The Origin [antikvár]

ForewordIRVING STONEBy Allan NevinsThe central fact upon which all of us who know Irving Stone and his work well would insist is his professional integrity as a biographer and literary artist. As Marguerite Yourcenar says in a note appended to her Hadrian's Memoirs, history has its laws, and poetry or imaginative reconstruction also has its laws; "the two are not necessarily irreconcilable": Irving Stone believes that in the hands of a conscientious writer they are perfectly reconcilable.He has written both conventional biography andlike Miss Yourcenar, Robert Graves, Catherine Drinker Bowen biography which admits imaginative detail. In books like those on Jack London (Sailor on Horseback) and Clarence Darrow (For the Defense) he scrupulously restricts himself to proved fact and direct inference. In his earlier books such as Lust for Life (Vincent Van Gogh), Immortal Wife (Jessie Benton Fremont), The Presidents Lady (Rachel Jackson); as with his later books Those Who Love (Abigail Adams) and The Passions of the Mind (Sigmund Freud); he lets a controlled imagination fill some gaps, but is careful not to go beyond the reasonably conjectural or to alter the spirit of historic truth.These rules exact from Irving Stone a research more laborious, and a composition more scrupulous, than any but his close friends are likely to realize. He spares no pains, and like Macaulay will travel hundreds of miles for a single precise fact. He believes some use of the imagination will make his characters more human, but he talked with fifty men to get an exact measure of Debs's pacifism when Debs was sentenced to ten years in federal prison CAdversary in the House). He knows how to write description with color, but he goes through shelves of old newspapers to find how a street in Lexington, Kentucky, looked when Mary Todd walked along it in girlhood (Love Is Eternal).Thus he meets the historical canons which he learned under Herbert Eugene Bolton at the University of California, where he graduated in 1923. I have heard from Annaix