Although I found fault with “And So It Goes,” the biography of Kurt Vonnegut, I found this interview with Shields on editing to be well worth the reading. Perhaps the problem with accuracy lies with his editors. Shields said this to an interviewer:
I don’t get edited—barely at all. I wrote twenty books for young adults, all nonfiction, and none of them came back edited. My first editor was my father, a journalist. He edited my school papers the way he would a news or feature story, while I sat beside him. What that was like I describe in “The Editor at the Breakfast Table.”
If ever a biographer screwed the pooch over easily fact checked info, it was Kurt Vonnegut’s biographer Charles J. Shields, Yet, book reviews for Shields’ biographies on Harper Lee and Lorraine Hansberry have been largely favorable and cited their accuracy.
This was the rebuttal by Mark Vonnegut concerning allegations rendered in the Vonnegut biography by Charles J. Shields regarding Dow Chemical stock ownership. This was the letter to the editor by Vonnegut’s friend Donald Farber.
The Vonnegut bio by Shields was authorized by Vonnegut, but after the author’s death, the family refused permission to quote verbatim from letters.