The best portrayals of real people in historical fiction

Herman Wouk’s The Winds Of War was published more than half a century ago. That makes it an old book. Not a bad thing, but old books do need to be read with a sensitivity to the times in which they were written. Winds holds up well. The story of the Henry family on the eve of WWII is stunning. A long book by today’s standards but so worth reading. Herman Wouk’s early training in radio can be heard in the attention-grabbing passages of domestic drama—soap opera at its engrossing best. But it’s Wouk’s grasp of history and historical figures that has landed this book on my list. Hitler.  Mussolini. Churchill. And best of all, FDR.

“Behind the warm jolly aristocratic surface, there loomed a grim ill-defined personality of distant visions and hard purpose…” One astonishing sentence on page 655. It doesn’t get any better! 

When recommending Geraldine Brooks’ multi-layered and intricately crafted March, another book must always be mentioned. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. March is the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical fiction rooted in Alcott’s classic novel that’s been read and loved for centuries. The March of the title is Jo March’s father in Little Women. In real life, his name was Amos Bronson Alcott. And he was the father of Louisa May Alcott. Brooks tells March’s fictitious story masterfully and with great historical acumen. Her depictions of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are truly historic. Geraldine Brooks is not a historian. Her husband Tony Horwitz was. In Brooks’ case it seems that to fall in love with a historian is to fall in love with history as well. March is the beautiful proof.

Caleb Carr’s novel The Alienist is the work of a military historian. Carr tells the story of how neither his agent nor his publisher wanted him to write historical fiction. So he submitted The Alienist as a true crime story based on an early serial killer. Finally he had to admit he’d made up criminal psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, the alienist, the killer, and most of the other captivating characters in his chilling, savage, and convincing novel. The way historian/novelist Carr describes the glamorous and gritty world of 1896 New York City, J.P. Morgan, and especially Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt makes The Alienist terrifyingly real.

Hilary Mantel was not a historian. She was not a psychologist. She was an insightful and imaginative novelist who wrote in searing psychobiographical style. With Wolf Hall Mantel gave us an understanding of and sympathy for one of history’s most misunderstood and maligned men – Thomas Cromwell – and in the process she transformed historical fiction. When asked if she believed in an afterlife, Mantel answered. “Yes. I can’t imagine how it might work. However, the universe is not limited by what I can imagine.” And yet, I always believed Hilary Mantel’s imagination was limitless. Read Wolf Hall. I think you’ll agree.

It could be that Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth should have been called The Booths. I had the opportunity to ask her about it. She said that the working title had always been Booth. She thought it would ultimately be changed by her publisher, but it was considered strong and remained Booth. Presidential assassins are difficult characters to write about – not uninteresting – even mesmerizing – but at the bottom unlikeable. I experienced this writing about Mary Surratt in my own book. I used a fictitious diary to give readers something not to hate about the only female Lincoln assassination co-conspirator.

In Booth Karen Joy Fowler gave readers John Wilkes Booth’s family to sympathize with and it works because of her skillful portrayal of a real family devastated by one of its member’s heinous acts. Their story was harrowing. Sad. And all too sadly relatable. Yes, maybe Booth should have been The Booths. It’s still a remarkable piece of historical fiction.