Academic Writers Block
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Do Canada’s academic historians have a collective case of writers’ block?
I’ve been getting the impression lately that Canadian academics are not producing much in the way of readable history books for the general public. Deciding to test this impression, I conducted a small, completely unscientific survey. I tracked down the results of the last five years worth of major national non-fiction book prizes – the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Writers Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-fiction and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction. Admittedly, prizes are not the best measure of quality. But they do give some indication of who are producing the kind of books that the literate public are reading.
And in Canada it doesn’t appear to be professional historians.
By my calculation, during the period 2004-2008, twenty-two separate history/biography titles were nominated for one or another of the big prizes. Of these, only nine were written by academics. And among the actual prize winners, only one – I’ve got a Home in Glory Land, winner of a Governor General’s Award in 2007 – had an academic author, Karolyn Smardz Frost.
All the other winners, and most of the other nominees, were written by journalists and other professional writers, confirming my sense that Canadian historians are not writing the kinds of books that people want to read.
Of course, it is not incumbent on academic historians to feed the public interest in Canada’s past. They have their own audience, each other, and their own obligation to historical research which should not be expected to attract the attention of a wide audience outside the academy. Still, it puzzles me why Canadian historians have abandoned the popular audience to non-academics.
This does not seem to be the case in either Britain or the United States. Thinking of my own bedside table over the past couple of months, I have read Postwar by Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, a history of France during the Nazi occupation by Richard Vinen who teaches at the University of London, and a very innovative couple of volumes on post-war Britain by David Kynaston, a professor at Kingston University. Of the past five Pulitzer Prizes for history, all but one was won by an academic historian. The 2008 National Book Award for Non-Fiction was won by Annette Gordon Reed, a history professor at Rutgers, for her Hemingses of Monticello. And this year’s list of “100 notable books” from The New York Times includes these history titles, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, Champlain’s Dream, Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, and This Republic of Suffering, all written by university types.
Of course there is nothing wrong with non-academics writing history books. I am, after all, one myself. But I do wonder what has discouraged Canadian academic historians from writing books that appeal to a broad audience. Is it not healthier to have our historians engaging with subjects that also engage the attention of the broad public?
Perhaps Brian McKillop’s new biography of the great popularizer, Pierre Berton, which I am just about to crack open, will have something to say on the subject.
I’ve been getting the impression lately that Canadian academics are not producing much in the way of readable history books for the general public. Deciding to test this impression, I conducted a small, completely unscientific survey. I tracked down the results of the last five years worth of major national non-fiction book prizes – the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Writers Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-fiction and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction. Admittedly, prizes are not the best measure of quality. But they do give some indication of who are producing the kind of books that the literate public are reading.
And in Canada it doesn’t appear to be professional historians.
By my calculation, during the period 2004-2008, twenty-two separate history/biography titles were nominated for one or another of the big prizes. Of these, only nine were written by academics. And among the actual prize winners, only one – I’ve got a Home in Glory Land, winner of a Governor General’s Award in 2007 – had an academic author, Karolyn Smardz Frost.
All the other winners, and most of the other nominees, were written by journalists and other professional writers, confirming my sense that Canadian historians are not writing the kinds of books that people want to read.
Of course, it is not incumbent on academic historians to feed the public interest in Canada’s past. They have their own audience, each other, and their own obligation to historical research which should not be expected to attract the attention of a wide audience outside the academy. Still, it puzzles me why Canadian historians have abandoned the popular audience to non-academics.
This does not seem to be the case in either Britain or the United States. Thinking of my own bedside table over the past couple of months, I have read Postwar by Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, a history of France during the Nazi occupation by Richard Vinen who teaches at the University of London, and a very innovative couple of volumes on post-war Britain by David Kynaston, a professor at Kingston University. Of the past five Pulitzer Prizes for history, all but one was won by an academic historian. The 2008 National Book Award for Non-Fiction was won by Annette Gordon Reed, a history professor at Rutgers, for her Hemingses of Monticello. And this year’s list of “100 notable books” from The New York Times includes these history titles, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, Champlain’s Dream, Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, and This Republic of Suffering, all written by university types.
Of course there is nothing wrong with non-academics writing history books. I am, after all, one myself. But I do wonder what has discouraged Canadian academic historians from writing books that appeal to a broad audience. Is it not healthier to have our historians engaging with subjects that also engage the attention of the broad public?
Perhaps Brian McKillop’s new biography of the great popularizer, Pierre Berton, which I am just about to crack open, will have something to say on the subject.
Comments
Of course, there are readable books by Canadian academic historians, but too often, their works fall short in style and content.
Does anyone else out there suspect that academic historians fear that if they drop the thesis-speak, they will lose the respect of their peers? History may be a social science, but writing is an art. And the more narrowly focused and pointed the historical content is, the more art is needed to carry it.
But is it so odd that academic work is of little appeal to the general public? After all, the best novels, plays or poems are not written by teachers of literature or of graduate courses in creative writing.
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