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Biography: My Career in 3 Acts - A Lakeland Lecture by Patrick Parr

Mar. 21, 2025

“With every book, my hair gets a little whiter.”

On March 13th, Patrick Parr delivered a Lakeland Lecture, sharing his journey to becoming a biographer. He began as a fiction writer until one day, his wife asked him, “What have you always enjoyed reading?” to which Patrick answered—biographies!

That realization led him to reach out to established biographers, ask questions, and listen to interview tapes. “Listening to cassettes of people that knew King—I knew that THIS is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

Parr emphasized the importance of collecting primary sources to create an authentic portrait of his subjects. “I want the guts of the person to make the portraits,” he said. For his latest book, Malcolm Before X, he sifted through prison files, newspapers, and firsthand interviews with family members and close friends of Malcolm X.

The life of a biographer isn’t easy—it involves rejection, years of research, and no guarantee of publication. But for those with a passion for writing, Parr’s advice was simple:

"Rejection is the oxygen of the industry. But just keep doing it again and again and again."

LUJ professor Roger Grabowski sat down and interviewed Patrick before his lecture

What in your life leading up to then prepared you for a career as a prolific writer of biographies?

In 2012, I was 31 years old. I'd written 8 novels, 8 screenplays, and dozens of short stories. I taught ESL and Creative Writing at the University of Washington but still qualified for food stamps. I'd been writing non-stop since July 1999, when I'd been lulled into a half-dead state by a Catholic priest whose monotone homily echoed off the walls gently enough to cause me to begin envisioning my first ever story: A town called Ellis, Illinois, where Native Americans and immigrant Europeans co-existed...and together they'd invent the game of baseball. I remember listening to Bolero's Ravel on a loop while writing and believed back then that the story was a masterpiece. It was something...but not that.

Is there any particular reason why the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement have become the focus of your books?

I wouldn't say I'm driven by historical events, but far more by the people involved. For my first book, The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, I focus on a three-year gap in King's narrative, 1948-1951. That's my 'thing', I guess you could say...filling important gaps in the narratives of people we think we know but don't. It just turns out that there are still many gaps in the lives of historical figures related to the Civil Rights Movement. We idolize James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and love to turn their words into quick, accessible quotes, but their formative years are often left in the shadows.

We hear much about the 21st century decline of paper books, the publishing industry, journalism, and even the act of reading itself. Do you have hope for the future?

As long as libraries exist, I have hope. Humanity needs to perpetuate the experience of the simple act of reading a book that has taken years to complete. One reason Malcolm X fell in love with reading was because he'd been deprived of all other potential distraction. Sitting in his 6 x 8 prison cell in Charlestown State Prison, 17 and a half hours a day, he not only read books, he absorbed them, fell into their worlds and committed them to memory. In the end, we remember what we want to remember. If you are spending your time scrolling through hundreds of short videos a day, are you going to want to remember them for the rest of your life? By the time you turn 50, what will all of that scrolling, all of those clips, memes, and posts have given you? Momentary entertainment...we are flickers of bandwidth distracting ourselves from our shadow's depths. Reading gives us light, ground to stand on, and a path to a better life.

What would you say to young people, for example university students, who would like to pursue a career in journalism or non-fiction writing, given the recent changes in both industries?

As I've told several of my classes, the best way of breaking into a journalism or non-fiction career is to try to apply for internships as early as their second or third year of college. I did not do that and ended up starting my journalism/nonfiction career ten years too late. It's my one regret...but I should qualify that by saying that I never even thought about an internship while I was in college. No one pointed me in that direction. I guess I was too single-minded on writing fiction, playing tennis, and reading American literature. Back then, I 'thought' I wanted to be a novelist, but, well, that goes back to the question I'll discuss in the lecture.

What are you planning next? Do you have any “white whales” of biography topics that you’d like to tackle next?

Currently I'm trying to secure grant support to complete "Malcolm After X," because there is still a lot of ground to cover. This book would cover his final 12 and a half years, and it will take a lot of work. I'll need to retrace his footsteps, and that means traveling to Ghana, Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, even Iran if I can find a way. Biographies are expensive...that doesn't get mentioned enough, but I will be talking about that during the lecture.

If I'm not able to get the funding for Malcolm After X, I'm left with three ideas: A mass-scale biography of Einstein, a cradle to grave bio of James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, or a dual biography of George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington. I'm exploring all of these when I can.

We look forward to reading more of Patrick’s works!