When I began writing fiction, I never thought of myself as a historical novelist. Yet my two published novels tell stories that involve not only historical events but include chapters set in two epochal wars of the 20th century: in Absolution, Vietnam, in A Stone for Bread, World War II. My as yet unpublished novel…
I recently read The Blood of Emmett Till, an extraordinary book by North Carolina author and historian Tim Tyson. The book recounts the horrendous torture and murder of a black teenager in 1950’s Mississippi following false accusations* from a white woman store clerk. Till’s murder and the acquittal of the men responsible sparked an outcry…
When I began revising an old manuscript that became A Stone for Bread, I found myself wondering if one more novel portraying a Nazi concentration camp might seem outdated. Yet since I began that revision, authors and filmmakers have continued to powerfully render Nazi Germany and its horrors, as in Anthony Doerr’s novel All the…
In my last post (see post here), A Stone for Bread‘s protagonist American Henry Beam and several American friends attend a rally in mid-1950’s Paris for a buffoonish right wing French politician, Renard Marcotte. Expecting to be amused, Henry finds himself surprisingly stirred by the man’s rhetoric. When the rally ends, Henry’s American friend Bert Yeager,…
The world’s great religions understand human fallibility and address it in varying ways through the Torah, the Christ, the Koran or through personal enlightenment either in this world or beyond. In the novel All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s character Willie Stark frames our human story in his own crude way: “Man is conceived…
Years ago when I was teaching at Greensboro College, I attended a guest lecture by Doris Kearns Goodwin where she talked about her biography of Lyndon Johnson. What struck me most was her comment that Johnson had never felt truly loved by his mother. He told Goodwin in an interview how gratifying it had been…
If you’ve never read Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, now might be a good time. It’s the classic American novel about corruption in politics, how a man is turned from idealist to crass manipulator of “the people” for his own ends. When I began A Stone for Bread nearly thirty years ago, I…
I end my series “On Becoming a Writer” in North Carolina, where I have lived since leaving New York. I taught only two semesters at Essex County College, because we moved that summer to Boone, where Tom was Associate Pastor at the Boone Methodist Church. With us was our three-week-old daughter, Carol. Talk about a wild year!…
After seven years in South Carolina, I cashed in my small savings, rented a U-Haul and moved my few belongings, including three cats, to New York City. The man I had been dating up and down the Eastern seaboard was a student there, but since I wasn’t ready then to commit to marriage, I rented…
The spring of my last year at the Children’s Home, I drove from Columbia to Chapel Hill to be interviewed as part of the application process for UNC’s School of Social Work. It wasn’t a happy interview and I knew afterwards this program would not be the right place for me. Uncertain what to do next, I…