This is Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. I'm Rachel Gordon. Here, we aim to make the process of writing and publishing a bit more transparent and a bit less overwhelming. Through conversations with editors and academics at all stages, from full professors to graduate students, independent scholars, and postdocs, we share stories, lessons, and helpful habits from our writing lives. Hello. If you're enjoying writing it, I just want to remind you that we'd love it if you left a rating and shared the podcast with a friend. It's really helpful for getting the word out. Today, we're really excited to get to speak with Maurice Samuels, who is the Betty, Jane, and Leanne Professor of French and the Chair and Director of the Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale. 
Maurice Samuel specializes in the literature and culture of 19th century France. He is broadly interested in investigating the origins of our cultural modernity, tracing how new forms of subjectivity and new ideas about history, politics, race, and the novel took shape in the period following the French Revolution. He is the author of five books and several edited volumes. Maurice's books have been published with academic presses, including Stanford, Chicago, and Cornell, and also trade presses such as Basic. And the latest book, which is a biography of Alfred Dreyfus, was published with the Yale University Press Jewish Live series, which I think of as practically trade, but maybe you can explain to us where this series lies on that spectrum and what it offers in terms of the benefits of trade or academic life. 
later in the conversation. I was thinking of you, Maurice, as a guest for writing it because of this latest book. I know some listeners are wondering why do certain academics get invited to write a book as part of a series? Most of us have to pitch an editor and maybe that is what happened here. But if you can tell us how this popular biography came about. Sure. Well, first of all, thank you, Rachel, for inviting me to participate today. I'm really happy to talk to your audience. And yeah, so I had long been an admirer, I would say, of the Jewish Lives series at Yale Press, which, as you said, they're short, readable biographies of famous Jews in history, going back to biblical times and up through the present. 
Everyone from King David to Mel Brooks, I think, has been a subject of biography. And I was fortunate enough that they came to me to write this. And I think probably because it really is what I work on. I'm a specialist of 19th century French Jews. So the Dreyfus Affair kind of stands very centrally in my field. And I did write that The Betrayal of the Duchess, my last book, which is about a kind of precursor affair. And that was my first attempt to do a more popular book. And I think because I have this more public-facing role running the Yale program for the study of anti-Semitism. So I have to say I was really fortunate because they came to me. And it was, in a sense, a kind of dream come true because I've always been obsessed by Dreyfus. 
So I was really happy. I had, in fact, spent... couple of years trying to write a screenplay about the Dreyfus affair before graduate school. So I was really, I knew a lot about it and I was really happy to have this opportunity. Yeah. So you were like the perfect author of this book. One of the advantages of the CL Live series, as you mentioned, is that they're pretty slim biographies. So they're, they just feel very accessible and doable for a reader. But I'm wondering for the writer, what kind of challenge this presented for you to write really such a slim biography? Yeah. Yeah. So when they approached me, they said that the point of these biographies is not necessarily to present original research. 
So they want you to have a fresh take on a subject. And I at first hesitated a little bit because the Dreyfus Affair, I think after the French Revolution, the Dreyfus Affair is the event in French history about which the most has been written. So there's just an enormous bibliography of books and articles about the affair. And I kind of was like, what can I possibly say that's new about the affair? So I did hesitate a little bit and I eventually decided that there was an opening to say something new in a few different ways. So first of all, I tried to really make Dreyfus the center of the story. And often he's not because he was actually off on Devil's Island while the affair to free him took place. 
So he kind of gets left out. And in fact, one of the most famous books about the affair in French is called The Affair Without Dreyfus. So there have been actually very few books that put him at the center. And I tried to do that. And strangely, even though if you ask people what they know about the Dreyfus Affair, they often the only thing they know is that Dreyfus was Jewish and falsely accused. But very few of the books, with some exceptions, about the affair have placed the Jewish question at the center. So I knew that I wanted to kind of drill down into what Jewishness meant for him, the role of anti-Semitism in the affair, and then the part where I think I offer the most original research in the book. 
There's other two, it was more like a question of my kind of what to focus on. I didn't, other people had said a lot of those things. But what is really my real research contribution is looking at the effect that the Dreyfus had on the lives of Jews around the world. So I read all these Jewish newspapers from the time of the affair in French, English, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and tried to do a synthetic account of how the affair was viewed around the world. So that was my, that I then had to condense that we can talk about it. It was actually really hard because I had enough to write an entire academic book on that. And I had to condense it into one short chapter in a book for a popular audience. 
So that was a challenge. Yeah, it sounds like a real challenge. And I'm just curious, since we've spoken to other guests who've mentioned how important the table of contents can be in terms of thinking about what are the key moments, where's the drama, what is going to lead to what, and maybe even provide some suspense and desire to turn the page for readers. How did the table of contents work for you? Is that sort of a helpful tool in the building the arc of the story? Yeah. Yeah. And I decided – so my table of contents, I have an introduction and then I have the soldier, the arrest, the prisoner, the affair, the climax, the reaction, which is the chapter where I talk about how Jews around the world, and then the aftermath. 
So I wanted these one-word titles that would – well, I guess two words with the – But that would capture an element of the biography. And kind of that's how I organized the book. Yeah, I love those one or two word chapter titles. Is this something you've noticed becoming more popular in recent years? Or what made you go with that? I hadn't. Maybe I had subliminally noticed that someplace else. But no, I just realized that that was how I was personally thinking about it. And I tried in each chapter. One of the challenges, I think, of writing the book was I had to both tell the story of his life because it's a biography, but I also wanted each chapter to wrestle with some larger question raised by the life or by the affair. 
So, for instance, in the first chapter where I talk about his from birth and his family until basically until the moment of the arrest, I I also wrestled with what Jewishness meant for him and his family and for French Jews in general. So that was that issue. In the chapter about the arrest, I wrestled with debates about how much anti-Semitism contributed to the affair and things like that. So I tried to have a conceptual question, but without slowing down the biography. So without slowing down the narrative. And that was one of the writing challenges I kind of set myself. That's a really great guiding principle that each chapter is going to be wrestling with a question. Is that something you took from your academic writing? 
Did the editor of this series suggest that? Or is that your understanding of biography? That was really my own desire to do both things, to tell a story, which I really wanted to keep front and center. But then also, since I worked in an academic way in a lot of these questions. I had a lot to say, and I wanted to get those things in the book. So I really tried to do both. I would say I tried to do that a little bit in my last book, in The Betrayal of the Duchess, and I didn't do it in quite as conscious a way in that book as I did in this book. That book, I was also trying to tell a story and struggled a little bit with how to integrate the conceptual... 
historiographic kind of issues. And then in my academic books prior, I didn't really try to tell a story. So it was really only those conceptual issues. And I imagine that question that you're wrestling with is also a way to keep the biography or these trade books relevant to your academic colleagues. Yeah. And that is also a challenge that I set myself as I wrote the book. So I didn't want to... write something that would either be seen as too much of a vulgarization or a simplification. I really wanted the history to be cutting edge. I wanted the ideas in it to reflect the cutting edge of research, but just explained in a way that would be accessible to a wider audience and that wouldn't slow down the story too much. 
Yeah. So did you have... peer review for this series? Yes, they sent it to one outside anonymous reader. So a little bit less. I think it was only one. Yes, I think it was only one. Whereas my other books always had two, except my last book, The Betrayal of the Duchess, did not have. That was a pure trade book. And I basically had to do my own peer review for that. So I had to send it out, you know, to people. So it So it's kind of straddling the line between academic and trade. So they did have peer review. Since you mentioned the Duchess book was your first trade press, what made you go in that direction then? That was just because I wanted to tell that story. 
So I was doing research for a different book, and I was in the French National Library. I was writing a book. This was my second book, which was on the first Jewish fiction writers in France. And one of the fiction writers was this guy named Ben Levy, and his tutor had been involved in this scandal involving the Duchesse de Berry, who led a civil war to recapture the French throne for the Bourbons in 1832. And she was betrayed by her trusted confidant, this guy named Simon Deutz. who was not only Jewish, but the son of the chief rabbi of France. And I came upon this story by, you know, looking at Deutz's brother-in-law had been the tutor to one of the writers I was writing about. 
And I couldn't believe it. And I spent a week going down a total rabbit hole in the French National Library. And then I thought, okay, I need to actually finish the book I'm supposed to be writing, but I have to come back and tell this story. And I found out that there was one article, one, you know, 10 page article in French on this, a few other references in old 19th century biographies, but basically no one had told that story. So that I just really wanted to tell a story. And that's what led me to do that as a trade book. Some listeners might be wondering, I feel like there's this fantasy some academics have that when I write a book that's a story I really want to tell, maybe that will go quicker because after all, I've got the passion. 
And maybe if I'm not doing it academically, I won't have all these annoying things I need to do. How long did it take you? How was the work? Did it feel less like work because there's something you were burning to do? Well, I would say the Duchess book was harder to learn how to write in that way. Once I got the voice down there, then it started to come more quickly. But it was very, very hard to figure out how to foreground the story, but also make sure that I was not... So for instance, in that book, I really struggled with how much to get inside the heads of the characters. So I don't like it when I read popular history books where they make up things. 
So I wanted to be as faithful as I could to the historical record. I didn't want to attribute any thoughts to the characters that weren't spelled out in writing in some place or reported by a firsthand witness. At the same time, For that kind of book, I did want to get into the heads of the characters as much as I could. I wanted to get as close to them, but without violating that rule that I had set for myself. And that was also really a challenge. In this book, in the Dreyfus book, that was less difficult. First of all, I think I knew more how to write. I had the tone. The tone came more easily, I think probably because of that last book. 
And it was pretty clear that I was how I think probably because of that last book, too, I understood a little bit more how to do that. I also had Dreyfus's a lot of letters by him, a lot of diary entries. So it was pretty clear how I was going to get inside his head as much as I could. It was still a challenge because Dreyfus was a very reserved person. So even though he wrote a lot and he wrote constant letters to his family while he was in Devil's Island, and the letters are very moving, but I wouldn't say that they're incredibly psychologically insightful. So he was very conscious that they would be read by the guards and probably that he was writing them for posterity. 
And in fact, he did publish his diary and journal there. And so he was very guarded, I would say, in how, you know, he was always trying to present a certain kind of image of himself. I didn't have many, much evidence of, you know, what he was really, really feeling at different moments. So that was a challenge, I would say. We've spoken to a couple of guests about this issue of trying to communicate thoughts and feelings. And some people have said that they use the language of he likely felt or... So practically speaking, how did you write that given the sources that you had? Yeah. I also – I want to say resorted to he must have felt he likely felt a few times. 
I don't love doing that because how do you know? And it's sort of mind reading. And so I tried to – as much as I could – ground those kind of statements in specific things he said. So I did try to avoid that. But for instance, there is one moment, one of the most dramatic moments of the book was his degradation ceremony. So after he was found guilty the first time in a three-day court-martial based on trumped-up evidence that wasn't even shown to his lawyers. So he didn't really even know why he was being accused of what was for him the worst crime imaginable, being a traitor to France. He was this incredibly patriotic guy. And then right after that trial, he's been sentenced to life imprisonment, and he has to undergo this horrible degradation ceremony in the courtyard of the Ιcole Militaire in France, kind of in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. 
He was... brought out and forced to parade around in front of all these assembled regiments of the army, 10,000 spectators crowded outside, screaming death to the traitor, death to Judas. They ripped off his epaulets from his shoulders, broke his sword. And there I really, I did say, like, how can we imagine what that must have felt like for Dreyfus? And I did point to, you know, some things that He wrote later to his wife shortly after. I also describe a photo that I show in the book of a kind of mugshot taken right after that ceremony. So there's kind of visual evidence of it on his face. I try to read his expression. So those were some of the things. But I definitely did, you know, because partly I wanted the reader to try with me to imagine what that must have felt like for someone like him. 
Thank you. That's helpful. You mentioned with the first trade book, it took a little while to get the tone. How did you know the tone wasn't right? Was this when you sent it to friends or colleagues, or you just had this feeling and then it clicked? Well, partly I had a great editor. So I have to say that's one of the big differences in working. I I because they're brilliant people and I'm really grateful to them for publishing my academic books. But beyond answering, you know, the my initial query and then sending it out and then judging the readers reports, they didn't do a lot of hands on editing. I have to say, like, I'm not, you know, maybe they read a chapter, but I didn't get any real feedback from my academic editors. 
Whereas For the Duchess book, for example, my editor, Clara Potter at Basic Books, who's not there anymore, but that was great. So I really felt like I had a partner as I was writing it. She read everything right away. I also am lucky that I have a lot of friends who are great writers and readers. And one of my friends is a great cultural historian, Caroline Weber. She would be an interesting person to have on this show. She wrote a book called Queen of Fashion and another one called Proust's Duchess. And I love those books. And she was incredibly helpful. Another one of my friends is a senior editor now at The New Yorker, but had also been a book publisher, I mean, a book editor. 
And she was really helpful, too. So and I have, you know, just several other friends who are novelists and who really helped me tell me when it wasn't right and then tell me when it was right. So that was that was really helpful. So it sounds like you're in the practice of sharing your writing. I wonder at what stage you do that. I do it when I feel like I have a draft that I'm not totally embarrassed by. So I have to think, okay, I'm doing what I wanted to do in this draft. I've achieved that. It might be wrong. I might go back to it. But I don't really show it before I feel like I've done what I want to do in that draft. 
Great. I wonder if you could talk to us a bit about the pleasures and pitfalls of writing biography. I know many academics are thinking about this, but they're not sure how it's different from writing their other academic books. Yeah. Well, biography is great because there's a built-in story arc, I would say. And so... you have that to go with. Whereas my last book, the Duchess book, was more about an event. It did involve a kind of double biography, both of the Duchess, the Duchesse de Berry, and the guy who betrayed her, Simon Deutz. That was structurally more difficult to have two characters that I had to, who then come together in this very dramatic event and then come apart again. So that structurally was very different. 
Whereas the Dreyfus book was, was a little more straightforward in that I followed the arc of his life. Although I wouldn't say it was totally straightforward because I did have a chapter where I zoomed out and looked, he goes out of the story and I talk about how Jews around the world viewed the case. So I decided That was a little bit of – that was a decision that I made that it was okay at that point to lose the thread of Dreyfus himself. And then I came back to him in a final chapter about his life after the affair. So biography is fun in that way in that there is a kind of built-in story. And it's a fun challenge I think to try to look both at how this person viewed the world – 
And also to think about what are the larger stakes of that person's life. I think that that really does raise really interesting historical questions. I'm also wondering, you've been the director of Yale Center for the Study of Antisemitism for it looks like over a decade. How has that position influenced your writing, both practically speaking in terms of your time? I'm sure that takes a lot of time. and content-wise, whether the center has influenced the topics you're addressing. Yeah, it definitely has, especially taking a lot of time since October 7th. So I think I naively thought I would get going on my new book this year, and that has not happened at all. So that's definitely been a challenge. But I do think that there has been a positive side to running the 
the program in that I've been lucky enough to hear a lot of really great cutting edge research about antisemitism. One of the main things the program does is bring speakers to conference to campus and we host events. And so I've gotten to meet, you know, basically, you know, all these really interesting scholars of antisemitism hear about their work. And so I think that kind of knowledge about the state of the field came from, organically, I would say, from running the program. And that really definitely came in handy as I wrote those books. And I would say also that it's given me a kind of great community of scholars, of people I can show my work to, people who I know who are interested. 
So I did an event last week, right when the book, the Dreyfus book came out and for my own program. And there were, you know, a lot, it was very gratifying to have all these people on the Zoom. And that's partly because I've been hosting other events for a decade. So it was really nice to have the tables turned on me and get asked questions about the book. That's great. I'm wondering too, if writing this biography made you want to write another, do you see that as a possibility in your future? Yeah, possibly. My next book, I haven't exactly decided how trade versus academic it's going to be. I can actually see it going either way. And I think I'm going to let the book dictate that. 
So at least for now, I'm not rushing to send out a trade book proposal right now. I want to kind of dig down into the material and I think that some books need to be one thing and some books need to be another. And I want to let that happen organically again in the book. So I would be totally open to writing another biography. The book I'm thinking about next is about how French writers reacted to the coup of 1851 in France that brought about the authoritarian regime of the Second Empire. But that coup also led to some of the greatest masterpieces in French literature. So I want to look at how probably four famous French writers, so Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert and Baudelaire and George Sand, how they reacted to the coup. 
So looking at their political choices and also their literary choices. So there's going to be an element of biography in that. And I have to wrestle with how, you know, because I'm, My training is in literature. So I'm a scholar of French literature. I'm really a cultural historian, and I've gone pretty far down the history track in the last two books. They're really books that are history with very little literature. This one, the Dreyfus one, had a couple of references to literature, but it's really a pretty straightforward work of history. And that, I think that history lends itself more easily to literature. writing for a popular audience than literature does. I think it's very hard. Some people have pulled it off and hats off to them. 
I think about like, you know, the book, the metaphysical club, which is, you know, about writers and thinkers, philosophers, and it actually manages to make those debates very, very readable and real, but that's, that's a hard thing to pull off. So I think with this new book, it's, That's what I want to figure out, like how much I want to talk about the literature, which would, I think, make it that would mean it would be for a more academic audience. I think, you know, the metaphysical club is really about American literature. I think it's maybe easier to find a public for then for what I work on, which is France. That's an even another, you know, level of difficulty. But some people have done it successfully, like France. 
There's Sarah Bakewell, for example, has written very readable books about French thinkers and writers. So it is possible. So it sounds like when you're thinking about, am I going to write trade or academic press, you're thinking, how do I want to tell the story? Do I want to tell a story or do I really want to engage with scholarship in the text? Or maybe even is it sort of potentially too niche for that? broad readership of trade. Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely one of the issues is how much I want to engage historiographic debates. For example, I do do it in the Dreyfus book. I mean, that's what I kind of launched the book by talking about, like, why haven't scholars really focused on the Jewish issue? 
But that is something that you don't want to do too much because it'll weigh down the book, I think, in a trade book. So you have to be really careful about... how you engage those historiographic debates. But one thing that I think is really hard to do in a trade book for a literature scholar is to do close readings of literary texts. That, I think, can tend to be pretty boring for a non-academic audience, maybe even for an academic audience sometimes. And how you talk about literary theory. So I think you probably want to avoid that for a popular audience. Or I don't know, if you can pull that off, that would be great. But that's really hard to do. Since you've been in academia for a while, I wonder if you can speak at all to the, I don't know, the problems or the challenges of doing trade while you're trying to build your academic career. 
Is there any sort of backlash or kind of negative reaction from academics, either in the tenure promotion or when you're a candidate for a job? Have you heard any of this or seen this happening, if not to yourself, to others? Yeah, I'll be honest. I'm kind of a wimp, and I definitely waited until I already had tenure to do this, was already a full professor. So I wrote three academic books, and then I wrote my first trade one. But I've definitely heard some people who have not done that, who've tried to write for a more popular audience. In fact, my colleague at Yale in the French department, Alice Kaplan, who's one of the most successful, I would say, crossover academic writers, certainly who works on France, she very gutsily wrote a memoir called French Lessons about why, you know, it was a very personal memoir before tenure. 
So She had also written an academic book, too. So, you know, she definitely did that first. And my advice would be probably to write an academic book first. And maybe for a second book, you could think about writing a trade book. But, you know, there are certain fields where maybe in American history, for example, where the line between trade and academic is more fluid, I would say, in that I think there's a wider audience for something that is a serious work of history. But what you don't want, whatever book you write, even if you write it for a trade audience, you have to make sure it's thoroughly researched, impeccably researched, impeccably footnoted. And that is one danger. One thing I would not recommend is to sign on with a trade press that won't let you have footnotes. 
So I was really lucky with both Basic and Yale that that was no problem. So I could have as many footnotes as I wanted. So both books are totally richly documented in that way. So I would say certainly before tenure, but probably after tenure, it's important to do that. And you can maybe negotiate with how you footnote. A lot of them don't want the whole page covered in footnotes. So I think For both books, I maybe tried to restrict it to one footnote per paragraph. Some of them want more call-out footnotes where there are no numbers in the text, but then you can turn to the end and you see words that will cue you to the note. But I would say that it is dangerous as an academic to write something that can be criticized as not sufficiently documented, not sufficiently scholarly. 
So I think That's still your responsibility. And the challenge is how to write a serious scholarly book, but make it readable. That's a good reminder and kind of warning. There's two questions that we ask all guests. And one is, if there's something you wish you had known about writing or publishing earlier in your career. There are a bunch of things. I think that I wish I had been on the lookout earlier for stories that I wanted to tell. And to be thinking in that way, I think that that was just not even on my radar until this story that I mentioned before really found me. And I would just advise people to be on the lookout for that because stories are – that's what you kind of need, I think, to write a trade book is to have a story. 
And I sort of wish that I had been thinking about that earlier, even if I would have waited anyway to have tenure. So I think that's one thing. Is that also because it made the writing of it more pleasurable and did it affect how people responded to the book, do you think? Yeah, I think it was pleasurable in the sense that it was a new challenge for me to write in that way. So it was painful and difficult to write it, but then it felt satisfying. So, you know, it was both painful and pleasurable. Yeah. In that way that writing is. And I think I always had, I probably always had that desire to write for a more popular audience. I actually took time off in between college and grad school and worked in Hollywood where I was trying to write screenplays and my job was reading screenplays. 
So I think I always had that desire. desire to tell a story. But then I suppressed that when I went to grad school. And I went to grad school in the 1990s. It was still sort of the tail end of the literary theory moment where a certain kind of writing that was completely opaque to people. I never felt like I did that. I personally always thought my writing was pretty readable compared to what everyone else was doing. But I remember I showed my dissertation and what was my first book to my father, who was, you know, not an academic. And he said, yeah, I decided to try to read until I couldn't understand anymore. And I got most of the way through the first paragraph. 
So that was a wake up call, like, okay, maybe I'm not as accessible as I think I am. To learn how to do that, did you find to write in a way that sort of telling stories accessibly Did you actually look to novels or other trade press books you admired and noticed were doing that well? Yeah, I think definitely other trade press books. I mentioned my friend Caroline Weber's books, which I think are excellent. Luke Manan's book. You know, there have been other ones, too. Unfortunately, you know, and my colleague Alice Kaplan, who I think writes, you know, fascinating, great books. books that straddle that line between scholarship and for a more accessible audience. So I had lots of good models, like very close to home. 
And I definitely, definitely learned a lot from them. And we also wonder if there is a writing habit or practice that's been working for you recently. Yeah. The big one is don't check your email before you start writing for the day. That, that I would say is the biggest one. And I can't, pretend that I always follow that rule because the temptation is just there. You have an inbox full of things, but I unfortunately am somewhat precious about writing and I can only do it if I'm feeling I have all my mental energy and I have a big chunk of time ahead of me. And I don't, I wish I weren't like that. There's some people who like in between picking up kids can, you know, dash off three pages of their book. 
I am not one of those people, even though I don't even have kids, but I still can't do that. But what is really hard is like I, you know, if I go into email and then an hour later, I feel completely angry and depleted and my mind has been taken in 20 different directions and then it's really hard to then start writing for the day. And you know what? Those emails will still be there. They don't need to be responded to first thing in the morning. Give your best hours first to writing. That's great advice. Maury, do you have anything else you want to share with us about writing, biography, choosing trade, choosing academic? No, I would just really encourage people that if you have a story that you want to tell, then absolutely you should write. 
uh, try to, you know, tell it whether it winds up being on the more academic side on a, in a more popular way, but do it in a serious, rigorous way. That would be my, especially if you're an academic and, but go for it. That's, that would be my advice. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Writing It, the podcast about academics and writing. sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. Visit our podcast description to find out how to contact us and send us your questions about academic writing and publishing. Follow us on social media at Writing at Pod and subscribe to us so you never miss an episode.