Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

Writing my previous post on Fiction’s Role in History, I ran across an Inside Higher Ed article titled Why Historical Fiction Matters . The author, Steven Mintz, lost me in the third paragraph when he wrote, The fact that many of the genre’s best-known practitioners—like Howard Fast, James Michener, Margaret Mitchell, Leon Uris, Gore Vidal and Herman Wouk—wrote for a popular audience didn’t help the classification’s reputation. The sentence displayed academic elitism, as if anything popular was common and base. I'll bet Mr. Mintz likes Shakespeare without realizing that he was the equivalent of a primetime television scriptwriter. He wrote plays that would draw an audience, the bigger the better. Shakespeare had about forty people's livelihoods in his ink-stained hands. If he wrote a flop, his cast and crew didn't eat. The comment reminded me of Raymond Chandler's quote above. Read all about it!

Characterization is a crucial element of fiction. Novelists must know the people they write about, or they may behave in ways contradictory to their personality. Historians don’t generally try to get inside a subject’s head, while a novelist thrives in invading others’ privacy. A novelist makes personality and motivations central to the story.  Before I write the first word of a historical novel, I read several biographies of the major characters to get a perspective on their distinctiveness. I read positive and negative perspectives to get a grasp of who these people were. Where do you find these personal descriptions of historical figures? First, I go to history books. Historians do not normally try to portray their subject’s thoughts and feelings, but they don’t ignore personality. Good ones dutifully quote contemporary descriptions of the subject to satisfy documentation requirements. The second place I go to is to the historical figures’ own writing. A person’s writing always ...

The Historical Novel Society judged Maelstrom as "polished, authoritative historical fiction with clear thematic ambition and solid craft." Complete Comments This is a confident and historically grounded opening that immediately signals seriousness of intent. Beginning with the photographic sitting at Abraham Lincoln’s appointment with Mathew Brady is a smart choice: it frames image-making, reputation, and political self-fashioning as thematic pillars before moving into the Cooper Union speech. The recreation of the address is strong, and the rhythm of the quoted passages carries authentic moral weight. The historical detail—gaslight counts, architectural layout, political context—feels well researched without becoming pedantic. Characterisation of Lincoln is respectful yet human. His physical awkwardness contrasted with intellectual command works well, and the moment where he anticipates shifting from legal to moral argument adds welcome internal tension. Where the chapter c...

  When writing a historical novel, I read lots of books, even for my westerns. Almost all are nonfiction, and some are contemporaneous with my novel's period. It takes time to read twenty or thirty books, and my memory of late is not as good as it used to be, so to access this material months later, my notes must be consolidated, annotated, and made searchable on a computer. Therefore, I read research books as eBooks on a Kindle. Why? First, this compact little device lets me carry an entire library with me wherever I go. In fact, I prefer the smaller, original Kindle because I can easily slip it into my back or front pocket. Any time I need to wait becomes productive time. I can whip out my Kindle and read instead of getting frustrated. I even read while on hold for some unempowered Help Line operator checking with a higher-up. I'm on my seventh Kindle and feel lost if it's not within arm's reach. The second reason I prefer a Kindle book to the printed variety is the H...