David Nasaw - Thoughts

Thoughts

Although he has published two highly-regarded, widely-selling full-length scholarly biographies, Nasaw describes himself as an academic historian, rather than a biographer. A historian, he says, "sweeps away the fables, the myths, the stories" and places scholarly subjects "in time and over time", while for biographers, the organization of the work is laid out in advance. "Writing history is not an art but a craft," Nasaw has said. "It requires interpretation and fifty sources and integrating and assembling this material into a story told by an individual voice."