its plot, characterization, and background. The question is not a new one. Henry James, W. D. Howells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Dreiser, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, and John Dos Passos, novelists firmly rooted in the canon of American literature, all wrote historical fiction. But, are they considered historical novelists?
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What makes an historical novel? What makes it valuable? Is it believable? Do we accept the story as true? Or do we accept it simply as fiction? Thinking back to Herodotus and Thucydides, both blurred the lines between fact and fiction simply to make the story more complete and more readable. And, writers of historical fiction often provide great insight into historical events. Both James Fenimore Cooper and William Gilmore Simms understood the importance of the frontier and wrote about it at length long before Frederick Jackson Turner enunciated his thesis. Thus, the fiction presaged the theory.
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There are, I think, two kinds of historical fiction in the broadest sense. The first takes a generalized event or a series of events and places characters and stories within them. C. S. Forester's "Hornblower" series, a vastly popular set of novels, has taught a generation more about the naval history of the Napoleonic era and the psychology of command than we, as historians, could ever hope to do.
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The second kind of historical fiction is that practiced by Kenneth Roberts. A very specific event, with known characters, plot, and outcome, is fictionalized, often with a reason. In
Boon Island
Roberts wanted to write an allegory of good and evil, with Americanism triumphant in the end. On the title page of his own copy of the novel, Roberts wrote: "the result of six years of contemplation, two years of struggle, and the most agonized summer I ever spent." It is interesting to note that, for the first time in his career, Roberts felt it necessary to use what is now a standard disclaimer on the verso of a title page: "With the exception
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