Year Created: 1992
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Description: American Heritage recently asked a wide range of novelists, journalists, and historians to answer a question: what is your favorite American historical novel, and why? The results made two things clear: that the question was not nearly so simple as it sounded; and that it had been well worth asking. John Demos, a former professor of history at Yale University, listed William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner as one of his favorite historical novels.
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I am an eager reader of such works, leaving aside the matter of “professional interest.” I’ve almost come to think that good novelists do better with at least some aspects of historical re-creation than “good” historians do. Two books come immediately to mind. William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner seems to me to convey the inner feel (for lack of a better term) of slavery better than any scholarly work I can think of. (And that is going some, since slavery has been a particularly lustrous area of scholarship in recent years.) I have a similar response to Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, which I frequently recommend to my students as the best single book on family history. Again, my criterion is “inner feel”—the specific textures of experience, the subjective alongside the objective dimension. Why, I find myself asking, can’t we historians do as well? The answer may be that we know more than we customarily allow ourselves to say.
—John Demos, professor of history, Yale University