Historical fiction

Max Byrd | November/December 2004

In 1804, an obscure English sailor named John Davis published an imaginative account of the seventeenth-century romance between Pocahontas and Captain John Smith and called it The First Settlers of Virginia, An Historical Novel.

Losers' Resentments and Obsessions in Alternative History

Fredric Smoler | September 1999

THE BEST OF TODAY’S ALTERNATE HISTORY ISN’T LIKELY TO CHEER YOU UP. BUT IT CERTAINLY WON’T BORE YOU.

People have been writing alternate history since at least the early nineteenth century, but for most of that time, it was a tiny sub-genre of popular fiction. Now it’s being produced in industrial quantities.

My Favorite Historical Novel

October 1992

What Can You Learn From a Historical Novel?

Daniel Aaron | October 1992

“Good fiction writers,” says the author, “write the kind of history that good historians can’t or don’t write.”

“What if many of a so-called Fact were little better than a Fiction?” asked Carlyle.

Lincoln Fiction & Fact

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. | December 1987

A new novel about Lincoln examines questions about civil liberties in wartime, staff loyalties and disloyalties, and especially, Lincoln’s priorities

This interview took place at the end of May in William Safire’s office at the Washington bureau of The New York Times. Safire is a trim and affable man of fifty-seven.

Interview With A Founding Father

Garry Wills | May/June 1987

James Wilson was an important but now obscure draftsman of the Constitution. Carry Wills is a journalist and historian fascinated by what went on in the minds of our founders. The two men meet in an imaginary dialogue across the centuries.

His red judge’s robe looked faded and theatrical by daylight. People at the bus stop stared at him, and his face flushed near the color of the robe. But he busily ignored them.

History For Rent

Geoffrey C. Ward | April 1987

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a column lamenting the very small number of video cassettes available to those of us who like historical documentaries.

Matters Of Fact

Geoffrey C. Ward | August/September 1984

Vidal’s Lincoln

WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S wartime secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, serialized their life of the President in Century magazine in 1885, Lincoln’s old friend and law partner William H.

Historical Fiction

James A. Michener | April/May 1982

Our most popular practitioner of the art speaks of the challenges and rewards of writing

Georg Brandes, Denmark’s leading literary critic, had a low opinion of historical novels.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.