I finished correcting the first-pass page proofs of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington at one-thirty this morning. After I deliver the pages to Emily Wunderlich of Gotham Books later today, I’ll no longer be able to make any more changes to the text of Duke for any reason short of criminal libel or flagrant misspelling. Unless I should feel moved to make a final fix or two en route to Gotham, that’s all he wrote.
Needless to say–I hope–I’ve done my damnedest to ensure that Duke contains no factual or typographical errors of any kind. Alas, the fact that I corrected one niggling little typo and a handful of oh-God-I-can’t-believe-I-got-that-date-wrong mistakes during my final editing pass served as a scary but usefully humbling reminder that no biographer is perfect. (No, I won’t tell you what they were. Only my friend Steven Lasker, who gave Duke an additional last-minute fact-checking read, knows the terrible truth, and he’s not telling.) All we can do is work as hard as we can and hope for the best thereafter, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.
So…here I come, Emily! Take good care of my baby!
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Duke Ellington performs “C Jam Blues” in 1941:
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
