Blog

The Blacklist Era

Despite a longstanding love of film and the darkened theatre, I had never given much thought to the Hollywood blacklist until the 1999 Oscars when the Academy gave a special award to Elia Kazan, the legendary director – and cooperating witness to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Television

Television is an important part of my novel, The Great Pretenders. Doing the research, I was astonished to find that the first talkie of Cyrano de Bergerac was actually made for British television in 1938.

The Power and Peril of the Past

Crescendo, like Beggars and Choosers, These Latter Days, Caveat and other fictions of mine, explores the power and peril of the past.

What If

The novelist’s central question.

For Love of Paris

Though I am a life-long Francophile, I had never read Les Misérables until after I saw the musical in London in 1986. The book seemed to me a tale of injustice and identity, yes, but more than that, a love poem, a paean to the city of Paris.

Caveat

For years I carried in my wallet a short article from the L.A. Times about a drought in 1916. The city hired a rainmaker, who brought rain, who actually unleashed a monstrously destructive flood. The inspiration behind Caveat.

Beggars and Choosers

Beggars and Choosers is the story of a group of poets, one who stayed true to the dream, and one who traded that dream for academic power.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

Some moments in American history are embedded forever in the national imagination, our collective memory.

Neither Fish Nor Fowl

Thus the great pleasure of writing novellas: the tale is just as long as it needs to be, and if in that loose definition, it remains neither quite fish nor fowl, not a mini-novel, nor a overblown story, well tant pis as the French say.

The Music Room

A concert inspired me to create, at least on paper, the noisy lives of children, two abandoned little girls, who live with music lilting through their lives.

The Butler in the Pond

"The novelist is one on whom nothing is lost." ~Henry James By 1980 I had achieved two important life goals: Little, Brown had published my first novel, and I had a beautiful son, Bear. A toddler at the time, Bear instinctively recognized that the clack of the...

These Latter Days

These Latter Days, a vast, brash, unruly novel, took me seven years to write. I was creatively unable to move on to another book till I had wrestled this one to the ground, and seen it into print.

Figs Napoleon with Leaves of Time

American Cookery is a big, broad-canvas novel of the West. A novel of migration and immigration, it reflects the California that I grew up in where everyone was from somewhere else. Some people (like my father) were uprooted by World War II when he joined the navy,...