The author is Daniel Wolff. He wrote You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke, and he’s collaborated with Memphian Ernest Withers in Withers’ collections of photographs, Negro League Baseball and The Memphis Blues Again. And he’s currently producing a documentary on New Orleans, called Right To Return, with director Jonathan Demme.
But today we’re talking to Wolff about How Lincoln Learned To Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them (Bloomsbury USA). The last of those 12 is Elvis Presley, and Wolff’s chapter is an insightful and, yes, moving look at the boy who became the man who would be King.
Q: There’s a whole library of books written about Elvis Presley. How does your 20-page portrait compare to his education covered in book-length biographies?
A: I’ve read (and kept) too many books about Elvis. (Just ask my wife.) And in order to write this profile in How Lincoln Learned To Read, I dug up even more information.
A couple of obvious comparisons to previous books: I look at Elvis only till he’s 18. So, it’s before he’s a star and even a professional musician. It’s about his coming up and ends as much more a portrait of a kid out of Mississippi who moves Memphis than it is the future King.
Second and in answer to your question: How Lincoln Learned To Read is a book about a dozen Americans, most of them supposedly well-known: Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Sojourner Truth, Henry Ford, etc. But the way these people are “known” depends on what we ask about them. I’m asking how they learned the things they needed — whether it’s machinery in Ford’s case or public speaking in Lincoln’s — and then I’m looking to the subjects themselves to answer the question through what they’ve written or said. That gives you a different kind of portrait than we may have seen before.
