With a month to go before publication date, I got a nice surprise in the mail yesterday when a lone hardcover of The Capitol arrived, along with a nice note from my editor.
It’s officially pretty, and it’s officially A Book, complete with some final corrections and light edits (even on the very very last pass, I *still* couldn’t keep my hands off of it) and with an index and photo insert–two things that weren’t in the Advance Reading Copy. And hey! You’ll even get some photos in full color.
I wasn’t expecting to get a copy in the mail just yet, so I opened the padded envelope without hoopla or expectations–and I can vouch for the fact that holding your newest book in your hand for the first time will never not be exciting.
Posted onMarch 24, 2026|Comments Off on Ten Great Biographies for Your Bedside Table
Looking for a great biography to add to your reading pile? Add any or all of the ten books long listed for the 2026 Plutarch Award, presented annually by Biographers International Organization. Good stuff.
Fun fact (and to toot my own horn a bit): I wrote and introduced the resolution creating this award when I was a board member of BIO way back in 2011 or so. From the very beginning, the list of nominees and winners has been rock solid, and I’m really, really proud of this one. It’s still the only international literary award given to biographers, by biographers.
Posted onMarch 18, 2026|Comments Off on In Case You Missed It (And Me) . . .
First thing’s first:
Look at me! Look at me! I’m quoted by the BBC!
Young Ted Geisel, looking serious.
It’s been 100 years (!) since young Dr. Seuss–at the time he was simply young Mr. Geisel–set foot on the campus of Oxford University, in pursuit of a doctorate in English, and I was delighted to speak with the BBC about Seuss’s time at their illustrious institution.
Alas, Geisel wasn’t a terrific student and only lasted a year there, leaving Oxford without a degree. His class notebooks are filled with more drawings and doodles than notes on Milton and Shakespeare, though he was clearly trying. Still, you don’t get Dr. Seuss without a stop at Oxford, as it’s where he met someone critical to his story: Helen Palmer, who would become his wife, first reader, fellow Beginner Books editor, and the person who looked at his Oxford notebooks and said, “You should be be drawing for a living.” You can read the rest of the story right here.
When I started researching Jim Henson for the biography, I knew he had filmed parts of several Muppet movies in New Mexico, but I didn’t know how much the state meant to him, and how often he visited. Imagine my surprise when I learned his father had retired to Albuquerque in the early 1970s and lived about four minutes away from my own childhood home.
New Mexico was so important to him, in fact, that he once told his son John that he felt the mountains near Taos was the “place I’m supposed to be” — and his ashes were scattered there, somewhere in the Sangre de Cristos, in 1992.
Oh, and if you’re planning on journeying to Taos to visit the specific site where his ashes were scattered, you’re out of luck in that regard–as Lisa Henson told me, “I’m pretty sure we were on someone’s private property and I don’t think we could ever find the place again.” But go visit Taos anyway; you’ll quickly come to see why Jim thought he belonged there.
I was sad to hear the news this week of the passing of Arthur Novell, who served as Jim Henson’s publicist for almost two decades. Arthur was not only a publicist, but a confidante and one of Jim’s reliable “fixers”–as many inside the organization warmly described him to me–who could be counted on to solve problems quickly and quietly. No matter what time of day it was, or where in the world Arthur might have been, he could almost always make things better with a phone call, taking care of the business of business and letting Jim Henson be Jim Henson.
After Jim’s death in 1990, Arthur was chosen by Jane Henson to serve as one of the founding board members of The Jim Henson Legacy on its establishment in 1992. That’s actually where he was when I first came to know him; he was serving as president of the Legacy when I approached the organization in 2008 to talk about a biography of Jim. He was genuinely warm and encouraging–and always so patient with me–and once I got the okay to proceed with the project around 2010, Arthur was one of the book’s biggest fans and cheerleaders.
There’s a good reason I called him the spiritual father of the biography; it wouldn’t have happened without his careful attention. I loved getting his e-mails dispensing guidance on how to approach performers, giving me his perspective on Jim’s career, or calling me “just to check in.” And there were times, I’m sure, when his hand on my shoulder–or his working behind the scenes on something I’m probably not even aware of to this day–made a real difference in my conversations with the Henson family, friends, and colleagues. With Arthur on your side, you were a made man.
After the book was published, Arthur and I stayed in touch, sometimes just a line or two in an e-mail. Any time I was in New York, I would try to have dinner–usually Chinese food–with him and his husband, Eddy, lingering for hours just so I could listen to the man tell stories, whether it was of his dancing on stage in New York as a young man, taking phone calls from Jim at 2 in the morning, or ushering around guests for Muppets Tonight. One of the last times we tried to get together, my train to New York was impossibly delayed and prevented us from having dinner. But Arthur texted me well into the evening and told me he was sorry we wouldn’t be able to see each other and that he missed talking with me.
That’s how he was.
Arthur was a lovely, lovely man, a true gentleman, and I’m forever grateful to him and even luckier to have known him. Godspeed, Arthur Novell; you were one of the good ones.
I don’t love the headline on it–and none of what’s in here will be news to anyone who’s read the bio–but still: People magazine picked up on a conversation I had last week on New York radio, where I was asked about Jim and Jane Henson’s relationship, along with a similar question about Dr. Seuss’s marriage to his wife, Helen. You can listen to the interview in its entirety here, as part of the radio show Nostalgia Tonight with Joe Sibilia. I talked with Joe not only about Jane Henson and Helen Palmer–and how important both women were in shaping the creative lives and professional careers of their spouses–but also the craft of writing both biographies, and the moments in their lives when Jim Henson and Dr. Seuss leaned into their trademark art forms.
Oh, and stick around and keep listening after my segment’s over, and you’ll also get good advice on estate planning from Mike Connors, who is not Mannix.
ETA: The same story is making the rounds with increasingly stupider spin, like this piece from The Globe, an absolute rag of a newspaper, which says breathlessly of information that was contained in the biography in 2013, “New details are emerging….” None of this is anywhere close to being new, you fetid trash mag.
Forty years ago today, the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated nine miles above Cape Canaveral, seventy-three seconds after takeoff, following the explosion of its main booster rocket.
It was a pivotal moment in GenX’s collective memory, the one we thought was going to be “our JFK assassination”–the “where were you when…?” question–until a September morning 15 years later. But it’s still a moment seared into our psyche–and yeah, we all remember where we were, when . . .
Me, I didn’t see it happen live. In January of 1986, I was a freshman at The University of New Mexico (and wow, does that make me feel old) and had a job working as the night editor for the campus newspaper, which kept me up into the early morning hours nearly every day. So I was barely out of bed on Tuesday morning when a friend of mine came to pick me up in my dorm room to walk to our 11:00 a.m. class. He asked me if I’d heard the news about the space shuttle. I said I hadn’t.
“It blew up an hour ago,” he told me.
All I remember is stammering the stunned question, “Did the astronauts survive?” He shook his head sadly.
We walked to class not knowing much more–and in the days before cell phones and iPads and lightweight TVs hanging in nearly every classroom, we didn’t get to see any footage until we watched the news much later in the day.
That wasn’t true for a lot of my fellow GenXers, though. An awful lot of you watched in classrooms, on a television rolled in on a wobbly metal cart, to see the launch of the shuttle carrying the first civilian–a schoolteacher–into space. GenX saw the entire thing happen live, a communal cultural experience that shaped a generation as excitement and awe turned to shock and horror. And all broadcast live on CNN, which was the only 24-hour news channel at that time.
Here’s CNN’s live feed from that day–a morning that looked like just another regular January morning and a run-of-the-mill shuttle launch. What we didn’t know is that a combination of politics, parsimony, and publicity had likely made what happened 73 seconds after takeoff mostly inevitable.
I was absolutely captivated by the Challenger story, and over the next decades, read everything I could about it. I was always particularly fascinated by the investigation that happened afterwards, which featured its own kind of political intrigue and drama, with secret informers, passed documents, even a “Deep Throat” figure who would help break open the entire investigation into the cause of the explosion.
Back in early 2020, in fact, I briefly considered making the Challenger and the subsequent investigation my next Big Project, envisioning it as a kind of political thriller. I had even gotten as far as putting together a proposal for a project I was calling 73 Seconds that had been enthusiastically received by my editor . . . when we learned that Adam Higginbotham, the same author who had written the terrifyingly terrific Midnight in Chernobyl, was also taking on the subject.
I couldn’t even be mad about it; there are certain writers who are just made for certain subjects, and as far as I was concerned, there was no better writer to take on Challenger than Adam. I pulled my proposal, and moved on to The Capitol a little more than a year later. Adam, meanwhile, finished his book, which came out in 2024 to rave reviews. Go read it. That cat can write, man.
Anyway, that’s where I was on January 28, 1986 — a major turning point in American history and in the modern American identity. How about you?
Posted onJanuary 23, 2026|Comments Off on That’s Me on The George Lucas Talk Show
File this under Things I Thought I’d Posted Already About and Then Found Out I Didn’t: Over the past few years, I’ve made a number of appearances on the improv talk show The George LucasTalk Show, brought to you by the brilliant and hilarious team of Connor Ratliff, Griffin Newman, and Patrick Cotnoir. If you’ve somehow managed to miss seeing it come across your social media feed, the show features Ratliff convincingly playing “filmmaker George Lucas” interviewing very real celebrities, while Newman chimes in as a dead-on Watto and producer Cotnoir provides all other necessary support. It’s been going on since 2014, and the celebrity guest list just gets better and better with each passing episode.
Sometimes, however–and this is all part of the fun–he has on fans and other types of non-celebrities . . . like me. Ratliff told me that he uses my 2016 biography of George Lucas as part of his “show Bible” and from time to time, while in character, he’ll mention “my biographer Brian Jay Jones,” which makes me both incredibly happy and weirdly giddy at the same time. And so, I’ve been delighted to jump into the fray the several times I’ve been asked, as the show is an absolute blast and I hope they keep doing it forever.
That’s all preface to telling you that in 2024, a team of documentarians released a really terrific film about the show, and Connor, called I’m George Lucas: The Connor Ratliff Story. At the moment, it’s available for download and streaming–but I’d really encourage you to invest in the 2-disc Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber which gives you not only the documentary, but tons and tons of extra features. Among those bonus features is more audio commentary tracks than you’ve ever seen anywhere else–Patrick Cotnoir actually wanted to set an official Guinness Book of World’s Records record for most commentary tracks, and I’m pretty sure he did so, since there are fifty-seven audio commentaries on this thing.
One of them is even by me. When Patrick asked me last year if I wanted to participate, my answer was, of course, um, yes, and I had a great time doing it. It’s the first and probably only time I will ever get to do a movie audio commentary–and as someone who has watched a lot of films with commentary, I didn’t want to disappoint. So I tried to tell stories about the real George Lucas that were relevant to what was being talked about on screen–including similarities between Connor’s story and Lucas’s own–as well as giving my impressions of having been on The George Lucas Talk Show.
And here’s one of the first things I talked about when it comes to being on the show: Connor Ratliff is absolutely committed to the bit. If you’re waiting for him to break character or even to wink knowingly at the audience, it’s not going to happen. He’s terrifyingly good; when he started giving me hell about writing in my biography about Lucas’s alleged lack of . . . er, enthusiasm in the bedroom, I stammered apologetically like I was being interrogated by the real George Lucas.
I also quickly learned to leave the funny to the professionals. I tried for a bit to be clever but quickly found I was in over my head. These guys are good at this stuff. They’ve got the funny under control; my job was to be the straight man.
Anyway, all this and more can be found in my commentary track–but there are plenty of others to choose from, too, including tracks from actual comedians like Chris Gethard, Bill Corbett, and Lane Moore. And for Muppet fans, you’ll also find a track by Craig Shemin and Stephanie D’Abruzzo.
I’m really proud to have been part of this in even a small way, and I’m delighted for the team at TGLTS, who keep right on regularly bringing you the funny. Check out the documentary, catch it live in New York if you can, or spend some time on the show’s YouTube Channel. You’re gonna love it.
I officially finished The Capitol over the weekend, when I sent my editor my final edits on the galley proofs–meaning it is now officially out of my hands and in the care of the fine folks at Dutton, so it can be on its way to you by June 2.
While I made the final changes to an editable pdf document, I always ask for a hard copy to read through as well–I’m hopelessly analog–and my editor was kind enough to put together a mock-up version of the finished book, which looks absolutely fantastic. I especially love this two-page splash at the very front, with the title and credits:
This one comes to you at a hefty 464 pages (which actually makes it just a hair shorter than Washington Irving, which clocks in at 468), with a full-color photo insert. We’ve also put a drawing, photo, or other illustration at the beginning of each chapter to give you an idea of what the building looks like in the chapter you’re about to read, so you can follow its progress from the moment it was just a placeholder on a map in 1790, through variations of domes and additions over the next century and a half, on up to the present day. In short, it just plain looks amazing.
I’ve been asked if there will be an audiobook, and at the moment the answer is Yup, I’m pretty sure there is, and you can pre-order it here. Beyond that, I don’t know who the reader might be–but the moment I hear anything, you’ll hear it next.
I’m excited to get this into your hands. I’ve said it before, but I know it’s been a long time coming, and I really appreciate your patience. It’ll be worth it, I promise.
On January 24, I’ll be presenting at the morning session of Biographers International Organization’s annual online Biography Lab, where I’ll be hosting a working forum called “Writing Creatively About Creatives.” You can read all about my session, and others, right here.
The day is free to BIO members, but you don’t have to be a member of BIO to participate. For the $60 cost for non-members, you’ll not only get to attend the entire BIO Lab–which includes plenary remarks by New Yorker scribe David Denby–but you’ll also receive a one-year membership to BIO, giving you access to all sorts of great events, like the annual BIO Conference in New York City. You can register for the BIO Lab here–and I’ll talk with you more on January 24, okay?
Posted onNovember 13, 2025|Comments Off on A Cover, a Title, and a Pub Date
Things are officially Official with The Capitol now, as we’ve got an official cover release from Dutton Books over on their Instagram page, with an official on sale date from Penguin Random House of June 2, 2026.
And as you can see, we’ve also got an official title for it. It was my editor who suggested swapping out my placeholder subtitle (the reliable but not terribly exciting An American Biography) with The Surprising Biography of an American Building, which I love and is *so* much more fun and much better reflects what I’m hoping to do with this unconventional biography.
Anyway, the listing for it is already showing up across several platforms, and it’s available for preorder from your favorite bookstore. You can also check out its official page on the Penguin Random House website for more information. And I thank you.
Welcome to the official website of Brian Jay Jones - that’s me, the writer and biographer and not the dead Rolling Stone. Or the live aeronaut. Keep trying.
