Biographical fiction
•
As most of you know by now, I love and adore historical fiction. It&#;s my preferred genre, although inom will have a go at most things if it&#;s well-written, has an interesting premise or I&#;m in the mood. However my go-to, when inom need a guaranteed read, a read I can simply fall into with comfort and ease, will always be historical fiction.
Historical fiction fryst vatten a novel where an author sets their book in a period of time before their own and populates it with fictional characters (think Thomas Keneally, Geraldine Brooks, James A. Michener). To refine this even further, you could include authors who write about the immediate past. A time they may have lived through themselves or perhaps their grandparents lived through, providing a anställda perspective to the historical context (think Tolstoy, Zola, Harper Lee).
In and around this are books that might be classified as alternate histories (think The Man in the High Castle or Stephen King&#;s 11/22/63 or George Orwell&#;s
•
Reading in a Boom Time of Biographical Fiction
We live in an age when biographical novels have become hugely popular, some of them rising to a high level of artistry, as in Colm Toíbín’s The Master (Henry James), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (Virginia Woolf), or Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde (Marilyn Monroe). It’s not that fine biographical novels haven’t always been around (see Lotte in Weimar, Thomas Mann’s exhilarating novel about Goethe, or Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, a magisterial book published in ). But similar works—really good ones—have been coming at us thick and fast in the last few decades.
Traditional literary novels are in decline. The figures bear this out, as in the most recent NEA study of American reading habits. A student of mine recently said to me in frustration: “I just can’t get interested in ‘made-up’ lives.” And I must admit, my own tastes have shifted over the decades away from inven
•
What Is Biographical Fiction?
My forthcoming book There Will Be Consequences(February ) is a biographical novel. Unlike my previous works, which incorporate both fictional and nonfictional characters, this book contains only people who exist in the historical record, but is still written as fiction.
Biographical fiction as a genre strives to present “real life” people in a way that moves beyond the strictly biographical to imagine their emotions at specific moments in their lives. It also bridges the undocumented gaps that strict biography can’t cover by imagining what might have happened, given what we know.
The earliest biographical novel is believed to be W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence about painter Paul Gauguin. Perhaps the most famous are Irving Stone’s Lust for Life about Vincent Van Gogh and Michael and Jeff Shaara’s books about the Civil War.
More recent biographical fiction include Hillary Mantel’s Wolfe Hallandnovels about the British royalty