Sources and Artifacts: Some Comments on the Articles by Michael Millgate and Christine Wiesenthal (Critical Essay‪)‬

PROFESSOR WIESENTHAL BEGINS with the salutary reminder that "biography;" like Rene Magritte's famous pipe, is not a "life" but rather an "artifact;" "a thing made;" a "representation." Professor Millgate, while insisting that biographers go to the sources "direct or documentary;" has an equally salutary reminder for biographers that might be put this way: those sources are also "artifacts;" "things made;" "representations;" more pipes that are not pipes. Both scholars, in different ways, challenge the view that writing a biography is simple. Why might it seem simple? A biography, unlike the history of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the social consequences of industrial-urban growth, or the rise of modernism, has a definite beginning and ending, a birth date and a death date. That seeming simplicity may explain why there are historians--indeed, they may be the dominant group these days--who take the view that biography is not really a serious form of historical writing. They contend that biography exaggerates the importance of an individual while underestimating the social, political, and economic factors that rarely coincide with an individual life but have much more permanent long-term consequences.