Vanity Presses

I heard a very interesting story on NPR this week about Wallace Stegner, the acclaimed novelist and first Dean of Stanford's Journalism School. It seems that academia did not pay the young Stegner all that much and with a wife and young child to support, he supplemented his income with freelance projects.

One such project was writing corporate biographies, usually commissioned by the corporation. I'm not sure what year it was, but Stegner wrote once such biography for Aramco, the oil company. Apparently there were some disagreements about what kind of story he was to tell: a PR fluff piece or the inside story of oil deals, and while he was willing to do either (for his fee), the company never made a decision. As a result, Stegner wrote the book and the company shelved it for some fifteen years.

Recently an enterprising corporate communications person found the tome in some files and began printing it in excerpts in the company newsletter. It was such a success, (you'd have to believe this was the PR fluff version), that the company recently printed the book, much to the chagrin of the Stegner family, especially since Stegner went on to become one of the great environmentalists of his time.

Anyway, I tell you all this to point out that corporate biographies (which I too write) have been around forever and usually pay pretty well. It made me feel better to know that one of the great historian/novelists of our time did not find such work demeaning. I don't either, although the ones I write are most definitely client driven. That's not to say, they are not interesting stories--just that they are rarely objective.

Who knows? One day, those volumes on the history of Southern New Hampshire Medical Center or Staten Island University Hospital may become collector's items?!