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August 05, 2009
Jack Fuller on Abbeville
When I was writing Abbeville, I never imagined that the disastrous economic history of the 1930s would come so close to repeating itself in my lifetime. All I did know was that extremity in one form or another was always ready to test human resilience, and that was what drew me to the story of my grandfather.
I had started writing Abbeville after the dot.com crash of 2000. Soon came 9/11 and the recession that followed. Painful as they were, the downturns of the first two years of the 21st Century did not, of course, compare with the Depression. But they did give a modern frame in which to understand it. I had been thinking for many years about a novel based on my grandfather’s excruciating experience. The mystery was not how history breaks so many but how some manage to hold themselves together, as he did.
Writing Abbeville was for a number of reasons both very personal and at times quite spooky for me. Perhaps most dramatically, as I was working on the book, an enormous circulation fraud surfaced at one of Tribune Company’s newspapers that reported to me. As my colleagues and I tried to get to the bottom of what had happened and who was involved, we ourselves came under scrutiny by federal prosecutors. In the midst of writing about my grandfather’s imprisonment for embezzlement, I could not help feeling the crushing weight of history threatening to repeat itself. In fact, I had to put the book aside. To say that I no longer could get any distance on my characters is an understatement.
Abbeville came out only a few months before the meltdown of the financial system in late 2008. I hope that no one who reads it suffered the challenges my grandfather did. At the same time I hope that Abbeville might helps readers feel what history’s victims felt—and helps the victims find courage that they can survive with souls intact.
Posted in: Our Catalog, Authors Blog, News/Press, | Keywords: abbeville, authors blog, depression, economy, jack fuller, newspress, our catalog, recession
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