| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (and Each Other). Ed. by Mark C. Carnes. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. 351 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-684-85765-0.)

The contributors to Novel History are both historians and novelists, who, in the words of the subtitle, "confront America's past (and each other)." In the introduction, the editor, Mark C. Carnes, argues that historians need novelists to help them with emotions and imagination and that novelists need historians to help them "to anchor the imagination to fact." Thus, Carnes insists, the major topic of the volume, rather than literary critique, is the historical imagination, a term that suggests the complex interplay between fiction and fact. 1

Although it includes a discussion of two nineteenth-century texts—Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)—the collection focuses on more recent novels, including, among others, Gore Vidal's Burr (1973), Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter (1998), Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove (1985), Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose (1971), Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (1994), Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991), Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (1997), T. Coraghessan Boyle's World's End (1987), and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (1998). Thomas Fleming writes two essays on his novel Time and Tide (1987), the first as historian, the second as novelist. . . .

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