This biography of John Marquand by Stephen Birmingham has some serious problems. There is good information here about Marquand and those around him; however, if you're a serious Marquand fan, this is not the only biography about him available. The problem is, who in 2010 knows very much about John Marquand, so readers are pretty much at the mercy of biographers.

Marquand's literary agent was one of the best in the business: Bernice Baumgarten. (Bernice, by the way, was married to another novelist who was working about the same time, James Cozzens.) I have a research interest in Bernice Baumgarten, which is why I know something about her; information is somewhat difficult to come by because literary agents are more or less peripheral figures in literary biographies--if that. However, what I've read about Bernice indicates that she was brilliant and totally focused on her job. She never had children, so she made Cozzens and her job her life.

Now the problem. Here's what Birmingham has to say about Baumgarten, Marquand's agent in reference to the manuscript of Marquand's new fictional venture, The Late George Apley: "Bernice Baumgarten read John Marquand's new venture into 'a new writing area' and was dismayed. Her immediate reaction was that the book was unpublishable. In all fairness to Miss Baumgarten--who has since moved to pleasant retirement in Florida--she probably could simply not understand the book, and what she could understand she could not believe. Her own background was middle-class-Jewish New York. Upper-class life on Beacon Hill in Boston was as remote from her experience as life on Mars."

Birmingham is similarly condescending to other women in Marquand's life. Whether he's right about the other women, like Marquand's second wife, Adelaide Hooker Marquand, I don't know. "When Marquand first met her, she was not as heavy as she would eventually become, but she was on the plump side." Birmingham goes on to make Adelaide into a total loon--which, as I say, she might have been. But because of his misreading of Bernice Baumgarten, I'm suspicious of his other characterizations. Truth is, Marquand was no prize himself; he was actually something of a cad, running around on his first wife while she was pregnant.

I don't want biographers who whitewash their subjects. I'm looking for balance when I read someone's life, not hagiography. There's good information in this biography; I just think that Birmingham probably had some prejudices and blind spots of his own that at times colored his assessment of these interesting people. ( )