My books have been described as business sagas. I guess my fear was that it would read on my tombstone, 'Here lies Ron Chernow, chronicler of the rich.' That sounds a little bit better now that I'm doing (Alexander) Hamilton. I decided that I would give the robber barons a breather. Now you are traveling back further in time in your current work, right?Ī. But I think that what happens then is that when the reader reads the book, they then join you on this journey to try to figure out this very complex figure. It will be a very long, often arduous, but always exciting quest, to try to figure out the truth of this personality. There will therefore be an excitement for you. And I say that because I think that if you're dealing with an enigmatic, contradictive figure, and somebody who you feel ambivalent about, you will wrestle with that figure every day that you write the book. The fact that Reagan was an enigma, you know, far from being a deterrent, I think is a very attractive quality in terms of a biographical subject. I'm very attracted to enigmatic and contradictory figures.

But I try to pick figures whom I struggle with. Now, I mean, we've had many, many wonderful biographies that originated with those impulses. And I've always held that that was a mistake. There's a tendency to glorify or debunk behind many biographies. I think that the inclination of most people is to like books about figures they either love or loathe. But there's always a certain leap of faith involved. And as with the marriage, so with the biography, you can only to a limited extent foresee the future. And it's a rather scary thing, picking a mate, because you are stuck for many, many years with the consequences.

If you pick the wrong partner, almost nothing can go right. If you pick the right partner, almost nothing can go wrong. I feel that it's very much like marriage. Let me say there's no more important matter for a biographer than the choice of subject.

Ron chernow biographies