Linda Gordon, author of Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, appears on Saturday, October 10 at 2pm on the University of Oregon Nonfiction Stage.
I’m a Portland native (Cleveland High grad) and come back to visit my family there often. My dad, who lived to be 101, just died—in the very house I grew up in, in the Woodstock neighborhood. Since leaving Portland I’ve lived in the Midwest and the East, but the Oregon landscape will always be my idea of beauty.
My books get written slowly because I’ve always had a full-time job as a college professor, now at New York University. But researching and writing history is what I love to do most, so I’m always working on some project.
My last book before Dorothea Lange was The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction.
Doing it took me into new territory—writing a story that I tried to tell as if it were a novel. Except that it’s all true.) I got such satisfaction from doing it that I wanted to tell a story in my next book. After spending a lot of time looking for the right story, I realized that a biography is a story. A life has an arc, it has conflict and pain and joy, and it is always deeply affected by its historical time and place. Lange’s life had that kind of drama and that kind of intense relation to historical events—depression, World War II, the Cold War, for example.
Lange was by no means a perfect person, and that attracted me—I find myself less interested in stories that divide people into the evil and the good. I like complicated people and complicated plots.
I read a lot of history books and articles—because I love history and because my job and my students require that I keep learning. But more and more I enjoy histories that are good narratives. Two of my favorites are Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, the best book about the civil rights movement and one that reads like a novel; and Robert Orsi’s Thank You, St. Jude, about how a group of Chicago women created a cult around this saint of “hopeless causes.”
You can find out about my other work at my website. To see the Lange biography, click here.