American History

[madupont]

weezo
          I suggest that you check the PEN Award winner E.P.Jones
at Amistad Press.  Almost everybody else you have met here at EfE web-site were originally readers of Jones' book at the nytimes.com Book Forums (mostly there to support the books industry, as a back up to their own Literary pages in the Sunday edition of The New York Times; Book Review).
                                By ironic happenstance, the moderator at the nytimes.com Book Forums, happened to do away with the African-American Literature forum(saying almost prophetically but, for him it was a matter of convenience,that "Anyway it will just be  categorically
Literature, inevitably".  Or, something of the kind....? That would depend on which readers/posters bothered to suggest and read books by African-American writers. This was still several years in advance of the Obama-Biden campaign).
                                           It was but a matter of weeks before banner headlines in The New York Times announced that American Novelists were voting on the Best New Novelist in the last 25 years; and a jury of her white peers elected Toni Morrison(who had of course already won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, just before she arrived to teach at Princeton campus. I moved out to Hopewell from Lawrenceville Prep School neighborhood, to cogitate some more on Lindbergh where there was a direct view from my apartment to his former air-strip above the lumber yard (that kidnapping case should have been relatively easy to solve, if Schwartzkopf* had really thought about it)
*Norman Schwartzkopf grew up in a mansion just opposite the Lawrenceville campus,during or after his father was the State Police official directing the Lindbergh case. As a friend in the nytimes.com Western European forum, who had been raised in East Windsor, said to me--"I can just picture little Norman, with a cooking pot on his head and bed sheet off the clotheline for a cape, playing Crusader behind the hedges across from the original Colonial  buildings on the Lincoln Hwy."
                     The commentary that I remember best from the hub-bub that took place like a free for all, in the postings about the article was a fellow poster at EfE who contended she had never met any Negroes who spoke like those for which  Morrison had written the dialogue.  I may have got lost in a plot line or two when I read: Paradise but in the next fifteen years I greatly appreciated the rhythms of the speech patterns the writer had employed after her historical research (I still think that her novel, about the women abiding in the old hotel at a North Carolina former vacation resort for the Black middle-class: LOVE    ought to be made into a movie). The writer, herself, is now touring Europe with the production of her drama: Desdemona.

[weezo]

Maddie,

It would have been much better if you had put your post on the fiction forum, since you are talking about a fiction writer.

If you remember, I am the lady who prefers reading history to fiction. This year has been an exception, as I've read all the Kay Scarpetta and Alex Cross books  while my cataracts ripened, were removed, and I was on steroids which did a number on my memory and comprehension. The easier reading of mystery novels met my need. Now, I'm back to history, having given the two collections to a shipment going to the Philippines to fill the empty shelves of a library.

Of interest, James Patterson, on Facebook, is getting into young readers. His recent release of Middle School seems to have opened eyes at that age level to the delights of reading. I replied, directing him to my Personalized Stories online, and, since he said yesterday he is perusing the great number of responses, am a tiny bit hopeful he will check out my work and perhaps contribute his immense talent to the need.

With a birthday coming up soon, I am studying what the Kindle family has to offer. I just finished reading a huge paperback book that has my hands still in pain and cramping for the effort. The book is more world history than American, and I still need to check out the science he bases his history on before I decide  if it's worthy of recommendation. But I will wholeheartedly recommend "The Abacus and the Cross", again in world history (Y1K) .... which with your Catholic background, you may find interesting.

Again, returning to Anita Wills. Her expertise is in Black Geneology, and that is what she writes in her books. Her books BEG for a good editor, but she has a stubborn streak <grin> .. But her research is excellent!! She and I did an afternoon in Fredericksburg before she did a book signing that evening. She has no reluctance to ring a doorbell and ask, when she can't find a street name to verify what she's read. She was looking for a street on the waterfront that disappeared when they built projects on the site. Her family stories, the product of her interest in geneology, are non-typical for African Americans. Majority of her ancestors were Free Blacks, but one in the mix was a slave on George Washington's plantation who is sometimes mentioned in the literature ...

Maddie, I think you and Anita could be good for each other! Not to mention, you can keep her up-to-date on goings-on in Lancaster, or her, you, as the case may be. As I said, you can find her on Facebook. She also has some groups, forums, a blog, and an weekly Internet radio broadcast where she discusses provocative subjects ....

[bosox18d]

Posting just to put Am History back atop this ahole spammer.They seem to have banned him and he came back with a like name.If they don't delete the spam forums though the forums will be full of this shit before long.

[madupont]

Hint : Neither Edward P.Jones nor  Toni  Morrison  have written Fiction that was not thoroughly based on actual History and historic fact.  I recall
Jones doing five years of research  as a journalist(he was in fact a journalist at Richmond), with a story in mind before he tied it all together.
Slavery in Virginia, the relatively unknown existence of Black slave- holders; the male of the pair is, however, inheritor as the son of a white plantation owner.  The intricate life of a very large scale plantation.
       Paddy-rollers. Refugee slaves. Journalist from Canada come to Virginia to get a story and getting one he didn't expect. And much,much more....

One did feel that one was reading well-written fiction although historic fictional literature. For which Jones won the PEN award.

However, when it comes to Toni Morrison, there is no denying because while she worked as an editor at a publishing house, that factor lent itself to the pursuit of historical research.  She quite often begins with something she wants to investigate and with questions in her mind about what some particular situation will involve. She carefully researches until she hits that "Eureka! moment" where she stops appalled. Then the formation of the novel proceeds in piling up. This used to be out at Canandaigua, in the vicinity of the Finger Lakes region where she had her home.     I  recall my sister-in-law telling me that she drove through there every day when she took a job at Exxon, until she worked out a deal with her girls who were old enough to be trusted and to manage, that she would drive down from Ontario and stay for the better part of the work week  at Canandaigua, after which she drove back home across the border. Thankfully, this was in the period before the post-9/11 crisis.

Morrison's work continued within her own household(after having been an editor in  Manhattan)but, eventually, there came a crisis when she lost an entire novel  because her house burned down. The thought does not cross your mind! But for those to whom it does,that has led to securing finished work or accumulating work in a safety-box at the Bank.
I have never found a mention where she actually names that novel or indicates what it was about, a novel whose name we didn't  need because we would never have the chance to read it. But it is like the death of a very young child. Oops! that is Joan Didion and I haven't gotten up the stamina to start reading it, in my large print edition.

But there is no denying that books of this kind, as literature, do not fall into the  category of being entirely fiction sans history. They have to have that basis in fact, as does Joan Didion's account of going through the dying of her only daughter and becoming frightened at knowing she is now completely alone and aging in this world.