The Steve Jobs Biography

A Garage in Mountain View

Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs opens not with a triumph but with a chore. Paul Jobs, an engine mechanic who never finished high school, is showing his adopted son how to build a fence in their Mountain View yard. He tells the boy that the back of the fence — the side nobody will see — needs to be as carefully made as the front. "He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see." Fifty years later, an aging Steve Jobs would run his hand along that same fence and tell the story again. It is the lesson he would impose, year after year, on the engineers who designed Macintosh circuit boards, iPod packaging, and the unseen interiors of every Apple product.

That image — a perfectionist father teaching a perfectionist son about hidden craft — is Isaacson's way of telling you what the book is actually about. Yes, it is the story of six industries reshaped by one man: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablets, and digital publishing. But the deeper argument is that Steve Jobs cannot be separated from his contradictions. He was thoughtful and callous, generous and cruel, almost mystical in his intuitions and brutally crude in his rejections. The same conviction that made him insist on milled aluminum and rounded corners also made him deny paternity of his first daughter in front of a state court. You don't get one without the other. The biography is Isaacson's attempt to look at the whole person without flinching.

Jobs called Isaacson in the summer of 2004 with an unusual proposal: write the book, take total access, but publish nothing in his lifetime if you wanted. There would be no review, no veto, nothing off limits. He gave more than forty interviews over two years, and Isaacson talked to over a hundred friends, family members, rivals, and colleagues. Jobs's wife Laurene Powell pressed Isaacson to start the real work in 2009, after Jobs's second medical leave. "If you're ever going to do a book on Steve, you'd better do it now." Jobs's only intervention in the manuscript was to dislike the proposed cover and redesign it himself.