Historical Fiction: 2009: September 2008 Archives

With more than 40 writers scheduled to speak during our Seminar this January, it can be difficult for a reader to know where to start. Sure, there are the classics and prize-winners, like William Kennedy's Ironweed and David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois; and recent books like Joyce Carol Oates's Wild Nights! and Gore Vidal's Selected Essays. But what of the hundreds you won't have time for? The exquisite pastime of reading can suddenly grow so stressful!

With this in mind, we've asked our panelists which books they would recommend from among their own works and those of their peers. In our third installment of the series, we hear book recommendations from Valerie Martin, Chantel Acevedo, and John Wray.

• Valerie Martin has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kafka Prize, and Britain's Orange Prize:
    "I can't recommend Barry Unsworth's Booker Prize-winning novel Sacred Hunger highly enough. It follows the passage of a doomed slave ship from Liverpool to Guinea to a strange and wonderful Utopia on the Florida coast where women, for better or worse, briefly get to run the show. Unsworth's new novel, Land of Marvels, takes place in Mesopotamia just before World War I, when it has dawned on the West that the oil is in the Middle East. This novel is both a thriller and a timely cautionary tale; not to be missed.
    Of my own books I'd choose Property, a novel narrated by a slave-owning woman in Louisiana circa 1820. I like to describe it as a tour of hell with a guide who works for the management. I'd also choose Salvation, a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, constructed of visual scenes from the saint's life which travel backward in time from his macabre death to his delirious moment of 'conversion' as a young bourgeois in 13th century Assisi."

• Chantel Acevedo teaches English at Auburn University. Oscar Hijuelos called her first novel "enchanting:"
    "Marilynne Robinson's Gilead should be required reading among writers. This spare and graceful book set in the 1950's about a minister with a secret teaches us that a historic backdrop doesn't have to pound readers on the head. Rather, it can serve as a quiet and powerful canvas.
    My debut novel Love and Ghost Letters focuses on Cuba before Fidel Castro, a time fraught with political upheaval. While the characters are wholly wrapped up in their own complex relationships, the march of history impacts their lives, despite their desire to tune it out."

• John Wray was selected by Granta as one the twenty best American novelists under thirty-five:
    "While both of my novels could be considered historical, I think Canaan's Tongue might be most interesting in the context of this seminar, due to the extreme liberties it takes with its historical subject matter. Its ostensible subject– the outlaw James Murrel and his vast criminal empire– was for me, first and foremost, a way to write about current American politics. How well suited is historical fiction to social and political protest? How much room for experimentation do the confines of the genre permit?"

Hilma Wolitzer is the author of several novels including, most recently, The Doctor's Daughter, Hearts, and Summer Reading; and a book on the craft of fiction titled The Company of Writers. She has taught writing workshops at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, New York University, Columbia University, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and right here at the Key West Literary Seminar. She will return to Key West and the Seminar for a third time this January, as a moderator for our 27th annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth, and as a faculty member in our writers' workshop program. In a telephone conversation yesterday, we learned what to expect from Wolitzer's workshop, and gathered some tips about how to assess the quality of a manuscript.

Littoral: How would you explain your approach to teaching a writers' workshop?

Hilma Wolitzer: I was in my 30s when I took my first workshop, at the New School with Anatole Broyard. The very first thing I ever heard about my work, the first comment in the class, was "That's the most boring thing I ever heard." Broyard stepped in and said "I don't see how your comments are useful to the writer. You have to say why you were bored, and what you would do to make it less boring." In that moment, I learned how to teach.

    Honesty and charity have to prevail. You have to ask questions of the manuscript: Do I believe this? Do I care? Am I compelled to keep reading? I encourage everybody to comment on everybody's work; and I ask the person who wrote the manuscript to not defend his or her work against criticism until everyone has spoken. It's not exactly a courtroom, but certain evidence comes out– if 10 people say they don't believe in a character, this is evidence against the manuscript. On the other hand, writers are not always aware of what they do well. If you can point out one good sentence in an otherwise not-so-good manuscript, that's very helpful to a writer.

L: Are there good books about how to write?

HW: More helpful than reading how-to-write books is reading well-written books. Right now, I'm reading a book that I'm crazy about– a contemporary novel called Old Filth by a British writer named Jane Gardam. I almost want to force this book on writers. David Nasaw is another writer I greatly admire. He's compelled to be truthful– it's part of his ethic– and he's a wonderfully lively and engaging writer. William Kennedy is a splendid writer; his novel Ironweed is a book that can teach anybody about writing and about invention and about language. Good writing conveys certain essential truths about how we live with one another; and that's what we're trying to achieve in this workshop- to make writing of quality not just better, but, as Grace Paley said, "truer."

L: What does a Key West Literary Seminar writers' workshop feel like?

HW: It begins as a group of strangers, like a pickup basketball game in a schoolyard, and people learn how to play as a team. Now it's not a contest– we're not trying to find the best writer; no one's going to win. If your manuscript becomes better, then everyone wins. These people come together and they talk about something quite intimate– their work– and they get to know each other very well in a very short period of time. I find that people generally are really supportive of one another and not competitive. After all, the aim of the workshop is revision, not suicide.

L: Are you ever too old to start writing?

HW: No! I was in my mid-40s when my first book was published. I encourage people to start writing at any age– you don't have to have great legs like an athlete or a dancer. You just sit at your typewriter or your computer in your pajamas and you're invisible. Only the work becomes visible.

With more than 40 writers scheduled to speak during our Seminar this January, it can be difficult for a reader to know where to start. Sure, there are the classics and prize-winners, like William Kennedy's Ironweed and David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois; and recent books like Joyce Carol Oates's Wild Nights! and Gore Vidal's Selected Essays. But what of the hundreds you won't have time for? The exquisite pastime of reading can suddenly grow so stressful!

With this in mind, we've asked our panelists which books they would recommend from among their own works and those of their peers. In round 2 of this ongoing series, we hear book recommendations from Samantha Hunt, Megan Marshall, and KWLS board member Robert Richardson:

• Samantha Hunt is the author of two novels, numerous pieces of short fiction, essays, and a play about the life of Charles Babbage:
    "I recommend Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever– a beautiful book that skips through the centuries, where each story comes down to the passionate love of both science and the natural world. From my own work, I'd recommend, The Invention of Everything Else, which is a novel about Nikola Tesla, America's most forgotten inventor. The book is set at the Hotel New Yorker in 1943 but travels as far as Croatia in the 1850s, Colorado Springs in the 1890s, and even a little bit into the future."

• As a reviewer for the Radcliffe Quarterly, Megan Marshall had the chance to comment on recent works by three fellow Seminar speakers.
     About Geraldine Brooks's The People of the Book: "Brooks shows her respect for history not by preserving or even re-creating but by imagining, filling in gaps and silences, creating and solving mysteries, thoroughly informed by but never in thrall to fact."
     On Jane Kamensky's The Exchange Artist: "... In place of the Puritan 'city upon a hill" has risen a Boston of scheming businessmen whose paper-money trails Kamensky tracks with relentless cunning. A gifted storyteller, she employs every tool of the historian's trade ... to bring a lost building and its era back to life."
    And on Tony Horwitz's A Voyage Long and Strange: "... Above all, Horwitz is determined to confront the past in as material a form as it can be located in the present. In so doing, he gently reminds his readers how much of history is readily available to all of us, if we would only think to look and ask."
    Marshall herself is the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, a Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, about which biographer and KWLS board member, Robert Richardson has written: "Vivid and well written, it combines domestic, cultural, and intellectual history with the skill of a novelist in a book that reads, at times, like an American Middlemarch."

Sena Jeter Naslund


Hilma Wolitzer

We are buoyed by the news that Sena Jeter Naslund and Hilma Wolitzer will join us for Session 1 of our upcoming Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth, January 8-11 2009. Wolitzer also joins the faculty for our writers' workshop program January 12-15.

Naslund is the current Kentucky Poet Laureate and editor of The Louisville Review and the Fleur-de-Lis Press. She is the author of 4 novels, including the immensely popular Ahab's Wife, which tells the story of Una Spenser, wedded to Melville's white whale-hunting captain; and her most recent book, Abundance, which reimagines the world of Marie Antoinette.

Hilma Wolitzer is the author of several novels including, most recently, The Doctor's Daughter, Hearts, and Summer Reading; and a book on the craft of fiction titled The Company of Writers. She has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships; and has taught at The Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and right here at the Key West Literary Seminar.

To register for the 2009 Seminar or Writers' Workshops, click here.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after being found guilty by jury / World Telegram photo by Roger Higgins.

In an interview with The New York Times, Morton Sobell, a co-defendant in the 1951 espionage case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, has admitted to passing on military secrets to the Soviets. Sobell, 91, who fled to Mexico before the trial and later served time in Alcatraz, had maintained his innocence for more than half a century. The article includes reactions from Robert Meeropol, the youngest son of the Rosenbergs, who were executed by the federal government at Sing Sing in 1953. Meeropol, his brother Michael Meeropol, and Michael's daughter, Ivy Meeropol, have each made significant contributions to the research on the Rosenberg case, which, as today's article shows, continues to test previously accepted versions of history. We're proud to present Michael and Ivy Meeropol together in Key West this January, as we examine Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth.

With more than 40 writers scheduled to speak during our Seminar this January, it can be difficult for a reader to know where to start. Sure, there are the classics and prize-winners, like William Kennedy's Ironweed and David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. DuBois; and recent books like Joyce Carol Oates's Wild Nights! and Gore Vidal's Selected Essays. But what of the hundreds you won't have time for? The exquisite pastime of reading can suddenly grow so stressful!

With this in mind, we've asked our panelists which books they would recommend from among their own works and those of their peers. We begin this recurring feature with historians Eric Foner and Jill Lepore, and novelist and critic Thomas Mallon.

• Eric Foner has been president of each of the three major professional historical organizations: the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians. He told us about two of his books:

     "Number one: The Story of American Freedom (1999): The title is meant to imply that freedom is both an actual history and a mythology in this country (for what is a story anyway?), which links perhaps to the theme of history and fiction.
     Number two: Forever Free (2006): Because no period of American history is more mythologized or fictionalized in popular imagination than the Civil War and Reconstruction."

• Thomas Mallon is an Ingram Merrill Award winner, and a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. In our recent interview, he revealed his favorites by fellow Session 2 panelists William Kennedy and Gore Vidal:

     "Politics is done very badly– and not all that often– in American historical fiction. But William Kennedy's Roscoe (2002), all about long-ago municipal machinations in Albany, is a terrific novel, better and more layered than The Last Hurrah (written by Edwin O'Connor in 1956), which I suppose would be its closest cousin. And I think Lincoln (2000) is the most artful of all Gore Vidal's novels, a brilliant exercise in multiple viewpoints and tonal control. Vidal's contribution to this whole genre is quite crucial and under-credited. He brought wit into American historical fiction– a quality it had been devoid of throughout the first half of the 20th century, when most of it was elephantine costume drama."

• From Jill Lepore, chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program and a regular contributor to The New Yorker whose novel, Blindspot, written jointly with panelist Jane Kamensky, is due out in December, we learned about two of her history books:

     "The Name of War (1998) is a history of a seventeenth-century war that's also a meditation on how we write about war, scrutinizing what's at stake in how war stories are told, what truths those stories uncover, and what truths they mask.

     New York Burning (2005) is an inquiry into the 'Great Negro Plot' of 1741, in which New York City's slaves were tried, and burned at the stake. It looks at the asymmetry of the historical record. Can coerced slave 'confessions' be trusted?"

Photo credits, top to bottom: Juliet Van Otteren, Graeme Gibson, Jerry Bauer, Mary Cross, Marion Ettlinger

We are honored to announce that Joyce Carol Oates will join us as a special guest this January 2009 for Session 2 of Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth, our 27th annual Seminar. Oates's readings and discussions during our 2007 event are memorable for many of us, and we enthusiastically welcome one of the great talents of our time back to the Seminar.

To call Oates prolific is akin to calling water wet. She is the author of more than 50 novels or novellas, more than 30 short story collections, a dozen collections of essays and nonfiction, several poetry collections, and several more collections of plays. She has published stories, essays, poems, and reviews in nearly every major (and minor) publication of the last 40 years; she has written psychological thrillers under the pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly;" and an Oates book has been on The New York Times Notable Books of the Year list for 35 of the last 40 years. Oates has written about such diverse American icons as Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, Stephen King, Sylvia Plath, and extensively on the enigmatic boxer Mike Tyson, whose precipitous rise and squalid fall she covered in the 1980s and 1990s for publications including Life, The Village Voice, and Newsweek. In addition, she founded and edits The Ontario Review, serves as the Roger S. Berlind Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. She is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the Prix Femina.

Oates's most recent book, Wild Nights!, is a collection of short stories about the last days of five American writers. Based on letters, diaries, biographies, unpublished manuscripts, and their own canonical works, Oates creates haunting final chapters for Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway. It is, wrote The New York Times, "a gem of a book ... about creativity and age and the complicated, anxiety-ridden relationship between the two."

Oates joins William Kennedy, Marilynne Robinson, Barry Unsworth, Russell Banks, and others on the list of speakers scheduled for Session 2 this January 15-18 2009. Session 1 is already sold out, and we expect Session 2 will also sell out early. Click here to register or call 1-888-293-9291.

Thomas Mallon is a novelist, essayist, critic, and former literary editor at GQ. He has received the Ingram Merrill Award for outstanding work as a writer, and is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. As the author of historical novels including Henry and Clara, Bandbox, and Dewey Defeats Truman, Mallon is known for richly imagined characters and situations set within crucial moments in United States history. As a critic, he regularly writes about new works of historical fiction; and a collection of his essays, In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing, includes two important pieces on the genre, "Writing Historical Fiction" and "The Historical Novelist's Burden of Truth."

Mallon's most recent novel is Fellow Travelers, an account of a Washington D.C. love affair between Hawkins Fuller, a handsome State Department official, and young Timothy Laughlin, a fervent anti-communist and Senate staffer. Through Laughlin and Fuller, we witness the so-called lavender scare of the 1950s, in which State Department employees suspected of homosexuality were fired as security risks; and are given a ringside seat for the sordid endgame of the Army-McCarthy hearings run by notorious Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In this installment of our ongoing interview series, Thomas Mallon talks about Fellow Travelers, the rumors of Senator McCarthy's own homosexuality, the Obama-McCain election; and the current state of historical fiction, including works by Gore Vidal and William Kennedy, both of whom will join Mallon in January 2009 during our 27th annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth.

Littoral: Are Hawkins Fuller and Tim Laughlin based on real people in any way? Why did you choose to cast these characters in a well-documented era in Washington?

Thomas Mallon: Fuller and Laughlin aren't based on any particular historical figures. Both contain bits and pieces of people I've known in my own life, which makes them like the characters one finds being created by just about any novelist of the "non-historical" sort.

    In this regard, though, one thing in particular interested me about Laughlin. When I started to make notes on him, the first thing I put down was "Date of birth: November 2, 1931"– exactly twenty years earlier than mine. I realized that in some ways I was going to be writing about what my own life might have been like had I been born two decades earlier.

    As for putting him and Fuller into this well-documented era: in this respect, they fit in with a lot of the people in my novels– minor figures, invented or real (take Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, from Henry and Clara), who get caught up in major historical dramas. The roles that Fuller and Laughlin play in actual events are sufficiently small that I don't think their presence on the scene disconcerts well-informed students of the period, the kind of readers who actually know, say, Charles Potter and the other members of the McCarthy committee. Even to such readers the presence of a staffer like Tim would seem believable.

    In any case, this has become my preferred avenue into history– the plausible presence of a small person who's seeing big things.

L: How is Fellow Travelers different from your other work? Are the rumors of McCarthy's homosexuality given more credence in your novel than in the historical record?

TM: Fellow Travelers is different mostly, I guess, in terms of subject matter. (The basic method and techniques are pretty much the same.) My novels had often contained a lot of politics, but homosexuality hadn't before this one been more than a leitmotif (a couple of minor characters, like Frank Sherwood in Dewey Defeats Truman).

    As for the McCarthy rumors: I suppose my book does give them more credence– or at least attention– than the historical record does, but there were certainly whisperings at the time about gay experiences McCarthy may have had from Wisconsin to the Wardman Park Hotel. His rather sudden marriage in middle age struck his detractors as suspicious.

    It's often been suggested that Roy Cohn had some sort of hold of McCarthy, whereas Fellow Travelers invents a situation in which it's David Schine who has something on the senator. I don't, of course, know the true nature of McCarthy's sexuality. In the novel I portray him as somebody with a sloppy libido that's governed by alcohol. He's mostly homosexual but likely to grope anyone when he's had too much to drink.