My goal as a volunteer had been to remain with the program until the first participants, still the core of the group, graduated from high school. And they all did graduate, among them several with honors. So I had expected to leave at the end of that summer, which I’d already announced. But a more…
Fiction is fiction, which means it doesn’t require absolute historical accuracy. But serious fiction writers often want to convey a “sense” of a culture or people, even when only imagining it. This is especially true if you’re not writing fantasy but attempting to create a “real” place, as, for example, author Jean Auel did in…
A novel that melds both history and fiction may at times seem paradoxical. But in the broader definition, this is fiction set during a particular historical time. It’s fiction, even when its characters are from the pages of history, stories of kings and queens, heroic men and women whom we learned about in school and…
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 My as yet unpublished novel…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became A Stone for Bread, I found myself wondering if one more novel portraying a Nazi concentration camp might seem outdated.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…