Harvard in the Books
In the Globe, Allan Helms reviews Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, by
William Wright.
It's a fascinating story, involving a secret tribunal that expelled a number of Harvard students for suspected gay activity. But Helms suggests that the telling of it is deeply flawed, including a number of factual mistakes, unattributed quotations, and occasional dips into fictionalization.
(The Crimson review said much the same.)
Concludes Helms, "Wright has been so ill served by his editor that perhaps it's time for a new purge."
A couple of points here.
First, Wright shouldn't need an editor to point out factual mistakes or to tell him that interspersing fact and fiction in a work of history is a bad idea.
But second, as is more and more true in publishing, Wright probably didn't have much of an editor. Well, let me rephrase; Wright's editor probably didn't do much actual editing. His publisher, St. Martin's Press, is known as a commercial house (as opposed to one with a highbrown reputation).
(St. Martin's publishes the paperback of American Son, so I don't say that as a slight; nothing wrong with being commercial.)
But I'll bet that St. Martin's was concerned that the publication earlier this year of Harvard Rules and Ross Douthat's Privilege had tapped out the market for books about Harvard, and consequently made a decision not to put a lot of resources into Wright's publication. That, and the fact that it's aimed at a very specific niche—gay people interested in Harvard—probably meant that Wright didn't receive a lot of editorial attention.
And since publishers don't pay for fact-checkers, Wright would have had to hire someone himself. (I did, for both of my books, and I consider it money well-spent.) It sounds like Wright chose not to.
I don't say this as a criticism of Wright; it's tough to write a book about a small subject and have the resources to do it just as you'd like to. At some point, you have to perform a cost-benefit analysis: If I have to spend $2500 on fact-checking, and that's, say, five percent of my advance after taxes and a 15% agent's commission, and the fact-checker catches ten small mistakes...is it worth the money?
Rather, I'm suggesting that some of the perceived failings of Wright's book may reveal telling changes in the publishing business. It's not easy to sell a book about a small chapter of Harvard history....
