How to explain the genesis of such a series?

As you will see in my bio sketch, I am a patriot in love with my country's noble heritage if not blind to its shortfalls and failures and cruelties. The American Story became a lifework series of up to ten or more novels because I came to see that the period 1800-1860 is crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our true values -- and because it is filled endlessly with wonderful stories. My aim is to portray these events that bear on our lives today and on America today in terms of the boiling emotions of the men and women of history whose struggle at the beginning holds passionate interest for today.

For these were the key years when the nation formed and became whole and democracy as we know it today crystallized. At the start we were a handful of states along the Atlantic, and by the end the continental nation we know today was fixed, washed on opposite shores by opposite oceans.

Each novel in the series is a discrete, complete story rich in drama and romance. Each focuses on a distinct period -- the Louisiana Purchase, the Texas Revolution, the opening of the Oregon Trail, the second and coming-of-age war with Britain in 1812, the opening West precipitating the long slide toward the gathering crisis that culminated in Abraham Lincoln's election and changed America forever. Ten are projected; four have been published: EAGLE'S CRY, 1812 ,DREAM WEST and TREASON. A fifth, MERIWETHER, will be published in 2002.

Each novel uses the historical figures of its period as main characters. We see Andrew and Rachel Jackson, James and Dolley Madison, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Sam Houston, John C. and Jessie B. Fremont -- the men and women who lifted the nation to greatness. History itself, the great story of American growth, provides the engine or plot line. But this is not fictionalized history; this is story, fully realized men and women playing out their fate, never sure if success or failure lies ahead, all done in terms of the hopes and dreams and loves and losses of these vigorous, loving, fighting, intensely human people of strength and courage.

Sweeping from Jefferson's day to Lincoln's, these novels make us see what went before in raw human terms that demonstrate that great events then, as they do today, turned on vivid human emotion. Jefferson's election in 1800 started the flowering of modern democracy while in parallel came the expansion to the new continental form. At the same time recognition of slavery as a moral evil and as a potentially fatal threat to that same democracy was taking hold as continental growth pushed the nation toward explosion. The novels in The American Story trace in rich narrative the convergence of the two trends, democracy and continentalism, and bring us to the explosion that lies ahead.

These are novels, not histories. They are fiction in the sense that I position the reader within the character's mind, emotions, hopes, reactions, intentions. The figures of history become figures of story, the meaning of their lives illuminated. Occasional fictional figures appear to take us places that presidents and their ladies don't normally go. But the presentation of the historical characters' natures and the events to which they react are as accurate as I can make them. I am creating the inner lives of great historical figures as they deal with the seminal events that made America what it is today -- in short, I am giving you the created inside story of a known outside story. History tells you the outside story; I reach inside to the human story that I believe gives you a new dimension of understanding as well as the pleasure of rich reading.

History is the narrative of human affairs. It is sober and straightforward and relies on documentation. But to say this is to say that it labors under vast restrictions, for statesmen don't record their hates and loves and hard driving ambitions and bitter angers that you and I know color all human events. Certainly I saw this reality in our own time in my years as a national correspondent covering White House, Capitol and national politics. My aim is to reach through the limits of history to give you the humanity that expresses the reality of The American Story in the emotions we know daily.

It is not history but I present it as a form of truth.

And I make it fun to read.

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