Biography

276 biography Vol. 3, No. 3 ANNOUNCEMENT OF AMERICAN LIVES ENDOWMENT, A NEW ORGANIZATION TO ENCOURAGE LIFE WRITING The American lives Endowment has been founded as a non profit educational organization to encourage grass roots life writing and family history, to educate the general public and scholars to the value and use of these materials, to encourage and assist their collettion by libraries, and to aid in their writing, editing and publication. The Endowment's interest embraces the life of every American and the history of every family come to these shores. But since those men and women who are publically acknowledged as our greatest leaders will, in the ordinary course of events, be the subjea of commercially published biographies or autobiographies, the Endowment emphasizes life writing for those for whom commercial publication is not possible. The number and kind of lives published commercially are not sufficient to illustrate or represent the depth and richness of the American experience. Today's poet or tomorrow's historian will not be able to touch the wellsprings of life on this continent unless there is available the richer fabric woven of many lives. Consider what historian Lynn White has written in "The Temple of Jupiter Revisited." His argument is for "public history." ... if we are to discover the history of mankind, and not merely the history of the very thin and friable upper crust of mankind, we must broaden our researches to include the . . . mass of men. Were they in fact anonymous? They had names and knew each other by them. Were they faceless? No more than we.... It is not their defect but our ignorance which has put them beyond our historical horizon. . . . (for) all history is, in fact, a matter of persons. ... To be historians of any society, we must be historians of the whole ofthat society. . . . our kind of history is as far advanced over Gibbon's as the present nuclear physics is over Newton's. ... As for ourselves, we are on the way toward producing a history of the globe and of all mankind. Further, the people to whom other people are most important, their family, friends and associates, do not have access except through transient and unrecorded direa experience, to the lives of those whom they love, admire or would wish better to know. It is rare that a child learns to know his great grandparents, and almost unknown that the same child, as a mature adult, has any opportunity to enjoy learning what these family figures experienced in their lives—what were their thoughts, their crises, their peak experiences, how did their lives evolve and what came to be their strengths? Were COMMUNICATIONS: AMERICAN LIVES ENDOWMENT 277 one now to have available a vehicle transporting one back in time, how wonderful it would be to know a deceased kinsman or kinswoman. There is so much love and wisdom and the color of living that today's parents would like to transmit to future generations, a bequest far more important than the few material items that one can leave that reach far down over the generations' chain. There is a simple vehicle that does allow each generation that prideful, enriching conversation with those who have gone before or will come after. It is the vehicle of biography, autobiography and family history. One needs no science fiction time-teletransport. One needs but a pen and the opportunity to write. The Endowment believes that one of America's great strengths is the family, for it is the ties of love, courage, admiration and example that help make people proud and strong, give them a sense of something greater than self, of being part of a chain of intertwined lives over time. By encouraging family members to write the biographies of one another , or family histories containing biographical vignettes, by encouraging the family members to write the story of their own lives, there is made available to present and future generations a living record of family members. No longer lost to the failure of memory or the unsettling pace of the modern scene, each life work will speak to kinsmen and kinswomen now and hence, communicating in words that are not...