Tonight (Saturday, September 26), James Ellroy appears at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland as the closing event of the 2009 Fall for the Book festival. I’ll be introducing Ellroy at tonight’s event, and my recent interview with Ellroy has been posted on the Washington Post Book World’s website here. (Listen directly by clicking here.)

UPDATE: The Ellroy event went great — half-sermonizing, half-showmanship, and all of it celebrating the “printed word,” specifically Ellroy’s own, of course. See a pic and a recap here.

On Tuesday, September 22, Alfred A. Knopf will publish James Ellroy’s Blood’s A Rover, the third and final installment of the Underworld USA novels that began with American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand. The new book is not only a fine finish to that trilogy but also strikes me as both Ellroy’s most ambitious novel (drawing on seven different perspectives) and the most accessible entry into the trilogy. As with its predecessors, Blood’s A Rover continues to explore how private lives can impact very public and highly political events, spanning in this case from the aftermath of the King and Kennedy assassinations to the eve of the Watergate break-ins. But this new book is also, at its heart, a love story, with each of the three leading men — Wayne Tedrow Jr., employed by Howard Hughes; Dwight Holly, reporting to J. Edgar Hoover; and Don Crutchfield, a window peeper turned obsessive investigator — falling under the spell of women, including a radical liberal activist, Joan Rosen Klein, who may stand as the most complex female character in all the author’s books.

Later this week, the Washington Post Book World will podcast my recent phone interview with Ellroy; I’ll post that link as soon as it’s available. Then on Saturday, September 26, at 7 p.m., Ellroy will make his only D.C.-area appearance at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland — the closing night headliner of the 2009 Fall for the Book Festival. (I’ll be there; shouldn’t you too?) In the meantime, I’m glad to preview that more formal interview and that upcoming reading with a quick conversation that Ellroy and I had earlier this summer, offering insights both into the book and into the man behind it.

Art Taylor: Blood’s a Rover marks a magnificent end to the Underworld USA trilogy, a crowning achievement for sure. Had you seen these books as a trilogy from the very beginning?

James Ellroy

James Ellroy: I knew the second novel would be my big novel of the 1960s. The history was easy to foresee: the civil rights movement, the ultimate assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, more Cuban exile shit, more mob shit, Howard Hughes buying up Las Vegas, general civil rights unrest, the Klan, and my two survivors from American Tabloid, Ward Littell and Pete Bondurant, getting further into the shit. It took longer to put Blood’s A Rover together, because going from ‘68 to ‘72, you’re going to have the summer of the political conventions and the ‘68 election and all that hoo-ha, but my mob guys had to get to a cool locale, and it took me a while to come up with the Dominican Republic and Haiti. It’s full of voodoo, which is cool shit and certainly intensifies all the black militant shit in L.A.

It’s been interesting to try to chart the line between documented/accepted history and your re-visioning of that history in all of these books. How do you approach that research?

One of the questions I never answer is what’s real and what’s not. The established history is there to be culled, to be analyzed, and then I extrapolate off of it fictionally with both real-life and fictional characters. For example, Don Crutchfield in Blood’s A Rover is a real-life private eye here in L.A. He has a website, and he’s a very successful Hollywood private eye, largely involved in the Michael Jackson pedophile cases. [Note: This interview took place before the death of Jackson.] I realized I could utilize Crutchfield differently. But he and I will never say what’s real and what’s not. Did he really go to the D.R. and kill all those people, kill a lot of Castroite Cubans? Well, maybe, maybe not.

Blood’s A Rover looks at the wages of right-wing political action and explores liberal activism in new ways — with characters examining their own ideologies and changing as a result.  Is any of this related to recent history in America, or is it solely embedded in the history of that era, or do various characters’ choices and actions stem from your own reflections on politics?

This has nothing to with the world today or the world over the past several years — either the current man in the White House or his predecessor. I conceived of this book before any of that shit started to happen. What I wanted to write was a book that’s about the necessity of belief and about the exigent factors of political conversation and spiritual conversion. I wanted to create a diverse panoply of characters who thought a great deal about what things meant. Wayne Tedrow was utterly exhausted morally from his racist journey in The Cold Six Thousand, and he certainly did not start out as a racist. And he keeps blundering around, killing black people, and then he falls in love with a black woman. This represents a seismic shift in my dramatic thinking. Dwight Holly becomes radicalized, and so does Don Crutchfield. It was the time, and I didn’t realize it until a lot of personal events intersected within my life: the dissolution of my marriage, my turbulent love affair with a left-wing woman named Joan, and my turbulent love affair with a married woman named Kathy who had a daughter who wasn’t mine, the basis of Karen in the book.

Each of the characters here seem to be looking for women — Dwight Holly is looking for love and family with Karen and finds a passionate connection with Joan; Wayne Tedrow is trying to find something with Mary Beth Hazzard; and Crutch is literally looking at woman and pursuing the women central to the case and, poignantly, searching for his own vanished mother. In other interviews, you’ve said you were putting aside talking about your own mother, but Crutch seems to be echoing some of that longing and obsession, and your new series for Playboy is all about your “pursuit of women.”  Women have often played important roles in your fiction, but it feels like the goals are different here, the stakes a little higher somehow, yeah?

Yes, it is. I’m writing a memoir that will come out in book form next year. The first two parts have been serialized in Playboy — in the April and June issues — and then the rest will appear in September and November. Women have been the big obsession of my life. It’s the biggest story of my life. It’s bigger than the story of my life. My mother and her murder, so I’m writing this memoir which is called The Hilliker Curse.

Tough to get away from that story?

Yeah, it is tough to get away from it. So why run?

Each of your novels has been consistently more ambitious than the one before — an admirable raising of the stakes as an author — and in this book it strikes me that you’re delving into different social and political viewpoints more completely than you have in previous books: Marsh Bowen’s journals, Karen Sifakis’ journals, Joan’s letters and then her own section at the end. Was delving into those viewpoints part of a self-conscious “upping the stakes”? Or what, in your opinion, makes Blood’s a Rover stand out as different from and better than your previous books?

The emotional resonance of this book. It’s not quite as complex as the last two novels. It’s a more open-hearted book. There’s the pathos of Don Crutchfield who’s  the voice of American ingenuity. I transposed my past, being a window peeper with a dead mother, to his past. I made Crutchfield younger than he is in real life. I didn’t go around killing communists or fomenting revolution in the D.R. But I did a lot of the early perverted shit that Crutchfield does in the book. And it’s wrenching, his love for Joan, it’s wrenching. And they have very few moments together toward the end of the book. Dwight Holly’s relationships with Karen Sifakis is wrenching. It’s preestablished in the text that the relationship has been going on for a period of years when the book opens. There’s children in this book, there’s a lost child in this book, there’s families. It is utterly different from any other book I’ve ever written. There’s a closeted gay black cop — very very bright and very very guarded and seethingly angry.

And that black cop, Marsh, and Dwight Holly develop a respect, a relationship.

Yeah, a Klan boy and a bright black kid from L.A. These people — they may be specious. Karen calls herself on her speciousness all the time. They may be hypocritical. Karen is the most introspective character in the book and calls herself on that all the time. But they pay for their lives in blood. And they change and they care about the world and they want to change the world. And their thinking and their actions shift radically. And then everybody’s does. And then it just all goes away at the end. It disperses, leaving the kid alone. If the last hundred pages of that book don’t break your heart, then you don’t have one.

Critics of your other books have accused you of being racist, sexist, homophobic. Do you pay any attention to that criticism?

I don’t pay attention to it. I’m empathetic with people. This book does not represent an exponential shift in my thinking. It’s about people from 1968 to 1972 and about the lessons I learned from Joan. All I really want is to get her one up in San Francisco. I still have her address. I just want to put it in her hands with all my love and an expression of my thanks. And then maybe see her at a book gig and just wave to her across the room.

I had a series of relationships with women that burned my life down, and I wrote a different kind of book. And then I wrote a book about women. And then I’m gonna write a new kind of book next that I’m not gonna talk about. ♦

I’m pleased today to host an interview between two great writers — and to present this interview as the first post of my recently redesigned site. Here, Tara Laskowski, the Kathy Fish Fellow at SmokeLong Quaterly, talks to Jessica Anthony, author of the highly praised novel The Convalescent. The two writers were classmates in the MFA program at George Mason University, and Anthony returns to Mason on Wednesday, September 23, for an alumni reading as part of the 2009 Fall for the Book Festival. Tara introduces the novel — and the interview — here:

Jessica Anthony’s debut novel, The Convalescent, hit the shelves earlier this summer to rave reviews. (Check out this one at the San Francisco Chronicle.) Anthony was the winner of McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award and graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. As McSweeney’s proudly writes on their web site about The Convalescent: “It is the story of a small, bearded man selling meat out of a bus parked next to a stream in suburban Virginia . . . and also, somehow, the story of 10,000 years of Hungarian history.”

I’ve been a big fan of Jessica Anthony’s work ever since we shared a fiction workshop class in grad school, and I can see why Barnes & Noble chose the book as a recommended summer reading pick, part of their “Discover Great New Writers” series. It’s a sharp, smart book that’s as weird and charming as its main character.

Tara Laskowski: In many writing classes, professors will say, “Write what you know.” You obviously haven’t stuck by that rule with this novel. What are the challenges of that, and what are the benefits?

Jessica Anthony

Jessica Anthony: When I started writing fiction, I often struggled with real life and invention. I felt bogged down by all sorts of things: whether I was being unfair to a person I knew; how I could use something interesting that happened to my advantage—but as soon as I let go of writing what I “knew,” as soon as I began aiming for pure unadulterated invention, the boundaries suddenly disappeared. There was no need to sort out what in my life was useful to fiction because it was suddenly all useless. It was a very freeing, happy feeling not to have to rely on experience to tell a story. So I don’t see much benefit for ‘writing what you know,’ whether in fiction or non-fiction. I have never had much interest in heavily autobiographical fiction, because I always found myself asking: “Why isn’t this an essay?” And what do we know of anything, really? If you have a character who has lost a parent and you have also lost a parent, you and your character experience that loss in wildly different ways (usually for the story to work, the further you are from your own experience the better, otherwise you may suffer defending the weaknesses in your story with that embarrassing insistence: “But it actually HAPPENED that way…”). If you are an essayist, memoirist, journalist, or fiction writer, it seems to me that you’re probably better served by writing what you learn, observe, or investigate. Reading what a writer has sought out in truth and fiction is far more interesting than reading what a writer knows.

How did you first get the idea of The Convalescent? Did it start with Rovar, or somewhere else?

I think this question is sort of linked to the one above. I usually begin writing with voice, and it’s very abstract. I wrote poetry before writing fiction, and I have always loved the musicality and innate rhythms of language. The prosody. That’s where voice lives. Take the opening to Lolita, for example:

Lolita: light of my life. Fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The opening to this novel is pure music — it also, as we learn, is the voice of Humbert…. But all of this is a roundabout way of saying that I begin with voice, and learn about the idea of a story as I go. For the novel, I began with a merging of the voices of Mersault from The Stranger and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. I loved the short sentences. Then I was walking through the Seven Corners mall while living in northern Virginia, and passed a McDonald’s. There on the wall was a picture of a schoolbus that said “MEAT BUS.” I started writing, and thought about something Alan Cheuse once said about character, how we all must know the full history of our characters lives and where they came from. I doubt he meant to travel back to the Ninth Century, but that’s where the investigation of Rovar took me. I recalled an afternoon walking around Budapest with a Hungarian man, Tibor, who said, “Hungarians have no history, they have only myth.” From there, the kernel for the real story began. So I think these two questions are linked because our life experience does matter—perhaps I would not have taken such an interest in Hungary had I never visited the country—but experience should never be used as an excuse for a lack of guts or imagination.

As a first time novelist trying to break into the publishing industry, what was the hardest part of the process?

At some point, in order for anyone else to want to read your story, you have to realize that writing fiction is not a demonstration of one’s ego; it’s the obliteration of it. You just have to write better sentences. Learning that was the hardest part for me. People want to publish great stories, but you have to fiercely try and give them one. It’s like what Hemingway said about how all fiction writers must have built in bullshit detectors. You know when you’re doing something well, and when you’re cheating. As soon as I started being honest with myself about writing, it was easier to find audiences…. All that said, the publishing business is a fickle beast. So it helps to do your research and figure out which magazines, agents, and presses might like your style.

With a polo captain, Carly Simon, a weed named Marjorie, and crazy Virginians popping up all over The Convalescent, we get a lot of quirky, amusing parts of this novel. What was the most fun part of writing this book?

I love this question. I just wrote a blog on Powell’s last week about the importance of fun and experimentation in writing. For me, so much of this book was fun to write, but especially the moments when I began to realize that the history was intertwined with the present. I was writing both narratives separately and never planned on one influencing the other, or vice versa. But when I saw how each could actually tell the other’s story, things really started to snap into place, and I felt like I had found the momentum. I am also a giant nerd. I genuinely loved reading all about the emigration of the Hungarians from the Steppes of Asia. Those are also writerly answers, however—so let me give you a more fun, less writerly answer, which is: “St. Benevolus.” [Editor's note: The name is what the narrator calls his erections — a word which will surely help to triple this interview's traffic.]

What’s next? Do you have another novel in the works, or are you still recovering from the energy sap from this one?

I am working on a new novel. When I handed in the final draft to McSweeney’s last spring, four years after it began, I hopped on a plane and walked across Scotland. Literally. Walking. It’s great way to start over: a hundred miles on foot, coupled with a nice sampling of Scottish whisky. You can’t beat it with a stick. ♦

Meet Anthony on Wednesday, September 23, at the Fall for the Book Festival, where she’ll be reading with fellow novelist O.H. Bennett, author of The Lie, and poet Nancy Pearson, author of Two Minutes of Light (a selection from which is reprinted here).

Check out another interview with Anthony at The Rumpus.

In addition to monitoring updates on the North Carolina Literary Festival (see last Friday’s update here), I also keep close tabs — very close — on another big fall book event: the Fall for the Book Festival, September 21-26 at George Mason University and throughout Northern Virginia, D.C. and Maryland. How close are those tabs? Well, for several years, I’ve actually been helping to market the festival, and occasionally I’ve even suggested a writer or two for each year’s line-up.

While that disclosure may rightly suggest some bias on my part, I feel certain that Fall for the Book’s attractions and achievements stand tall without any spin or slant. This year marks Fall for the Book’s 11th annual festival, and the 2009 headliners are two of the finest writers in the U.S. — novelist E.L. Doctorow, winner of this year’s Fairfax Prize, and novelist, poet, and filmmaker Sherman Alexie, winner of the Mason Award. The festival overall spans a wide variety of genres — fiction, folklore, mystery, history, poetry, politics, spoken word, kids events, and more — and the schedule strikes a balance between young, up-and-coming talents and writers plucked straight from the bestseller lists, often with books hot off the presses. For example, Doctorow’s latest novel, Homer and Langley, will be released just on the eve the festival, and one of my favorite writers of all-time, James Ellroy, closes the festival by debuting his novel Blood’s A Rover, the final installment of his massive and ambitious Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, published just days before his appearance.

This past week, Fall for the Book posted its full schedule of events online, with more than 100 writers, scholars and performers on the line-up, and events scheduled in communities throughout the region,“bringing the rock stars of writing to your backyard”(as one of our marketing catchphrases has put it).. With the festival set, I send festival director Bill Miller a few questions, urging him to look back at Fall for the Book’s past, test the pulse of its present, and maybe even forecast its future.

Art Taylor: This year marks the start of the festival’s second decade, and you’ve been involved since the beginning. What has been the biggest change in Fall for the Book since that first year, and what’s the most important change/improvement/initiative you’re working on for future years?

Bill Miller, Fall for the Book

Bill Miller: From the beginning, Fall for the Book has been lucky enough to bring in some of the best writers of our time as festival participants. Even when we had no money to spend on honoraria and travel for them, these writers agreed to join us and let our audiences experience their work first-hand. Now, thanks to the generous and caring support of numerous businesses, individuals, and agencies throughout the region, Fall for the Book is able to accommodate a wide variety of readers’ interests by presenting writers whose works form the standards of today’s published words. That we are able to present such stellar writers and more than 100 of them every year is the biggest single development, I think, since the beginning of Fall for the Book.

As we go forward with Fall for the Book, what we envision is a festival that literally spans out to embrace the whole region, with writers of the highest quality appearing in all areas of the metro region. This is what we sometimes call the distributed model of the festival and under it, each area will have a part of the festival housed within it. This will enable people to attend events that are interesting and informative without having to all come to one location to do so.

The festival offers two major awards each year: the Fairfax Prize and the Mason Award. What kind of standing do these awards have in the larger literary community? What efforts do you think are needed to earn the prizes more recognition or greater respect?

Yes, each year, Fall for the Book selects two writers whose works the festival’s awards selection committee believes warrants recognition. I don’t know how the larger literary community perceives the awards, but I would say that there has been less visible attention paid to them than I would have thought. The thing is, we don’t try to make news with these selections. Our goal is to honor writers who have contributed significantly to the literary arts and the growth of readership for the literary arts. To anyone who is paying attention, then, these probably seem like logical choices rather than newsmaker choices. If we want to garner more attention for the awards, we probably need to change our goals and incorporate into them some criteria that would ensure that we made news with each selection. Or create one or two new awards with those goals. Something that would surprise people more. I guess I just gave myself a new project to work on.

The phrase literary festival potentially carries some weighty connotations. Is Fall for the Book primarily aimed at fans of big-L literature? Are there events for someone who just enjoys the occasional beach read, for example? And how are you dealing with the seemingly regular reports that book reading is on the decline, or the suggestion that women read and men don’t, or even that echoing death knell for the novel?

In fact, we don’t call ourselves the Fall for the Book literary festival and haven’t since about the second year, for just those sorts of reasons. People indicated in surveys that they had certain expectations about the festival when the word literary was in its title. So even though books remain our focus, we are not a literary festival with or without the cap L. We are more a festival of the literary and cultural arts. Most years, festivals include photography exhibits, music performances, and even dance demonstrations or performances. These are all part of the artistic, creative spirit out of which writing comes, we think, and so make perfect components of a festival dedicated to writing and reading, as Fall for the Book is.

Beyond that, I would note that, yes, we always — always — have a wide variety of writers and books represented at Fall for the Book. Beach reading, science, public issues and policy, essays, memoirs, how-to’s even. We have no one theme or approach but rather try to present something of interest to a wide variety of readers.

Is there a death knell sounding for the novel? I think there are huge changes in store for how we read and the formats in which our books are delivered to us, and those changes may mean large changes in the publishing industry, too. But I think we have to be careful not to confuse change with the death of things. Indeed, the changes may serve to increase readership as they make a wider variety of reading materials available in an ever-larger array of formats. Will we change our name to Fall for the New Format? Or even to Fall for Reading? I don’t think so, but I would expect us to include the new formats and the new publishing modes in the Fall for the Book array of fantastic events.

This year continues to be a tough time both for arts organizations and for the book publishing industry. What are the particular challenges that a festival like this faces in this economic climate?  What are you doing to meet those challenges? And what can fans of the festival do to help out?

Fans could make minor contributions and that would help a lot, actually. This can be done by visiting the Fall for the Book web site and just clicking on “contribute.”

All right, that’s tongue in cheek. Seriously, though, yes, these are tougher times economically and several of our sponsors have had to drop out altogether or significantly reduce their support levels. We began working with all of our sponsors months and months ago to see how the economic times would affect them and their abilities to help Fall for the Book, and then in response to what they told us, we sought additional support from new sponsors and managed the resources we had very frugally so that Fall for the Book festival-goers would not experience a diminished festival this year.

A main goal for us in this climate was just that — to ensure that festival-goers did not experience a diminished festival. And we managed it very well, actually. Our fundraising is on par with last year’s, and our spending management has been carefully tuned to maximum effect. The combination has produced a festival that is even more outstanding than in previous years. Maybe that comes with learning more about what it is you’re doing.

Looking at the 2009 schedule, what event are you personally most anticipating? Is there a favorite author of your own on the program?

Oh, I look forward to it all, to all of them — all of the writers who are coming. Every year, I find myself being like most of the people who come to Fall for the Book, I imagine. I want to go to everything. I used to be able to do that, too. I could get to every event at least briefly. But as the festival has grown and as we have begun to incorporate and build into venues that are not on the main Fairfax campus of Mason, it has been more and more difficult to do this. But doing it that way allows us to get events closer to the people of the region, and brings Fall for the Book into the backyards of everyone in the metro area.

Dennis Drabelle is the author of Mile-High Fever: Silver Mines, Boom Towns, and High Living on the Comstock Lode, released just last week and already earning high praise.  A review in the Washington Post Book World said that Drabelle “provides vivid insight into the mines and the world of Western newspapering,” and Open Letters: A Monthly Arts and Literature Review called Mile-High Fever “a fantastic book, one that instructs and entertains in equal measure, one that sheds some new light on the banging, awkward adolescence of America, revels in an enormous cast of well-drawn characters, and is from first to last a fun reading experience.”

Virginia City, one of the most important of the Comstock’s mining towns, served up its own nuggets of the gunslinging Western myth; as Mark Twain wrote in Roughing It, “The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery were occupied by murdered men.”  But as Drabelle explained in an interview last week at First Person Plural with my friend and fellow writer Kyle Semmel, the region’s history also “crystallizes so much that was going on in America at the time (the late 19th century): robber barons looting the country, while at the same time certain inventions and developments — the cable that will make elevators safe and permit the building of skyscrapers, modular cubes as a construction form that will allow those buildings to really scrape the sky — were being developed in what amounted to a kind of industrial lab. At the Comstock and in San Francisco, where the mining stock market was headquartered, you can see fraud galore as well as the evolution of a new kind of American writing in the newspapers springing up in the mining towns.”

Drabelle has been a contributing editor at the Washington Post Book World since 1985 (and for full disclosure, one of my own editors there), and in 1996 he earned the National Book Critics Circle’s award for excellence in reviewing. In addition to his regular work for the Post, he has also written for publications including The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Civilization, American History, and Smithsonian. Contributing to his background on the topic at hand were six years as a lawyer at the U.S. Department of the Interior, in part monitoring the effects of the 1872 Mining Law on national parks and wilderness areas.  

Drabelle will discuss Mile-High Fever on Wednesday, July 15, at 6:30 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble, 555 12th St. N.W., Washington, D.C., and he’ll also appear in September at the Fall for the Book Festival (which, another disclosure, I also help to promote). On the heels of  the interview mentioned above and in advance of those appearances ahead, Drabelle indulged some questions for me below. 

Art Taylor: This story began as an article for Smithsonian. What brought you to that story in the first place? And then what drew you toward broadening that article into a book?

Dennis Drabelle: Actually, the book began as a not-quite article for Smithsonian. They commissioned it, I wrote it, they accepted and paid for it, and then they changed editors. The new one wanted me to cut the piece in half and then might or might use it, and I resisted. Ultimately, they restored the rights to the piece to me and let me keep the money, and I resold the piece to American History, where it was published.

The article was on William Stewart, and I found my way to him in a very bookish way. I was reading Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (which, despite being written by an Englishman and set in Britain, is in my view the best novel of the Gilded Age). [Note: Newsweek thinks it's the best book about today's world as well.] In the novel American shysters sail to England and sell wildcat mining and timber stocks to unsuspecting British investors. After I finished the book, I consulted The Penguin Companion to Trollope, which said that this episode was probably based on the Emma mine scandal. I researched that, and found that at the heart of the fraudulence was William Stewart, a U.S. senator from Nevada who first made a name for himself as a go-getter of an attorney on the Comstock Lode. I think you can finish the chain yourself: the story kept getting larger and more interesting as I went along, and eventually I thought there might be a book in the Comstock, especially one that emphasized its ties with San Francisco, where almost all the profits ended up. 

San Francisco benefitted greatly from the Comstock — whether we’re talking about banking and finance or even the development of the iconic cable car, which relied heavily on technological advancements made in the mines — and in terms of finance, law, industry, architecture, even literature, the Comstock story offers several influential, even foundational developments for the history not just of the West but also of the nation as a whole. And yet throughout the book, I kept having to remind myself that there was a Civil War going on back East, and a difficult Reconstruction in its wake. How does the Comstock story offer an alternate history of a country in transition, an alternate perspective on what formed the U.S. that we know today? And how has the Comstock story been overshadowed by the Civil War? 

The Comstock was so far removed from the Civil War that its big events were old news by the time they reached Virginia City. But that doesn’t mean there was no connection. Nevada was admitted to the union prematurely in 1864 because the Lincoln administration needed more solid Republican votes in Congress, not to mention the ability to cite the mines’ value in balance sheets when the feds went to Europe looking for credit. And the best thing William Stewart did as a senator was to perfect the language that became the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed (on paper at least) the right of freed slaves to vote.

As for the Comstock being overshadowed, yes, I think it has been—but perhaps not so much by the war (which ended when the Lode’s heyday still had 15 years to run), but by the whole phenomenon of the boom-and-bust mining town. They popped up and died all over the West, and one is pretty much the same as the other—except for Virginia City, where indeed you had all these industrial inventions and developments, along with the making of Mark Twain. 

What stands in your mind as the most positive contribution of the Comstock to the U.S.? Is it industrial advancement? Is it literary, through Twain? Is it that San Francisco cable car? or something else entirely?

I do think it is Mark Twain and the demotic kind of writing that revolutionized American prose. As I said at the end of the book, the best you can say about the great mass of humanity that flocked to Virginia City is that on the whole they had a good time while a few voracious entrepreneurs and speculators were hogging the wealth. But the crackling atmosphere of tall tales and applied wit and polyglot language did lead to something rather magnificent.

Another  follow-up: The Bank Ring, the Bonanza Kings, and the stockbrokers’ schemes — and the disparity between the very rich and the “rest of us” — can’t help to resonate with some headlines in more recent newspapers. How does this tale of boom and bust shed some light on what’s happening today?

One lesson is probably not to invest in mining stocks: there are simply too many chances of being hoodwinked. And I don’t want to get on a soapbox, but on the Comstock you can see the beginnings of the unbridled laissez-faire capitalism that has gotten us in trouble so many times in our history. Stewart made sure that the mining laws gave everything to the miners (which meant large corporations, in most cases, not the romantic image of the rugged individualist with a mule and a pick and a grubstake), with no royalties being paid to the federal government even though most of the mines occurred on federal land. Same with the mining stock market — very little regulation by any level of government. The Comstock may be an extreme case, but I think you can there, in embryo, some of the hands-off trends that have culminated in our current economic calamity.

Back to the question of writing once more: Even beyond Twain, much of the period writing that you quote throughout the book is often beautiful prose. J. Ross Browne’s article for Harper’s; the great excerpts from Dan De Quille (William Wright); even fire chief Kettle Belly Brown’s words in the closing pages — each offers vivid, often lyrical language. But writing about the journals of Alfred Doten, you comment that “many entries are humdrum… but some lines crackle with the wonder of life.” Was finding good writing from this era more often like panning for gold nuggets, or was there, as with the Comstock Lode, a wealth of literary treasure to be mined?

There is amazingly good writing all over the literature of the Comstock. Besides the people you mention—and I totally agree about J. Ross Browne, a fine stylist—there was also Eliot Lord, a fellow who visited Virginia City after the heyday was over and wrote a book-length report under contract with the Geological Survey. Soon, in fact, it was indeed published as a book, Comstock Mining and Miners, and it’s an invaluable source. Among other things, Lord tracked down Bucke, the guy who survived the horrible blizzard that killed the last surviving Grosh brother. Without him, we would not know nearly as much as we do about that tragic episode — and Lord, mind you, was funded by the government. Even Mary McNair Mathews, the keeper of a lodging house, wrote good prose, and her book Ten Years in Nevada is very readable. The conclusion I draw is that before the distractions of electronic media, people paid far more attention to the words they used and the sentences they constructed. The level of superior writing made my research a pleasure from beginning to end. 

You write early in the book about “the difference between sentimental fiction and callous reality” and toward the end you discuss Virginia City as the inspiration for the TV show Bonanza and as a tourist destination today. To what degree did you find that this story supported many of the expectations/tropes of the Western myth and to what degree did this story resist or refute all that?

The reviewer for the Washington Post quite rightly pointed out that I much preferred telling stories of fraud and excessive litigation and heirs trying to break wills over tales of gunslingers shooting it out on the streets of Virginia City. There was some of that, but it was pretty much over by the end of the rush’s first five years, and what, really, does it tell us? Rather than feed the image we already have of derringer-wielding poker players and dancehall floozies, I thought I would follow the money — which, of course, is what brought 15 or 20 thousand people to Nevada in the first place. It’s not so much that the Comstock refutes the Wild West myth as it points out that the myth is a bit shallow: there was a lot more going on in the West than gunfights at high noon.