The Neglected Giant: Writing about Agnes Meyer Driscoll

You don't have to read too far into the biography I wrote of codebreaking pioneer Agnes Driscoll (nee Meyer) to realize it's got its scholarly side; the footnotes are a pretty good indicator of that.  If you go all the way through to the seven appendices, you'll have an even better idea.

(Form for ordering a free hardcopy here; softcopy directly here.)

But, although getting the scholarly side right was critical, the aspect of writing about Driscoll that concerned me most was making it readable.  I did my darnedest to make it a page-turner, even literary.

The page-turner part, as far as I could make it so, came about through three elements.  The least of the three was throwing in a little foreshadowing here and there.  More useful was pacing: Many of the narrative sections are followed by reflective ones.  The major element was through the section and chapter transitions.  I put a lot of figurative sweat into those.

See, any time a written work has a portion that's clearly ending, that's an opportunity for readers to stop turning pages and do something else.  So making not just a smooth transition to the next part, but an engaging one, is crucial.

Here's an example:

...She might have been seething with resentment, fuming with frustration, or burning with ambition, but the evidence is inadequate for us to be sure.

"We Didn't See Anything Burning": 1938-1941

The "heat" imagery of the last sentence of the one section, and the word "burning" (a repeat, as well) in the following section heading didn't happen by accident.

Whether the biography has any literary merit or not is for others to say, but I did strive to use what techniques I could.  For example, since the theme of the work is what a giant she was, I used wording throughout to reinforce that image.  If you want to know what I mean, go back and look at the fifth paragraph of the previous entry, starting with (italics added), "She raised herself..."

The biography was a lot of work, but it was also incredibly gratifying.  If you get half the satisfaction from reading it that I had in writing it, you're in for a treat.

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The Neglected Giant: Agnes Meyer Driscoll

The links in this entry are correct as of September 2020 

She helped save thousands upon thousands of American lives, but you've probably never heard of her.  A remarkable woman who lived a remarkable life, she was never famous and has become almost forgotten.  History has neglected her.

Codebreakers don't tend to gain fame in the first place, although Alan Turing is a welcome exception.  But even among those who pay attention to such a specialized field, Agnes Driscoll (nee Meyer) gets name recognition, but is rarely mentioned in the same breath, or even the next breath, as a William Friedman.

But she should be.  Hired as a stenographer, which was typical for women almost a century ago, she turned herself into a codebreakder, and became one of the best.  She is given credit for breaking two Japanese codes virtually single-handedly.  She was almost the only codebreaker for the Navy for a couple of decades.  You would think that would be enough.

But she also did more individually than all but one other person to break JN-25, the code Japan's navy used at Midway.  (The organizational credit for breaking it correctly goes to the Navy's Station Hypo.)  Midway was the turning point in the Pacific war, putting Japan irretrievably on the defensive, and breaking JN-25 helped save many thousands of American lives.

She raised herself up to become a premier codebreaker.  Anecdotal evidence abounds that she was a warm woman, encouraging others' growth.  She soldiered on, standing tall, doing so at an age long after virtually all of her peers had moved on to other duties or retired.  Yet she never rose through the ranks as high as they did, and their names are typically mentioned above hers even today.

Why?

One of the last things I was able to do before retiring from government service was to tell her story.  It's a free federal publication, and a free hardcopy can be ordered using this request form, or the softcopy viewed here (links updated September 2020).  Go read it.  You can skip through the technical parts; you don't have to learn old codes and codebreaking.  But do learn about a great codebreaker.  Better yet, about a great American.

Help undo decades of neglect.