The desire to help people was always a part of Clara Barton’s life. Even at the age of eleven, she demonstrated that when she took care of her brother when he became ill. Seven years later, Barton opened a free school where she was a teacher who taught all the young children who would not otherwise have had the chance for a better education. When the school did not offer her the higher paying position to head the school, she resigned. She became busy once the Civil War started, volunteering her time and effort to help the wounded soldiers by advertising for supplies and nursing the injured. This was just the beginning of the foundation of the Red Cross, and later Barton did all that she could do to help expand the Red Cross throughout the United States. In three biography excerpts, from Clara Barton: Professional Angel by Elizabeth Pryor, Angel of the Battlefield: The Life of Clara Barton by Ishbel Ross, and Clara Barton: In the Service of Humanity by David Burton, the authors present to us insights about who Clara Barton really is. Biographers do not always give a full accou

Finally, each writer brings his or her own writing techniques to their biographies. Ross uses a narrative approach to get her views across. For example, her sentences are extremely descriptive, which makes Angel of the Battlefield an interesting story to read. For instance, she writes, “small homes on stilts sailed off from their moorings as wind and water battered them” (Ross 184). To Ross, the story is not just about facts, but it is a story written in a way that will interest the reader to continue to read. When Ross mentions the way Barton visited the local stores that survived, following “the battered railroad tracks with a drove of dogs at her heels,” she paints a vivid description of what is going on. Even the thought of dogs following at her heels shows that Barton was thought highly of. There are also excerpts from her diary to show us more about Barton. For example, Ross adds excerpts from her diary that tells her own story and reveals to us more about Barton: “Julia Glover specially asks for seeds. She is a survivor of seventeen drowned at one place” (186). Generally, Ross portrays Barton as a person who took her time to get to know and care for the people. Barton made sure they had everything they needed. In addition, the piece has a kind of fairy-tale ending in which everyone lived happily ever after.

On the other hand, Pryor sounds more factual than Ross and does not use a narrative approach to writing about Barton. Like Ross, though, Pryor includes excerpts from Barton’s diary, but she cites her examples with footnotes, which suggests that Pryor is supporting her claims about Barton with formal research methods. In Ross’s writing, there are no footnotes to support her claims. Unlike the other two passages, Burton provides deeper human insight into Barton. For example, when he includes the excerpt from Scribner’s Magazine, he shows how impressive the Red Cross was because Barton and her assistants adopted the “most rigid system of economy” even in the “absence of machinery.” But then he also includes an excerpt from The Review of Reviews which notes that Barton did not have any paperwork to show for what she did. For everything the Red Cross did, she should have had documents that could serve as a record and guide for other relief organizations (Burton 126-127). But, just because the Red Cross was running smoothly, it does not mean Barton was perfect and had everything well organized. She was only human, and this seems to be Burton’s point.

Secondly, each writer draws slightly different conclusions about Barton’s character. Ross

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