2007 James Fenimore Cooper Prize Acceptance Speech: Thomas Mullen

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Thank you very much. I'm quite honored to receive the Cooper prize and still somewhat amazed that my name will be alongside those of the many great novelists who have claimed the prize over the years.

I'd also like to thank you for allowing a lowly novelist to crash your historians' club. I have to admit that, while I was writing the book, and again during the tense post-writing, pre-publication months, I don't think I could have imagined anything more terrifying than giving a talk in front of an audience of historians. A novelist who wades into history does so cautiously, wary of the fact that out there in the vast, unknown audience are people who know far, far more about this time period and location than he does, and that if he gets anything wrong, he'll be exposed as the charlatan he fears himself to be. In fact, when I received a phone call a couple of months ago from someone claiming to represent the Society of American Historians, my first thought was, Oh no, what did I do? So, the fact that the esteemed jury found my book worthy of the Cooper prize can only mean that, as all fiction writers must, I did an admirable job of concealing my most egregious errors.

As a fiction writer, after all, I traffic in lies, imagination, myths, and tall tales. But facts are often what jumpstart the process. I first had the idea for this book nearly a decade ago, when I read an article that mentioned that some uninfected towns in the western United States decided that the only way they could protect themselves from the flu epidemic was if they blocked off all the roads leading into town and posted armed guards to prevent anyone from entering—I immediately imagined a scene in which two bored guards were unexpectedly presented with a lost traveler, someone who was desperately cold and hungry and needed their aid. I wanted to know what the guards would do, how they would judge this stranger's life against their own lives and the lives of their families. Would they do the charitable thing and take this person in, or would they forbid him entrance and force him to starve and freeze to death in the woods? Still, the thought of writing a historical novel struck me as hugely intimidating, a whole order of magnitude beyond the ordinary complexities of character, setting, plot, and style that any novelist must tackle. So I let the idea sit for many years. For a time I even considered placing the story in some sort of post-apocalyptic landscape, just to spare myself the historical research and the onus of having to get so many facts straight.

This has reminded me of an experience I had giving a radio interview to promote my book; I had done a fairly good job of anticipating the interviewer's questions, but then she hit me with a real stunner. She commented that the book had a lot of history in it, and she asked if I'd ever considered writing it as straight nonfiction. I was aghast—seconds of dead air passed while I sat there, speechless. I can't think of anything I would want to do less than write nonfiction, particularly history—it just seems so unfathomably difficult. I am in awe and very much appreciative of you who not only can do this work but also seem to enjoy it; the poring over of microfiche, the translations of old diaries, the detective work of tracking down lost letters and family records in old town halls. I, however, am most at home sitting at my desk and letting my imagination run wild, unfettered by fact or form or fear of making a mistake. In many ways, I feel I benefited from the fact that, in my research, I was never able to find any more information about these reverse-quarantined towns, and therefore was able to invent a storyline without either fealty or faithlessness to what had actually happened to them. Still, I am hugely in debt to the various historians whose work on World War I-era America, the 1918 flu epidemic, the violent labor clashes of the 1910s, the early feminist movement, and the free-speech debates of the Wilsonian era all brought this period to life for me. I listed all the works I consulted in my author's note, so I won't bore you with a long recitation of them, but I will say that the more I read about 1918, the more I came to realize that the best way to tell my story would be to ground it in our own very real, very messy, very fascinating past.

Finally, I've often been asked if I intended any of the connections that some readers and critics have made between the dilemmas my characters faced and such contemporary issues as the war in Iraq, terrorism, immigration, bird flu, and AIDS. And I think that just as a historian tries to remove his or her own biases or judgments when assessing the time period or historical figure he or she is studying, I as a novelist tried not to let my awareness of contemporary events skew my narrative. At the same time, I know that I am a product of my time and place, and I admit that much of what made 1918 so fascinating to me were the echoes I felt from then to now. The sense of fear; the warnings from government to be watchful and on guard against sinister forces in our midst; the conflict between isolationism and engagement; the sense that the world is shrinking; the attempts to portray ourselves as more patriotic than our political opponents; and the temptation to close ourselves off from that which we don't understand. But I never felt that my job was to point out interesting connections between time periods or offer clever comments on how history repeats itself. I'm most interested in using my fiction to ask questions about human nature: Who are we? Why do we do the things we do? What are our moral guidelines, and how well do we really follow them? What does it mean if we shuck off these guidelines when we feel threatened? My experience of studying the 1918 era only served to underscore how immutable human nature seems to be, and how the societies that we have created are very much the product of our own yearning but flawed character. And I would hazard that most historians are similarly asking questions about human nature: Why did this historical figure do that? Why did these people allow that to happen? Why did this event occur and not its opposite? The dates and names and places are so much less interesting than trying to understand the reasons—or lack of reasoning—behind them. So I thank all our great historians for helping to erect the framework for understanding our pasts and our present, and for allowing fiction writers like myself to fill in the small gaps with the spackle of our imagination.

And of course I'd like to thank my editor at Random House, Jennifer Hershey, my agent Susan Golomb, and my wife Jenny for all their wonderful help on the book. Thank you very much.