“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
Born
in Glen Cove, NY on this date in 1951, Mallon is an award-winning novelist,
essayist, and critic, known for historical novels providing great attention to
detail and context for readers, sort of a “fly on the wall" view of events
swirling around them.
Mallon
has authored 11 novels – including the multiple award-winning Henry and
Clara and Watergate – and 8 nonfiction books, including one of the “definitive”
works on plagiarism, Stolen Words.
His most recent book is 2025’s The Very Heart of It: New York
Diaries, 1983-1994. Also the author of hundreds of news and feature stories,
he points out newspapers as great research sources for “historical” fiction.
“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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