start of his career as a literary biographer. With rejuvenated determination to write about a subject dear to him–and to write, moreover, for the general reader–Richardson began a book on Thoreau. "I said, ‘I want to write for somebody besides the professors,’" he said. "‘I don’t want to ignore them, or be ignored by them, but they’re not the exclusive audience.’" As Richardson shifted from university scholar to public intellectual, he decided that his next book would be insightful, but a pleasure to read, too. It would tell a story. It would place its subject in the foreground and keep its author deep in the shadows.

Richardson spent nearly a decade researching and writing Emerson: The Mind on Fire, devoting most of the time to research. He used the same grueling method that he had applied to Thoreau: in addition to the secondary literature about his subjects, Richardson sought to read "everything of any importance" that they had ever read. For the books on Emerson and Thoreau, Richardson estimates that his reading lists ran to nearly 2,000 titles. The effort pays off, he says, enabling him to see the development of his subjects’ own thought by tracing, minutely, the sources of its inspiration. "The goal," Richardson says of intellectual biography, quoting Janet Malcolm, "is to show why this particular person did this particular work."

Richardson compiles his reading lists by beginning with pre-existing lists made by other scholars. He then consults university library records and combs his subjects’ journals and letters for references to other books they mention or seem to have read. As he explains succinctly in the preface to Emerson, "My approach to both Thoreau and Emerson has been to read what they read and then to relate their reading to their writing."

Compared to the glacial pace of his research, the writing goes quickly: Richardson said he spent about a year writing Emerson. The book is written in 100 short chapters. In each, Richardson at once probes and describes, building at once a story and an argument.

"I understand biography as involving a lot of the skills a novelist uses, but playing by the rules of the historian," he said.

Richardson is now nearly two years deep in the reading list for his next book, a biography of psychologist, philosopher and anti-transcendentalist William James, who, perhaps unknowingly, identified another skill indispensable to the biographer: empathy.

Said Richardson, "William James says in an essay called ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’ that the hardest thing, the thing that none of us can really do, is to really see from another person’s point of view, but how important it is to try."

—Eric Gershon '93

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