The biographical facts in Brothers are drawn from hundreds of books, essays, papers, journals, and newspaper articles. The following are those sources to which I am especially indebted.
For the story of the Booths, I relied heavily on three books. The Mad Booths of Maryland by Stanley Kimmel, published in 1940, was the first book to treat Edwin and John in the context of their remarkable family, and the first to provide many details about the brothers’ early years. Another family biography, less comprehensive but no less absorbing, to which I often turned, was American Gothic by Gene Smith. American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W. Kauffman, in my opinion the most nuanced and vivid biography of the younger Booth, furnished many essential details. I was also helped by My Thoughts Be Bloody by Nora Titone, which focuses on the rivalry between Edwin and John, and Good Brother, Bad Brother: The Story of Edwin Booth & John Wilkes Booth by James Cross Giblin, an illustrated biography aimed at younger readers.
Many of the stories I tell about John can be found in The Unlocked Book: A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by His Sister Asia Booth Clarke, which is particularly valuable for its description of their shared childhood and adolescence. (I used a 1996 edition entitled John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir, edited by Terry Alford, which contains an informative biographical essay about Asia.) I was also helped by Asia Booth Clarke’s The Elder and the Younger Booth, which offers an appreciation of the careers of Edwin and her father. Additional details about the Booth children’s early years were drawn from Sketches of Tudor Hall and the Booth Family by Ella V. Mahoney, a sympathetic portrait published in 1925 by the woman who bought the Booth home in rural Maryland from Edwin and John’s mother. “The House that Booth Built,” by Kathryn Hopkins Kavanagh (Harford Historical Bulletin, no. 71, Winter 1997), was also of assistance. I am indebted to Junius Brutus Booth: Theatrical Prometheus by Stephen M. Archer for several anecdotes about the Booth paterfamilias, and for details on the nineteenth-century theatrical scene.
Many of John Wilkes Booth’s letters were destroyed by their recipients in the days following the assassination, when any link to the assassin put one in peril. Those that survived can be found in Right or Wrong, God Judge Me, a compilation of Booth’s extant writings (letters, diary entries, love poems) edited and annotated by John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper, who also wrote the useful biographical introduction.
For information about John’s performances I turned to Lust for Fame: The Stage Career of John Wilkes Booth, in which Gordon Samples quotes from or reproduces a trove of reviews, playbills, billboards, and assessments from Booth’s fellow actors. Short biographical essays offer context on each segment of John’s meteoric rise. In Yesterdays with Actors, Kate Reignolds Winslow recalled her theatrical experiences with John (“this sad-faced, handsome, passionate boy”), including the revelation that he occasionally slept covered in oysters. In Life on the Stage, her 1901 memoir, actress Clara Morris reminisced about both Edwin and John.
For details on the assassination’s aftermath, I am indebted primarily to Michael W. Kauffman’s American Brutus, but also to Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Edward Steers Jr.; John Wilkes Booth: Fact and Fiction of Lincoln’s Assassination by Francis Wilson (Booth’s first biographer); The Life, Crime, and Capture of John Wilkes Booth, a collection of contemporaneous dispatches by George Alfred Townsend, a reporter for the New York World; and Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson. (Swanson, along with Daniel R. Weinberg, has also assembled and edited Lincoln’s Assassins: Their Trial and Execution, a haunting volume of photographs.) For additional information on Booth’s post-assassination flight, I made use of the eyewitness testimony of Major M. B. Ruggles, a Confederate officer who encountered Booth and Herold during their failed escape, and Captain Edward P. Doherty, who commanded the 16th New York Cavalry detachment that captured the fugitives. (Interviews with Ruggles and Doherty were conducted by Prentiss Ingraham, a former schoolmate of Booth’s, and published as “Pursuit and Death of John Wilkes Booth” in The Century magazine, January 1890.) Thomas Jones remarked upon the fleeing Booth’s beauty in his 1893 book J. Wilkes Booth: An Account of His Sojourn in Southern Maryland After the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, His Passage Across the Potomac and His Death in Virginia. For you-are-there immediacy, I recommend The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators, a facsimile transcript of the trial, compiled and arranged by Benn Pitman and published in 1865. My account of the Confederate attempt to burn down Manhattan on the night the Booth brothers performed Julius Caesar is drawn from “The Plot: Full and Minute Particulars, How the Plan Was Conceived, How Its Execution Failed” (New York Times, November 27, 1864). The program boy’s memories are taken from “This Man Saw Lincoln Shot” by Campbell MacCulloch (Good Housekeeping, February 1927).
For details on the life of Edwin Booth, I also consulted The Last Tragedian by the actor Otis Skinner, which includes a selection of Booth’s correspondence; Darling of Misfortune, an early biography by Richard Lockridge (published in 1932); and Prince of Players by Eleanor Ruggles. Life and Art of Edwin Booth, a tribute to the actor written by his friend, New York Tribune theater critic William Winter, and published not long after Booth’s death, furnished particulars about the actor’s post-1865 career. Behind the Scenes with Edwin Booth by Katherine Goodale, a young actress who was part of Edwin’s touring company, paints a sympathetic portrait of Booth and of theatrical life in the late nineteenth century. In 1886, a young actor named Edwin Milton Royle toured with Edwin and remembered enough forty-seven years later to write Edwin Booth As I Knew Him, including the observation that Booth suffered stage fright everywhere but on the stage. Further material on Edwin’s activities during his post-assassination years was culled from “Memories and Letters of Edwin Booth,” an account written by his friend William Bispham and published in The Century (November and December 1893), as well as from Edwin Booth: Recollections by His Daughter Edwina Booth Grossman and Letters to Her and to His Friends. Crowding Memories by Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, whose husband was a close friend of Edwin’s, offers a poignant account of Edwin during the months after the assassination.
An excellent introduction to sibling difference and the nonshared environment can be found in Separate Lives: Why Siblings Are So Different by Judy Dunn and Robert Plomin, two of the most prominent researchers in the field. See also “Why Are Siblings So Different? The Significance of Differences in Sibling Experiences Within the Family” by Judy Dunn and Robert Plomin (Family Process, vol. 30, September 1991), and Separate Social Worlds of Siblings: The Impact of Nonshared Environment on Development (edited by E. Mavis Hetherington, David Reiss, and Robert Plomin). Sandra Scarr’s provocative quote can be found in an essay she coauthored with Susan Grajek, “Similarities and Differences Among Siblings,” and published in Sibling Relationships: Their Nature and Significance Across the Lifespan, an early (1981) and influential collection of essays edited by Michael E. Lamb and Brian Sutton-Smith. “Each Sibling Experiences Different Family” by Daniel Goleman (New York Times, July 28, 1987) summarizes the research on sibling “micro-environments.”
My brief description of the Melville brothers was derived from my reading of Melville by Andrew Delbanco; that of the Brown brothers from Sons of Providence by Charles Rappleye; that of the Newton brothers from Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton; that of the Capone brothers from Capone by Laurence Bergreen.
For an overview on the experience of favoritism, I recommend Chapter 7, “The Chosen,” in Francine Klagsbrun’s Mixed Feelings: Love, Hate, Rivalry, and Reconciliation Among Brothers and Sisters; Chapter 8, “Siblings in Conflict: Bonds of Aggression and Rivalry,” in Stephen P. Bank and Michael D. Kahn’s The Sibling Bond; and Chapter 5, “The Golden Child,” in Jeffrey Kluger’s The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us.
My account of the Waughs relies almost entirely on Fathers and Sons, a fascinating (and occasionally frightening) family history written by Evelyn’s grandson Alexander Waugh. I also made use of A Little Learning by Evelyn Waugh, an account of the author’s early years; My Brother Evelyn and Other Portraits by Alec Waugh; The Early Years of Alec Waugh, Alec’s chatty, agreeable take on his youth; and The Best Wine Last, Alec’s breezy summary of his peripatetic adulthood. Louisa Whitman’s note to her children can be found in Chapter 16 of Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A Life. Favoritism in the Cheever household is discussed in John Cheever by Scott Donaldson, and in Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey. The story of the Cheever brothers may be told most revealingly by Cheever himself, in The Journals of John Cheever (edited by Robert Gottlieb) and The Letters of John Cheever (edited by Benjamin Cheever).
Helen Koch’s 1950s study and the Colorado study of favoritism are described in Separate Lives by Judy Dunn and Robert Plomin. Katherine Conger’s study is mentioned in The Sibling Effect by Jeffrey Kluger. The study of thirty elderly mothers was outlined in a press release from Cornell University “Science News,” November 20, 1997. Stephen Bank’s quote can be found in his essay “Favoritism” in Practical Concerns About Siblings: Bridging the Research-Practice Gap, a collection of essays edited by Frances Fuchs Schachter and Richard K. Stone. Schachter’s work on “split-parent identification” is described in her essay “Sibling Deidentification and Split-Parent Identification: A Family Tetrad,” in Sibling Relationships, edited by Michael E. Lamb and Brian Sutton-Smith. Favoritism in the Freud household is discussed in Chapter 8 of The Sibling Bond by Stephen P. Bank and Michael D. Kahn. Freud’s quote on being the favored child can be found in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (edited by Ernest Jones) vol. I, p. 5. The Mussolini nursing story is told in the second chapter of Mussolini, a biography by R. J. B. Bosworth. Alfred Adler makes the sibling/tree analogy in “Family Influences,” Chapter 6 of his book What Life Should Mean to You. That both the preferred and nonpreferred child in a family may suffer is the conclusion of “Perceived Parental Favoritism and Suicidal Ideation in Hong Kong Adolescents” (lead author Anton F. De Man), published in Social Behavior and Personality, vol. 31, no. 3, 2003.
Some maintain that birth-order research holds the key to understanding sibling difference. Others insist that it is no more scientific than astrology. The man generally acknowledged to be the first to study—if only in passing—this controversial subject is described in A Life of Sir Francis Galton by Nicholas Wright Gillham. Galton’s investigation into the effect of birth order on intelligence forms a small part of his book English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture. Published in 1895, Primogeniture: A Short History of Its Development in Various Countries and Its Practical Effects by Evelyn Cecil offers a fascinating early survey of this institutional form of favoritism. Darwin’s opinion of primogeniture is quoted by Frank J. Sulloway in Chapter 2 of Born to Rebel; the 1974 survey of thirty-nine non-Western societies is mentioned in Chapter 3 of that same book. Although not discussed in this book, The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why, by Dalton Conley, offers an interesting analysis of factors that affect sibling fortunes.
Alfred Adler’s ideas on birth order can be found in “How Position in Family Constellation Influences Life-Style” (Chapter 25) from volume 7 of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, and from Chapter 6, “Family Influences” in Adler’s What Life Should Mean to You. Biographical details are drawn from The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology by Edward Hoffman. The Norwegian IQ study is described in “Research Finds Firstborns Gain the Higher I.Q.” by Benedict Carey (New York Times, June 22, 2007).
John Adams’s warning to his firstborn can be found in Book 1, Chapter 3 of Paul C. Nagel’s biography John Quincy Adams. Joe Kennedy Jr.’s explanation of an eldest son’s responsibilities can be found in Part 1, Chapter 4 of The Kennedys: An American Drama by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. The Prince of Wales’s advice to the future King George III is taken from the first chapter of A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings by Stella Tillyard. James Baldwin’s observation on his fraternal duties is taken from the first paragraph of his essay “Autobiographical Notes” in Notes of a Native Son. Benjamin Spock’s complicated relationship with his siblings is explored in Dr. Spock: An American Life by Thomas Maier. The Housman family solar system is charted by Laurence Housman in the first section of his memoir, My Brother, A. E. Housman. The story of the Wolff brothers’ summer is told by Geoffrey Wolff in “Advice My Brother Never Took” (New York Times, August 20, 1989). Each Wolff tells his side of the tale (Geoffrey in “Heavy Lifting” and Tobias in “A Brother’s Story”) in Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry, a collection of essays edited by Andrew Blauner. E. B. White’s description of his brother’s pedagogical gifts is taken from the autobiographical essay that introduces Letters of E. B. White (edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth). Henry Kissinger’s letter to his younger brother is quoted in Kissinger by Walter Isaacson (Chapter 3). Ben Franklin’s account of working for his heavy-handed older brother is taken from his Autobiography. Anthony Trollope describes his older brother disciplining him in his Autobiography. The Saint-Exupéry brothers’ story is from Saint-Exupéry by Stacy Schiff. Sam Houston Johnson details the bicycle-buying incident in My Brother Lyndon.
Henry James’s description of William’s sixteen-month head start can be found in his memoir A Small Boy and Others. Rupert Everett’s boarding-school nickname was mentioned in “Rupert Everett Is Not Having a Midlife Crisis” by Alex Witchel (New York Times Magazine, February 22, 2009). Frank Sulloway tells the story of the Cuvier brothers in Chapter 2 of Born to Rebel. The quote about John F. Kennedy’s freedom to determine his own path can be found in Part 1, Chapter 5 of The Kennedys by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Arthur Miller enthuses abut his escape from orthodontic purgatory in the first chapter of his autobiography, Timebends. Richard Ben Cramer tells the story of the DiMaggio brothers in Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. The friend who described the young Bobby Kennedy is quoted in Part 2, Chapter 3 of Collier and Horowitz’s The Kennedys.
Edward M. Kennedy writes of the mellowing effect he had on his father in Chapter 3 of his memoir True Compass. The Alice James quote about dwindling parental attention can be found in Jean Strouse’s Alice James. My brief portrait of Wilky and Bob James is derived from House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family by Paul Fisher and Henry James: The Imagination of Genius by Fred Kaplan.
The Lukas fraternal dramas are described in Blue Genes, Christopher Lukas’s memoir about his brother. Muslim honor killings are discussed in “The New Berlin Wall” by Peter Schneider (New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2005). The analysis of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm is summarized in the first chapter of The Sibling by Brian Sutton-Smith and B. G. Rosenberg.
Philip Roth writes about his father’s bequest in Chapter 3 of his memoir, Patrimony. Leonard Nimoy’s quote about being a second child was taken from “Leonard Nimoy at the Controls,” by Aljean Harmetz (New York Times, October 30, 1988). Henry James’s reaction to his older brother’s death is described in Chapter 18 of The Jameses by R. W. B. Lewis.
Frances Schachter’s work on deidentification is outlined in her essay “Sibling Deidentification and Split-Parent Identification: A Family Tetrad” in Sibling Relationships, edited by Michael E. Lamb and Brian Sutton-Smith. Details about the Kennedy brothers at Choate can be found in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga by Doris Kearns Goodwin; John’s therapy is described by Nigel Hamilton in JFK: Reckless Youth. The Wideman brothers’ story is told by John Edgar Wideman in Brothers & Keepers. That it is an example of sibling deidentification was pointed out by David C. Rowe and Patricia Elam in “Siblings and Mental Illness: Heredity vs. Environment” in Practical Concerns About Siblings, edited by Schacter and Stone. For more on the Shackletons, see Shackleton by Roland Huntford.
Frank J. Sulloway’s work on birth order and creativity is the subject of his book Born to Rebel, which also provides a wealth of fascinating sibling stories. Sulloway was profiled in “The Birth of an Idea” by Robert S. Boynton (The New Yorker, October 7, 1999).
The Plutarch quote advising brothers against working in the same field can be found in De Fraterno Amore. The story of the Hunt brothers is taken largely from The Greater Journey by David McCullough. Ezekiel Emanuel’s observation about fraternal geographic distribution is from “The Gatekeeper,” a profile of Rahm Emanuel by Ryan Lizza (The New Yorker, March 2, 2009). My description of the Emanuels also draws from “The Brothers Emanuel” by Elisabeth Bumiller (New York Times, June 15, 1997), and “Hug It Out” by Lauren Collins (The New Yorker, May 25, 2009).
Francis Galton discussed the role of chance in Chapter 3 of his book Natural Inheritance. The young Charles Dickens’s reaction to his father’s incarceration is described by Peter Ackroyd in Chapter 3 of Dickens. The saga of the Adams family is taken primarily from Paul C. Nagel’s John Quincy Adams; also from David McCullough’s John Adams. For details on the Roosevelt brothers, see The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris and Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough. The relationship between Prescott Bush Jr. and his younger brother George is explored in The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg and in The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty by Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer. J. R. Ackerley writes of his brother’s death in My Father and Myself; the story is also told in Peter Parker’s biography Ackerley. My description of Erasmus and Charles Darwin relies chiefly on Darwin by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, The Survival of Charles Darwin by Ronald W. Clark, and The Autobiography of Charles Darwin.
Like everyone who has written about the Kelloggs, I am enormously indebted to Richard W. Schwarz, who turned his doctoral dissertation into an indispensable biography, John Harvey Kellogg, M.D., and to Horace B. Powell, author of The Original Has This Signature—W. K. Kellogg. Both are troves of information from which I borrowed heavily. I also relied on Cornflake Crusade, Gerald Carson’s witty account of the search for the perfect breakfast cereal, and The New Nuts Among the Berries, Ronald M. Deutsch’s entertaining and enlightening history of food faddists. My portrait of the Kelloggs was enhanced by my reading of Tales of Battle Creek, a collection of articles gathered by Berenice Bryant Lowe; Cerealizing America by Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford; Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt; and The Battle Creek Sanitarium System: History, Organization, Methods by J. H. Kellogg. I have also drawn on the collection of unpublished letters by John Harvey Kellogg, Will Kellogg, and their colleagues, at the Center for Adventist Research at the James White Library, Andrews University. For literary dessert, I devoured The Road to Wellville, T. Coraghessan Boyle’s uproarious fictional take on J. H. Kellogg, the San, and the cereal wars.
For biographical details on Freud, I turned to Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life for Our Time. Freud’s quote on sibling rivalry can be found in Lecture XIII of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. David Levy’s research is described in “Rivalry Between Children in the Same Family,” by David M. Levy, Child Study, May 1934 (pp. 233–37); and in Studies in Sibling Rivalry by David M. Levy (published by the American Orthopsychiatric Association, 1937). I came across Peter Neubauer’s quote in the prologue of Mixed Feelings by Francine Klagsbrun. The University of Illinois research on the frequency of sibling quarrels is summarized in Chapter 3 of The Sibling Effect by Jeffrey Kluger.
Anna Quindlen told the story about her sons’ rivalry in her “Life in the 30’s” column (New York Times, November 5, 1986). How Robie H. Harris was inspired to write Mail Harry to the Moon! is described in “Take My Brother, Please” by Sarah Ellis (New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008). The tale of the Housman siblings quarreling over clouds can be found in the first chapter of A. E. Housman by Richard Perceval Graves. Adler recounted the story of the four-year-old who wanted to be as old as his older brother in “How Position in the Family Constellation Influences Life-Style” from volume 7 of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler. The Coleridge brothers’ battle over cheese is described in the first chapter of Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804 by Richard Holmes; the Joyce brothers’ battle over the last pancake is from Part 1, Chapter 4 of James Joyce by Richard Ellmann; the beggar brothers’ battle over bread is from the essay “Cake” in Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen.
Sibling rivalry in the Eisenhower household is detailed in the first chapter of Eisenhower: Soldier and President, the one-volume version of Stephen E. Ambrose’s biography. Sibling rivalry saturates every Kennedy biography; I am particularly grateful to The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys by Doris Kearns Goodwin; The Kennedys at War by Edward J. Renehan Jr.; JFK by Nigel Hamilton (in which Rose Kennedy’s quote can be found in Part 2 and the story of JFK’s nautical interference on his brother’s behalf in Part 4); and The Kennedys by Peter Collier and David Horowitz (in which Joe Kennedy Sr.’s quote on winners and losers and a description of the ill-fated bike race can be found, Part 1, Chapter 4).
The Clark brothers feud is thoroughly described in Nicholas Fox Weber’s The Clarks of Cooperstown, as well as in The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings by Michael Conforti, James A. Ganz, Neil Harris, Sarah Lees, and Gilbert T. Vincent. Plutarch cites the Charicles and Antiochus squabble in De Fraterno Amore. Robert Caro tells the story of Paul and Robert Moses in “Two Brothers,” Chapter 26 of The Power Broker, his epic biography of Robert Moses. The benign estrangement of Ralph and Herbert Ellison is detailed in Ralph Ellison by Arnold Rampersad.
Sources for my discussion of sibling conflict in the animal kingdom include: “Early Sibling Rivalry Among Spotted Hyenas” (New York Times, May 7, 1991); “Within Nests, Egret Chicks Are Natural Born Killers” by Carol Kaesuk Yoon (New York Times, August 6, 1996); “Savage Siblings” by Maria L. Chang (Science World, January 10, 1997); and “The Mark of Cain” by Nora Steiner Mealy (California Wild: The Magazine of the California Academy of Sciences, Winter 2002). My description of the tension between George and Jeb Bush was gleaned from The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty by Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer; The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty by Kitty Kelley; and The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg (in which the story of George W.’s election-night phone call with his father can be found).
John Ed Bradley described the Guy brothers’ punting wars in “Hang ’em High” (Sports Illustrated, December 21, 2009). Information on the Sutters is from “A Team Unto Itself,” by E. M. Swift (Sports Illustrated, October 13, 1980) and from Six Shooters: Hockey’s Sutter Brothers by Dean Spiros. I learned about the Spinks brothers from “Leon Spinks in Search of Himself and Title” by Michael Katz (New York Times, June 8, 1981) and “The Iron Ball and the Bible” by Pat Putnam (Sports Illustrated, March 13, 1978). For details on the Quarry brothers, I am grateful to “Staying in the Ring,” by Jonathan Mahler (New York Times Magazine, December 31, 2006) and to Hard Luck: The Triumph and Tragedy of “Irish” Jerry Quarry by Steve Springer and Blake Chavez. (Although I do not cite it in this book, I recommend Blood Over Water by David and James Livingston, a candid account of sibling rivalry written by brothers who rowed against each other in the Oxford-Cambridge boat race.)
The faux rivalry between Houdini and Hardeen is recalled in Chapter 5 of Houdini!!! by Kenneth Silverman. I learned more about their relationship from The Secret Life of Houdini by William Kalush and Larry Sloman and The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini by Ruth Brandon. For the story of the Dasslers I am entirely indebted to Sneaker Wars by Barbara Smit. The Malkovichs’ rivalry was examined in “Being Any Number of Versions of the Self He Has Invented,” by Lynn Hirschberg (New York Times Magazine, April 27, 2003). The story of the Bellow brothers is well told in Bellow by James Atlas.
The UNH study of sibling violence, “Kid’s Stuff: The Nature and Impact of Peer and Sibling Violence on Younger and Older Children,” by David Finkelhor, Heather Turner, and Richard Ormrod, was published in Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 30, 2006 (pp. 1401–21). The study was summarized in “Beyond Rivalry, a Hidden World of Sibling Violence,” by Katy Butler (New York Times, February 28, 2006). The Steinbeck brothers’ “primal tug of war” pervades the pages of Nancy Steinbeck’s The Other Side of Eden (co-written with her husband, John Steinbeck IV). I also benefited from reading The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer by Jackson J. Benson, and Journal of a Novel, a collection of Steinbeck letters to his editor during the writing of East of Eden. For the story of John and Fred Cheever, I relied on Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, as well as on Scott Donaldson’s John Cheever, and on two Susan Cheever memoirs, Home Before Dark and Treetops. The Journals of John Cheever and The Letters of John Cheever provided further illumination.
My description of the Freud brothers’ feud is derived from “Sir Clement Freud and Brother Lucian Freud in Feud as Latter Rejects Knighthood,” by Richard Eden (The Telegraph, June 28, 2008); “I Am the Forgotten Freud, Says Brother of Sir Clement Freud and Lucian Freud,” by Adam Lusher (The Telegraph, July 12, 2008); and “Clement Freud Died Without Resolving Feud with His Brother Lucian,” by Anita Singh (The Telegraph, April 17, 2009). For the Mann brothers’ story, I am indebted to Nigel Hamilton’s dual biography, The Brothers Mann, as well as his essay “A Case of Literary Fratricide: The Brüderzwist Between Heinrich and Thomas Mann,” in Blood Brothers: Siblings as Writers, a fascinating collection of essays on well-known sibling literary pairs edited by Norman Kiell. I was also helped by Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949, edited by Hans Wysling.
Coleridge’s observation on his brother’s mercurial nature is from the first chapter of Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804 by Richard Holmes. Alice James’s letter about her brother-in-law’s death is quoted in the last chapter of Henry James by Fred Kaplan.
Wanting to let Vincent and Theo speak for themselves as much as possible, I have relied heavily on the incomparable letters, as published in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh. The three-volume Bulfinch Press edition contains Johanna van Gogh-Bonger’s biographical sketch of the brothers, among other invaluable supplementary documents. Where I felt the Bulfinch translation was unnecessarily opaque, I have substituted translations from other sources, chiefly The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, translated by Arnold Pomerans, selected and edited by Ronald de Leeuw.
For biographical details I relied mainly on Vincent van Gogh by Marc Edo Tralbaut and on Vincent and Theo van Gogh: A Dual Biography by Jan Hulsker. For the relationship between Theo and Jo Bonger, I drew from Brief Happiness: The Correspondence of Theo van Gogh and Jo Bonger, which has a helpful introduction and commentary by Han van Crimpen. Other books on Van Gogh from which I benefited include Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s monumental Van Gogh: The Life (nearly nine hundred pages of text and some five thousand pages of online notes); The World of van Gogh, 1853–1890 by Robert Wallace; Vincent van Gogh: A Life by Philip Callow; Van Gogh: His Life & His Art by David Sweetman; Stranger on the Earth, a provocative psychological biography by Albert J. Lubin; The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Provence by Martin Gayford; and Van Gogh: A Study of His Life and Work by Frank Elgar. John Rewald’s essay “Theo van Gogh as Art Dealer,” from his book Studies in Post-Impressionism, was very helpful. So, too, was Personal Recollections of Vincent van Gogh by Elizabeth du Quesne van Gogh, in which the sister who scorned him offers an intimate look at the artist’s early life. For inspiration but not information, I read Lust for Life, Irving Stone’s melodramatic fictional take on Van Gogh, as well as Stone’s Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh.
Some of the most detailed and perceptive writing about the Van Goghs can be found in exhibition catalogues and books. I am especially indebted to Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, an examination of the life, work, and mutual influence of the painters during their two months in Arles, by Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, and to Theo van Gogh: Art Dealer, Collector and Brother of Vincent by Chris Stolwijk and Richard Thomson, which contains informative essays on the life and career of the lesser-known van Gogh. The lavishly illustrated Taschen Van Gogh by Rainer Metzger and Ingo F. Walther provided visual stimulation.
The story of John Keats nursing his dying brother is told by Robert Gittings in John Keats. Mathieu Dreyfus’s struggle to free his brother is detailed in Dreyfus: A Family Affair by Michael Burns. I found the story of Michael and Brendan Marrocco in “Spirit Intact, Soldier Reclaims His Life” by Lizette Alvarez (New York Times, July 2, 2010); Ronald Herrick’s kidney donation was described in the Associated Press obituary dated December 30, 2010. The Muir biting incident is taken from the first chapter of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir. Booker T. Washington tells of his deliverance from flax-shirt agony in the first chapter of his autobiography, Up From Slavery.
Material on the Bachs is from Johann Sebastian Bach by Christoph Wolff; on the Beethovens from Beethoven: Biography of a Genius by George R. Marek. The Chaplin brothers’ bond is discussed in Chaplin by David Robinson; also in Charles Chaplin: My Autobiography. John Warhola’s role in his younger brother’s life was mentioned in “John Warhola, Brother of Andy Warhol, Dies at 85” by William Grimes (New York Times, December 28, 2010). Richard Rhodes recounts his harrowing childhood in A Hole in the World. The Hagel brothers’ heroism is briefly (and modestly) described in America: Our Next Chapter by Chuck Hagel. Material on the Whitman brothers is drawn from Walt Whitman: A Life by Justin Kaplan, as well as from Now the Drum of War by Robert Roper and Walt Whitman’s America by David S. Reynolds.
Jeanne Safer’s quote on being the sibling of a child with special needs is taken from Chapter 7 of her book The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling. For the story of the Collyer brothers, I am indebted to Ghosty Men, in which Franz Lidz digs his way through the Collyer legend. Although I don’t refer to them in this book, two memoirs about growing up with a disabled sibling provided provocation and illumination: Jay Neugeboren’s Imagining Robert and Karl Taro Greenfeld’s Boy Alone.
The strange case of Herbert and George Silver is taken largely from “Brother Dead for Months . . . in the Next Room” by Bob Joliffe (Bournemouth Echo, February 4, 2004). Michael W. Kauffman tells the story of John Atzerodt turning in his brother in American Brutus. The Woolf brothers’ dinner-table colloquy is recounted in Sowing, the first volume of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography.
For the story of the Kaczynski brothers, I am especially indebted to “Missing Parts,” David Kaczynski’s haunting, revealing essay in Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry, edited by Andrew Blauner. I also leaned heavily on the New York Times, particularly “From a Child of Promise to the Unabom Suspect” by Robert D. McFadden (May 26, 1996); “The Tortured Genius of Theodore Kaczynski” by David Johnston and Janny Scott (May 26, 1996); “Heart of Unabom Trial Is Tale of Two Brothers” by William Glaberson (January 5, 1998); and “Making the Death Penalty a Personal Thing” by William Glaberson (October 18, 2004). I was also helped by “I Don’t Want to Live Long,” an interview with Ted Kaczynski by Stephen J. Dubner (Time, October 18, 1999) and by “Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber” by Alston Chase (The Atlantic, June, 2000).
For details on the Bulger brothers, I relied most heavily on Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, the Boston Globe reporters who broke the extraordinary story of the Whitey Bulger/FBI alliance. I also made use of The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century by Howie Carr; Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s Irish Mob by Kevin Weeks and Phyllis Karas; and While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics, by William M. Bulger. For details of Bulger’s 2003 testimony to the House Committee on Government Reform, I turned to “Grilled by US Panel, Bulger Says He Did Not Aid Brother” by Shelley Murphy (Boston Globe, June 20, 2003), and on the transcript of his testimony, which can be found in The Next Step in the Investigation of the Use of Informants by the Department of Justice: The Testimony of William Bulger: Hearing Before the Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives, One Hundred Eighth Congress, First Session, June 19, 2003, serial No. 108-41 (http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house http://www.house.gov/reform). For details of Whitey’s capture, I turned to the comprehensive reporting in the Boston Globe, particularly “Bulger Ordered Home” by Peter Schworm and Shelley Murphy (June 24, 2011) and “Ever the Wiseguy, and Sharp as Tack” by Kevin Cullen (June 25, 2011). I was also helped by “F.B.I. Manhunt for Mob Legend Ends After Tip on Companion” by Adam Nagourney and Abby Goodnough (New York Times, June 24, 2011). For details on John Bulger, see “John Bulger gets Six Months” by Shelley Murphy (Boston Globe, September 4, 2003).
My discussion of the Joyces is drawn primarily from My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years by Stanislaus Joyce and James Joyce by Richard Ellmann; also from Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann, and “James and Stanislaus Joyce: A Jungian Speculation,” by Jean Kimball, in Blood Brothers: Siblings as Writers. Leon Edel’s quote on “the martyred siblings of literary history” can be found in Kimball’s essay.
“The Marx Brothers never let facts get in the way of a good story,” begins Hector Arce’s 1979 biography, Groucho. Many of the key stories on the Marx canon come in several variations, depending on who’s doing the telling. Both the brothers and their biographers disagree on everything from whether Minnie pulled Groucho from school in the sixth grade or the seventh to whether Gummo was named for his habit of wearing gumshoes (rubbers) or for his habit of sneaking up on people like a gumshoe (detective). Where there is disagreement, I have gone with the source that seems the most trustworthy.
For the biographical framework of the Marx brother’s lives, I relied heavily on three books: Hector Arce’s pioneering biography, Groucho; Stefan Kanfer’s comprehensive and astute Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx; and Simon Louvish’s high-spirited collective biography Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of The Marx Brothers. I also consulted Kyle Chrichton’s 1950 biography The Marx Brothers, which provides a thorough if not entirely accurate examination of the brothers’ early years, and Joe Adamson’s Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, a combination biography, filmography, and appreciation that pulls off the often-attempted, rarely achieved feat of writing about the Marxes with Marxian panache.
I also borrowed from The Marx Bros. Scrapbook, a collection of photographs and interviews of Groucho, Gummo, Zeppo, and several of the writers and directors who worked on their films. Assembled by Richard J. Anobile, the book provides not only a wealth of stories—some familiar, some not—but also, because the interviews are unedited and unexpurgated, an unfiltered view of Groucho in his later years. (One can see why Groucho, although credited as coauthor, sued—unsuccessfully—to keep this book from being published.) Charlotte Chandler’s Hello, I Must Be Going is another compendium of invaluable (and, apparently, unedited) interviews with an elderly Groucho and his friends and acolytes. (See also Chandler’s March 1974 Playboy interview of Groucho.) My account of Groucho’s last years relies on Steve Stoliar’s Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho’s House, a fly-on-the-wall view of Groucho’s chaotic ménage written by a young fan hired to be Groucho’s archivist. My description of Harpo and Susan’s party for Groucho and his third wife owes everything to Ben Hecht’s description of that event in his memoir, A Child of the Century.
Several books written (more or less) by the brothers themselves were indispensable. Many of the Harpo stories I cite can be found in Harpo Speaks!, an autobiography written with Rowland Barber. I also consulted Groucho’s numerous works, including his memoir Groucho and Me and The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx. (Groucho’s best writing can be found in his letters, in which he was far less circumspect than in his memoirs.)
I also relied heavily on memoirs by Marxian offspring. In Growing Up with Chico, Maxine Marx provides an affectionate but clear-eyed look at her father and her uncles; My Life with Groucho and Son of Groucho, both by Arthur Marx, offer unvarnished views of both father and son. Love, Groucho: Letters from Groucho Marx to His Daughter Miriam, edited by Miriam Marx Allen, makes for hilarious, poignant, and occasionally painful reading. I also benefited from Bill Marx’s cheery Son of Harpo Speaks.
My discussion of the Rothschilds is drawn from Frederic Morton’s witty biography The Rothschilds, as well as from The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets, 1798–1848, the first-volume of Niall Ferguson’s two-volume biography. For information on the rise of the Lehmann brothers I am grateful to The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844–2008 by Peter Chapman. I got my information on the Nicholas brothers from “Fayard Nicholas, Groundbreaking Hoofer, Dies at 91,” an Associated Press obituary that ran in the New York Times on January 26, 2006. For the Mayos, I owe everything to The Doctors Mayo by Helen Clapesattle. Material on the Wrights was mined from The Wright Brothers: A Biography by Fred C. Kelly; Miracle at Kitty Hawk: The Letters of Wilbur & Orville Wright, edited by Fred C. Kelly; and Wilbur and Orville by Fred Howard. I am especially indebted to James Tobin’s To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight, which not only provides much useful detail but embeds the brothers in the larger history of aviation’s early days with a brio that made this reader feel as if he were airborne himself.
The Howe brothers’ story is told in The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution by Ira D. Gruber. For the Montgolfier brothers, I relied on their Wikipedia entry. Details on the Disney brothers are from Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. My discussion of the Gershwins borrows from Gershwin: His Life & Music by Charles Schwartz; Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin by Deena Rosenberg; and The Gershwin Years: George and Ira by Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart. For the Grimms, I consulted The Brothers Grimm by Jack Zipes, as well as the biographical essay by Maria Tatar in The Annotated Brothers Grimm (edited by Tatar). For the Goncourts, I drew on Pages from the Goncourt Journals (edited, translated, and with a helpful introduction by Robert Baldick). My description of the James brothers is taken almost entirely from T. J. Stiles’s edifying, electrifying Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. John Newman Edwards’s description of the brothers is contained in “A Terrible Quintette,” his 1873 essay.
Material on the tennis-playing Bryans is from “Togetherness” by Jon Wertheim (Sports Illustrated, April 26, 2010) and from “Deuce” by Eric Konigsberg (New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2009). My description of the Everlys owes everything to The Everly Brothers: Walk Right Back by Roger White.
For biographical details I relied heavily on Walter Harding’s indispensable The Days of Henry Thoreau. I also made use of Henry Seidel Canby’s idiosyncratic and intuitive Thoreau. For sheer intellectual exhilaration, I turned again and again to Robert D. Richardson Jr.’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind; for psychological insight to Richard Lebeaux’s two-volume biography, Young Man Thoreau and Thoreau’s Seasons, which offers the most thorough and provocative exploration of John and Henry’s complicated bond. I was also helped by Frank B. Sanborn’s Henry David Thoreau, an informal biography written by a young friend of Thoreau’s who was a frequent dinner guest at the Thoreau home during Henry’s last years. Thoreau, The Poet-Naturalist: With Memorial Verses, an affectionate, idiosyncratic memoir written by Thoreau’s neighbor and hiking partner, William Ellery Channing, provides almost as much insight into its author as into its purported subject. I found many details about Thoreau as a young man in “Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend,” an essay by Edward Emerson, whose childhood was spent largely in Thoreau’s company. “Thoreau,” an essay by Edward’s father, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was also of help. Thoreau’s essential flavor comes through most thoroughly, of course, in his own work, especially in the two million words of his journal; I used the two-volume Dover edition. Where I have quoted from his letters, I relied on The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode. Where I have quoted from his poems, I used The Library of America’s Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems.
My description of the Concord Academy under the Thoreaus owes much to “The Diary of Thoreau’s ‘Gentle Boy,’” an essay by Clayton Hoagland in The New England Quarterly (vol. 28, no. 4, December 1955, pp. 473–89), which examines the journal of Edmund Sewall, a Concord Academy student and the younger brother of Ellen Sewall. My understanding of the Thoreau-Emerson relationship was enriched by Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter by John McAleer; Emerson Among the Eccentrics by Carlos Baker (particularly Chapter 10, “Thoreau”); Emerson: The Mind on Fire, another riveting intellectual biography by Robert D. Richardson Jr.; and Robert Sattelmeyer’s “Thoreau and Emerson,” one of many insightful essays in The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau (edited by Joel Myerson). For details of the Thoreaus’ river trip, I am indebted to Linck C. Johnson’s historical introduction to The Illustrated A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Chapters 2 and 3 of David M. Robinson’s Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism, which discuss John’s death and the writing of A Week, were also helpful. I consulted the brief discussion of Thoreau in Louisa May Alcott by Martha Saxton, as well as the description of Alcott and Thoreau in American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever’s portrait of nineteenth-century literary Concord. I also enjoyed the contrarian portrait of Thoreau offered by Robert Sullivan in The Thoreau You Don’t Know.
Hallmark’s sibling bereavement cards and the childhood sibling-loss study were mentioned in The Empty Room: Surviving the Loss of a Brother or Sister at Any Age by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn. Information on the Barries comes from Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie by Lisa Chaney; also from Margaret Ogilvy, J. M. Barrie’s memoir of his mother. Mary Lincoln’s mourning is described by Jean H. Baker in Mary Todd Lincoln. I found the Henry James quote about his late brother in the last chapter of The Jameses by R. W. B. Lewis.
Erich Lindemann’s landmark study, “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief,” was published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 101, 1944 (pp. 141–48). Albert C. Cain’s “Children’s Disturbed Reactions to the Death of a Sibling” was published in The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vol. 34, no. 4, July 1964 (pp. 741–52). The death of Jack Cash is discussed by Johnny Cash in his autobiography, Cash (with Patrick Carr), and by Michael Streissguth in Johnny Cash: The Biography. My account of Salvador Dali’s childhood is derived from The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dali by Meredith Etherington-Smith and from The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, the artist’s insouciant autobiography. Joshua Fleck and his blanket are described in “A Singular Pain: When Death Cuts the Bond of Twins” by Neela Banerjee (New York Times, March 1, 2007). Arnaz Battle and his tattoo are cited in “Tale of My Tattoo” (Sports Illustrated, November 22, 2004). Information on the Presley twins is from Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick. For details on Bill Tilden, I turned to Frank Deford’s Big Bill Tilden; also A Terrible Splendor by Marshall Jon Fisher. Chris Weir’s decision to complete his brother’s army service is the subject of “A Brother’s Unfinished Business” by Lauren Gregory (Chattanooga Times Free Press, September 28, 2008). The unconventional Olmsted marriage is discussed by Witold Rybczynski in A Clearing in the Distance, his biography of the architect. The effect on Jerry West of his older brother’s death is described in Jerry West: The Life and Legend of a Basketball Icon by Roland Lazenby; also in “Basketball Was the Easy Part” by Gary Smith (Sports Illustrated, October 24, 2011). The story of the Nixon brothers comes from Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, a fascinating psychobiography by Fawn M. Brodie, and from Nixonland, an exhilarating cultural biography by Rick Perlstein. Art Spiegelman’s story is taken from Part II of his graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. John F. Kennedy’s “shadow boxing” quote is from Collier and Horowitz, The Kennedys (Part 2, Chapter 1). Hitler’s sibling losses are discussed in Chapter 10, “Siblings as Survivors: Bonds Beyond the Grave” (which also contains a good general discussion of sibling loss) in The Sibling Bond by Bank and Kahn.
George H. Pollock discusses the effect on J. M. Barrie of his brother’s death in his essay “On Siblings, Childhood Sibling Loss, and Creativity,” from Psychoanalytic Studies of Biography (edited by George Moraitis and George H. Pollock). The Wordsworth quote (“I shall . . . never be at peace”) is from Chapter 12 of Wordsworth: A Life by Juliet Barker. The story of Samuel and Henry Clemens is taken from Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers and The Autobiography of Mark Twain. For information on Jack Kerouac, I am indebted to Kerouac, Ann Charters’s seminal biography; also to Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac by Gerald Nicosia. For further reading, I recommend two remarkable memoirs about fraternal loss: Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore and In My Brother’s Shadow by Uwe Timm. Thomas Wolfe’s short story “The Lost Boy,” based on the death of his older brother Grover when Wolfe was four, is no less memorable.
John F. Kennedy’s “It was like being drafted” quote is from Chapter 39 of Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys; the Choate headmaster’s quote is from Collier and Horowitz’s The Kennedys (Part 2, Chapter 1); JFK’s quote on the family political hierarchy is from “Social Causes Defined Kennedy Even at the End of a 46-Year Career in the Senate” by John M. Broder (New York Times, August 26, 2009). Ted Kennedy’s “fallen standard” quote can be found in Collier and Horowitz’s The Kennedys (Part 4, Chapter 2). The story of the silver cigarette box is from “Ted” by Richard Lacayo (Time, September 7, 2009).
Of the numerous books I found helpful but which I did not make direct use of in Brothers, I would like to mention a few. I learned about how sibling relationships have changed over the centuries from Siblings: Brothers & Sisters in American History by C. Dallett Hemphill and from We Grew Up Together: Brothers and Sisters in Nineteenth-Century America by Annette Atkins. Brothers, a collection of essays and photographs assembled by the editors of Esquire, provided visual and literary inspiration. Although I limited my scope in Brothers to brothers, several books about sisters were useful in helping me formulate my thoughts, especially Sisters by Elizabeth Fishel and You Were Always Mom’s Favorite! by Deborah Tannen.
I have changed the names of three people in this book. Ricky Ratters, Freddie Miller, and Mr. Lammons are pseudonyms.