Thomas Mallon

Thomas Mallon (born November 2, 1951) is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author's crisp wit and interest in the "bystanders" to larger historical events. He is the author of nine books of fiction, including ''Henry and Clara'', ''Two Moons'', ''Dewey Defeats Truman'', ''Aurora 7'', ''Bandbox'', ''Fellow Travelers'', ''Watergate'', ''Finale'', and most recently ''Landfall''. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism (''Stolen Words''), diaries (''A Book of One's Own''), letters (''Yours Ever'') and the Kennedy assassination (''Mrs. Paine's Garage''), as well as two volumes of essays (''Rockets and Rodeos'' and ''In Fact'').

He is a former literary editor of '' Gentleman's Quarterly'', where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column in the 1990s, and has contributed frequently to ''The New Yorker'', ''The New York Times Book Review'', ''The Atlantic Monthly'', ''The American Scholar'', and other periodicals. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and served as Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2005 to 2006.

His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose style. He was elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.

Early life and education

Thomas Vincent Mallon was born in Glen Cove, New York and grew up in Stewart Manor, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Arthur Mallon, was a salesman and his mother, Caroline, kept the home. Mallon graduated from Sewanhaka High School in 1969. He has often said that he had "the kind of happy childhood that is so damaging to a writer."

Mallon went on to study English at Brown University, where he wrote his undergraduate honors thesis on American author Mary McCarthy. He credits McCarthy, with whom he later became friends, as the most enduring influence on his career as a writer.

Mallon earned a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he wrote his dissertation on the English World War I poet Edmund Blunden. On sabbatical from Vassar College in 1982–1983, Mallon spent a year as a visiting scholar at St. Edmund's House (later College) at Cambridge University. It was here that he drafted most of ''A Book of One's Own'', a work of nonfiction about diarists and diary-writing. The book's rather unexpected success earned Mallon tenure at Vassar College, where he taught English from 1979 to 1991.

Writing career

Thomas Mallon's writing style is characterized by wit, charm and a meticulous attention to detail and character development. His nonfiction often explores "fringe" genres—diaries, letters, plagiarism—just as his fiction frequently tells the stories of characters "on the fringes of big events."

''A Book of One's Own'', an informal guide to the great diaries of literature, was published in 1984 and gave Mallon his first dose of critical acclaim. Richard Eder, writing in the ''Los Angeles Times'' (28 November 1984) called the book "an engaging meditation on the varied and irrepressible spirit of life that insists on preserving itself on paper." In ''A Book of One's Own'', Mallon covers a wide range of diarists from Samuel Pepys to Anais Nin. He explained his enthusiasm for the genre by saying: "Writing books is too good an idea to be left to authors." The success of ''A Book of One's Own'' won Mallon a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1986.

Mallon then began publishing
fiction, a genre in which he'd informally dabbled throughout childhood and young adulthood. Mallon published his first novel, ''Arts and Sciences'', in 1988 about Arthur Dunne, a 22-year-old Harvard graduate student in English. Soon after its publication, in 1989, Mallon released a second nonfiction book called ''Stolen Words: Forays Into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism''.

''Henry and Clara'', published in 1994, established Mallon as a writer of historical fiction from that point forward. The novel traces the lives of Major Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, the young couple who accompanied Abraham Lincoln to Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. A story of star-crossed lovers intermingles with personal and political tragedies and spans the couple's first meeting in childhood to their eventual derangement. Mallon's writing career took a dramatic turn when John Updike praised ''Henry and Clara'' in ''The New Yorker'', calling Mallon "one of the most interesting American novelists at work."

Historical fiction, Mallon has declared in interviews, is the genre in which he is most interested as a writer. "I think the main thing that has led me to write historical fiction is that it is a relief from the self," he explains. American political history has been perhaps his main subject and interest; in 1994, he was the ghostwriter of former Vice President Dan Quayle's memoir, ''Standing Firm''.

After the publication of ''Henry and Clara'', Mallon went on to write seven more works of historical fiction, including his most recent novels, ''Watergate'' (2012), ''Finale'' (2015), and ''Landfall'' (2019). ''Watergate'', a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, is a retelling of the Watergate scandal from the perspective of seven characters, some familiar to the public memory, such as Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods, and some brought to light from the sidelines of the scandal, such as Fred LaRue. ''Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years'', one of the ''New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015, takes readers to the political gridiron of Washington in 1986; the wealthiest enclaves of southern California; and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where President Ronald Reagan engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev. Readers of ''Finale'' find themselves in the shoes of many characters both central and peripheral to the Reagan presidency––from Nancy Reagan to Richard Nixon to actress Bette Davis.

''Landfall,'' Mallon's latest novel, takes place during the George W. Bush years against a backdrop of political catastrophe: the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina, in particular. At the center of the narrative, though, is a love affair between two West Texans, Ross Weatherall and Allison O'Connor, whose destinies have been intertwined with Bush's for decades.

Awards and nominations

* Phi Beta Kappa, 1972
* Rockefeller Fellowship, 1986–87
* Ingram Merrill Award (for outstanding work as a writer), 1994
* Great Lakes Book Award for Fiction, 1998, for ''Dewey Defeats Truman''
* National Book Critics Circle Award

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