United States

Biographers working across the United States, where the subject is usually a living American with a garage full of photographs and a family that has been asking for the story for years. The work ranges from recorded interviews to finished manuscripts, and the settings range just as widely: a ranch, a factory town, a law practice, a kitchen table.

What holds the tag together is the assumption that the material is domestic and the reader is related. That is a different starting point from a national archive or a university press.

What separates the United States listings from their United Kingdom, Australian and Canadian counterparts is the shape of the family they serve. Family Heirloom Arts and Story Trust both work from the premise that a private archive already exists somewhere in the house, and that the biographer's job is to give it a spine. Trena Cleland and Story Scribe sit closer to the spoken word, building a life narrative out of interviews with the person who lived it. Private Historian and Writing Cabin take on subjects whose story reaches past the family: a business, a town, an institution. Real Life Stories rounds out the group by handling the manuscript as a finished object rather than a draft.

Readers arrive here having typed biographer USA into a search bar, usually after a relative has died or a retirement has arrived. The listings answer that moment rather than the academic one.