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What the couch next to the writer’s desk ought to look like
Partial bibliography The Battle of Carthage: Border War in Southwest Missouri, July 5, 1861 Borderland Rebellion: A History of the Civil War on the Missouri-Arkansas Border Civil War St. Louis The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens A Concise History of Bulgaria Conversations with E. L. Doctorow Crossroads at the Spring: A Pictorial History of Springfield,…
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Who are we writing about? The challenge of Gulliver’s dilemma
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels poses several upendings of size to point out human fallacies of perspective. The Lilliputians, five to six inches high, see Lemuel Gulliver as a “Man Mountain” and find his outsized complexion and the quantities of food he consumes to be grotesque. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver is tiny and finds the giants who…
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What would E. L. Doctorow do?
In the book Conversations with E. L. Doctorow edited by Christopher D. Morris, E. L. Doctorow is asked again and again about history, accuracy, and historical fiction, especially in regard to one of my favorite novels Ragtime. Doctorow believes fiction is its own system of knowledge, and adds “there is really no fiction or nonfiction;…
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A fiction that keeps making history: ebooks do cost money
Dear Editors at Financial Times: I am pleased to see the attention David Gelles and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson focus on the unsettled but exciting waters publishers now navigate (“A Page is Turned….” February 9). While much of the article informed readers greatly about the challenges and opportunities publishers face, I am disappointed that no one from…
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For an answer, let’s get a pinch of Heine
Reading Georg Lukács The Historical Novel, I think I’m finding one source of the chafing between the writer of fiction set in the past and the historian. In his chapter on “The Classical Form of the Historical Novel” Lukács praises Sir Walter Scott as the original and in some ways the greatest historical novelist. From…
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History is in the heart of the beholder and the mouth of the ranger
Travel for University of Arkansas Press in the late 1990s took me to an unforgettable Missouri town, Arrow Rock, and the whole environ along the banks of the Missouri River. As a sidetrip to a day of events at the Missouri Folklore Society meeting, I drove over to the National Military Park at the battlefield…
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Collective memory and the celebration of Saints
[A] saint was commemorated on a liturgical feast day (and the most important might have several feast days, as did Saint Brees: in The Black and Gold Legend, Joachim de Marigny explains three such commemorations associated with Brees’s draftment, his captivity, and his ascension to Lombardi; these recall his being drafted to the National Football…
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The Founding Legends and the Problem of Who Dat?
Timothy T. Isbell, a friend and an author whose books I have been honored to promote, cracked this joke on facebook. It is far too clever to leave unrepeated: When The Who plays at halftime at the Super Bowl, I wonder how many of the really younger generation will look at their parents and ask…
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Unwinding the story, or Give him enough rope
For those forced to read history, passages that describe everyday life or economic output in a period must be like slogging through genealogical lists of begats in the Bible. But for the motivated fiction writer… well, these passages provide a geeky thrill. An example, in Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern…
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The hope of justice and the sorrow of lists
Michael Fellman’s Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War is a book one finishes and never forgets. Unassailably, artfully, humanely this is how great historians write. But for the native Missourian, his is a hard book to read. His concepts of psychic numbness, survival lying, and the unwinding of all…
Fiction and History 