Any student of pop culture is familiar with this type of headline: "Tell-all biography reveals the stunning secrets of glitzy celebrity!" Many of today's cultural consumers also are well aware that those biographies are written for money, not for their artistic merit or selfless pursuit of the truth. Revealing photographs and embellished stories are the name of the game. The public eats them up, and buys plenty of books.

It is a familiar story--today. But in the late 1800s, the cult of celebrity was just beginning its ascendancy. For Robert Habich of the Department of English, researching the celebrity of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the late 1800s (and no fewer than six Emerson biographies quickly written after his death in 1882) has offered a wealth of information regarding the advance of photography, the "cut-throat" publishing industry, the mass media, and how all these elements merged to create a new biographical genre.

"Prior to this time, the purpose of biography was veneration, to show what was admirable about a person," Habich says. "After the 1880s, it was about disclosure. Emerson just happened to die at a time when the nature of biographies was changing."

As a member of the American Antiquarian Society's 2004 Summer Seminar, Habich went to the source to learn more about publishing and the history of the book. "The society houses the premier library for the history of books and print culture," explains Habich, who was afforded the opportunity to further his research and writing through a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend fellowship award. Receiving support to attend the invitation-only, intensive immersion into the history and business of publishing taught him to be sensitive to the way the economics of publishing affects literary history. He says, "It was a chance to learn from national experts in the field and to see the ways in which biographical book culture changed in the 1880s."

Of the six biographies Habich examines in his forthcoming book on the subject, entitled Building Their Own Waldos: Emerson¹s First Biographers and the Politics of Genre, the biography written by Oliver Wendell Holmes was the best seller. Habich notes, however, that the book wasn't written for artistic reasons. "He did it for the money," Habich says. "Holmes was retiring from Harvard Medical School, and he wanted to rent a better summer house. He had an annuity contract with Houghton Mifflin for $1,000 a year, which went up to $4,000 when he agreed to write Emerson's biography."

It was a win-win situation for both parties, according to Habich. Holmes was able to retire in style, and Houghton Mifflin got a "big name author to write about a big name author," something the publisher needed to compete in the extremely contentious publishing industry of the late 19th century. "There were lots of publishers, and many of those publishers were going out of business at this time," Habich explains. Of the six biographies he is examining, Houghton Mifflin eventually owned five of them.

Emerson's biographies offer a case study of how biography was changing at the time, says Habich. With the advent of photography, the telegraph, and coast-to-coast mass media, there was a kind of intimacy with celebrities that the general public hadn't before experienced.

Habich's extensive knowledge of the development of the genre in the late 19th century is the result of his digging into as much of the available documentation as possible, from the notes and rough drafts of the biographies themselves to the sales receipts of the books. He has tracked the biographers through unpublished letters, journals, and other records in more than 20 libraries here and abroad, most recently at the Library of Congress and the University of Reading archives in the United Kingdom, to his current intriguing position, "right in the middle of the conversation between the publishers, the biographers, and the Emerson family."