“I often tell people who want to
write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about. Read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to
stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get
back to the original sources.” – Thomas Mallon
An award-winning Novelist, essayist,
and critic, Mallon (whose 65th birthday is today) is known for
historical novels that are renowned for attention to detail and context as they
provide their readers into a “fly on the wall" view of the historical events swirling around them.
The author of 9 novels, including Henry
and Clara, Two Moons, and
Watergate, he also has written one of the definitive works on
plagiarism, Stolen Words, and two
volumes of his insightful essays. All
told, he has written 16 books and hundreds of news stories, features and essays
in his long career as journalist and creative writer.
As a journalist who
is fairly well versed about Watergate, I really enjoyed Mallon’s terrific
crafting of his 2013 novel Watergate, a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner
Award for Fiction. The colorful
retelling of the Watergate scandal from the perspective of 7 characters is a
truly great read.
Historical fiction, he said, is the
genre in which he is most interested. “I think the main thing that has led me
to write historical fiction is that it is a relief from the self,” he said. 
As for advice to writers of historical fiction, he offered this system that has
worked so well for him. “For almost
every novel I've written, I've read the daily newspaper of the time almost as
if it were my current subscription. For Two
Moons, which was set in 1877, I think I read just about every day of the Washington Evening Star for that year.
For Henry and Clara, I read the Albany Evening Journal of the time.”
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