A look at the National Book Critics Circle nominees - Biography

After graduating from high school in 1977, Eustace Conway spent 20 years in a tepee in the North Carolina mountains, hunting animals for food and dressing in their skins. Between extraordinary adventures - hiking the 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail with few supplies, and riding his horse across the country in 103 days - Conway waged a personal crusade to convince Americans that they, too, could return to the land. Gilbert's "The Last American Man," draws on nearly a decade of conversations with Conway to render a masterly portrait of this buckskin-clad iconoclast. Along the way, she examines America's ongoing infatuation with the frontier, and its consequence for the nation's mythology of masculinity. But Gilbert is too good a writer to stop there: she dispels the Daniel Boone fantasy to reveal Eustace Conway as not a simple mountain man, but a contradictory character whose environmental evangelism drives him to a grueling, ironically modern schedule. Funny and smartly written, "The Last American Man" is the vivid campfire tale of a master storyteller. Eustace Conway's greatest good fortune may be not living close to nature, but having such a writer tell his story. Also nominated for the National Book Award. (271 pp.) (Full review May 9, 2002) By Heather Hewett

This lean biography is based on 46 volumes of Franklin's writings. It offers a quick but mostly uncritical account of his remarkable careers as a printer, scientist, diplomat, and principal architect of the American Republic. Readers see the turmoil of a man who loved both the British Empire and the rights of Americans. He clung to the hope that independence didn't have to mean a complete break - that separate societies with their own representatives could remain united to the king. But he also envisioned a future when America would become a "great country, populous and mighty," free of "any shackles that may be imposed on her." Unfortunately, Morgan's detailed descriptions of Franklin's machinations as a minister to England and France crowd out insights into his private life. Reflecting Franklin's own priorities, he devotes little space to family - including the wife Franklin left behind during his long service in Europe, and his son, a colonial governor who fled to England during the revolution. There are glimpses of Franklin's insatiable curiosity - whether about salt water crabs, how tea leaves settle, or electricity. But as Morgan suggests, those scientific inquiries - and perhaps his family too - always lost out to his greater purpose in life: public service. (314 pp.) By Seth Stern

In the heart of the Depression, radio listeners across North America thought of the Carters as family: Sara had a mother's sweet alto; Maybelle lit a fire on the guitar, and AP's high bass strolled in and out of ballads and old hymns as if he had chores to do meantime. But off the air, these pioneers of modern folk, country, and bluegrass music were intensely private people, who left behind almost none of those paper clues on which biographies can rise. How much more of a triumph, then, is "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?", the first major biography of the Carter family. Drawing on the recollections of relatives, neighbors, listeners, and scholars, Mark Zwonitzer, with Charles Hirshberg, achieves an elegant story of a cast of characters more complex than their fans would believe, or their melodies suggest. The book chronicles the Carters' 18-year career from their childhoods through their unmaking, from Sara and AP's wedding to their painful divorce, from Maybelle's feisty beginnings to her designation as "the Queen Mother of Country Music." Along the way, we get a glimpse of how the family that modern artists from Johnny Cash to Lucinda Williams count as forebears wrote their haunting songs. (397 pp.) By Mary Wiltenburg

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