Matthew Pearl
Matthew Pearl
Matthew Pearl is an American novelist and educator. His novels include The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, The Last Dickens, and The Technologists. Editions have been published in more than 40 countries...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 October 1975
CountryUnited States of America
elements explosive fictional historical history
What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.
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When it comes to referring to Dickens's life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.
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Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.'
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I still have my high school copy of the collected Poe - missing its covers and pretty worse for the wear.
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I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.
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When Dickens arrives in the United States in November of 1867, he's already in questionable health. So by the end of the trip, he was really in failing condition, and really, he would never recover completely after this point, and you could sort of draw a straight line to his ultimate decline and death.
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'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.
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For several years at the University of Virginia, students had an annual tradition of raising hell around campus, burning tar barrels and shooting pistols into the air.
certainly
If we think about what mystery entails as a genre, certainly a big part of it is a resolution.
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Harvard was also a little bit of a villain in my first book, 'The Dante Club.' I guess there might be a way to make Harvard more of a sympathetic presence, but it's such a powerful institution that it more naturally lends itself toward not necessarily a negative but an obstructionist element in a story.
films
Films have become shorter in length, jumpier in style, and simpler in story so that they can be more easily transferred to once under-exploited international markets.
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Up until the final decade of the nineteenth century, the United States and the United Kingdom did not recognize copyright in each other's creative works.
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When Charles Dickens arrived in Boston Harbor, where he started, they had to keep it secret because there was such a mob of people expecting him, and they actually chased down his carriage at the hotel, the Parker House Hotel.
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My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including 'The Black Cat' and 'The Purloined Letter.' Being an animal person, I had trouble with 'The Black Cat!' I got hooked instead by 'The Purloined Letter,' a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin.