ENGL 3400 March 15

Today we have a guest speaker: Charles Shields, the author of two biographies of Harper Lee
I've read the introduction to one biography and composed a few questions for him:

Questions for Charles Shields
How do you see biography used most skillfully in scholarly work and also in the classroom?
How do you see the equation of Scout with Harper Lee or of other characters with people in the author’s life as helpful or a potential pitfall in terms of teaching and scholarship?
Why did you segue from teaching to writing biographies for young adults?
What topics do you choose to overlook in the biography and why? How do you make that choice?
In researching for the biography, you say that you relied on unorthodox methods such as google searchs, online reunion searches, etc., but then also pair that with first hand interviews, visiting locations, and examining materials. Given that most scholarship these days seems increasingly limited to online databases and print sources, do you have a particular stance on current research methods? Do you see research methods evolving and do you attach ideas about quality with the evolution?
Two years of re-writing—writing process