"Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story"
About this Quote
It sounds like a throwaway career aside, but it’s really a historian admitting, with a wink, how porous genres become once you’ve spent a lifetime turning messy evidence into narrative. David Herbert Donald made his name by writing biographies that read with novelistic drive while staying anchored to archival grit. So when he casually floats memoir, essays, or a mystery, he’s not announcing a midlife pivot so much as naming the tools he’s already been using.
The specific intent is disarmingly modest: a menu of possible late projects, delivered in the conditional mood ("maybe", "perhaps"), as if authorship is something that happens to you rather than something you seize. That softens the authority that comes with being a major Lincoln scholar; it frames him not as a marble bust of expertise but as a working writer still curious about form.
The subtext is sharper. Biography is already a kind of detective story: motives obscured, documents incomplete, suspects dead, clues contradictory. A memoir would acknowledge the historian’s own position in the archive - the preferences, blind spots, and personal stakes that shape what gets called "objectivity". Essays would let him speak in his own voice, less bound to the long, evidentiary march of a monograph. A mystery story, meanwhile, is a sly admission that readers crave suspense and resolution, and that historians routinely choreograph both while pretending they don’t.
Context matters: Donald came of age in a mid-century academy that prized professional distance and distrusted overt literary ambition. This line sidesteps that old policing. It treats writing not as a hierarchy (serious history vs. “mere” genre) but as a set of overlapping methods for making the past legible - and, crucially, readable.
The specific intent is disarmingly modest: a menu of possible late projects, delivered in the conditional mood ("maybe", "perhaps"), as if authorship is something that happens to you rather than something you seize. That softens the authority that comes with being a major Lincoln scholar; it frames him not as a marble bust of expertise but as a working writer still curious about form.
The subtext is sharper. Biography is already a kind of detective story: motives obscured, documents incomplete, suspects dead, clues contradictory. A memoir would acknowledge the historian’s own position in the archive - the preferences, blind spots, and personal stakes that shape what gets called "objectivity". Essays would let him speak in his own voice, less bound to the long, evidentiary march of a monograph. A mystery story, meanwhile, is a sly admission that readers crave suspense and resolution, and that historians routinely choreograph both while pretending they don’t.
Context matters: Donald came of age in a mid-century academy that prized professional distance and distrusted overt literary ambition. This line sidesteps that old policing. It treats writing not as a hierarchy (serious history vs. “mere” genre) but as a set of overlapping methods for making the past legible - and, crucially, readable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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