Novels starring real people

September 14, 2007 1:28 PM

What good, recent novels depict the lives of actual, once-living people?

I'm thinking along the lines of Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. I'm looking for fictional depictions of real people, preferably those who lived within the last century. I suppose the genre of this sort of book would be "historical fiction," but as in the case of Horan's book, the main characters (Frank Lloyd Wright, Mamah Cheney) are real people about whom quite a bit is known, and the history is fairly recent.

posted by annabellee to writing & language (29 comments total)

Keeping the World Away by Margaret Forster, about Gwen John and what happens to one of her paintings.

Not quite the last century, but interesting: Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, by Harriet Scott Chessman, about Mary Cassatt and her sister.

Interesting question.
posted by paduasoy at 1:33 PM on September 14, 2007

Oh, and I didn't care for The Hours, but that has Virginia Woolf in it.
posted by paduasoy at 1:35 PM on September 14, 2007

Julian Barnes' recent novel Arthur & George is based on the real lives of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji.
posted by wheat at 1:38 PM on September 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

The Master is a good recent example, focusing on Henry James.
posted by mochapickle at 1:40 PM on September 14, 2007

I'm a big fan of Jerry Stahl's I, Fatty, about Fatty Arbuckle.
posted by box at 1:46 PM on September 14, 2007

I'm reading a book right now called Critique of Criminal Reason. It has Immanuel Kant helping to solve a murder mystery in Prussia in 1803.
posted by lpsguy at 1:46 PM on September 14, 2007

The Chinatown Deathcloud Peril features various 1930s pulp writers as characters, including H.P. Lovecraft and L. Ron Hubbard.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 1:46 PM on September 14, 2007

Longing is an interesting (and pretty good) novel about Robert and Clara Schumann.
Review
posted by bassjump at 1:50 PM on September 14, 2007

The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr feature all manner of turn of the 20th century New York characters, including Teddy Roosevelt.

I really enjoyed Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks, which is a massive novel about John Brown.

I hated The Dante Club but it does fit your guidelines in that it features Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell.
posted by fancypants at 1:54 PM on September 14, 2007

That reminds me, mochapickle, there's Author! Author! too - also about James, by David Lodge. I haven't read it, but there's a small chunk of it here.
posted by paduasoy at 1:55 PM on September 14, 2007

The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Urrea was written about one of his relatives a few generations back. It has quite a bit of historical research behind much of the novel.
posted by ejaned8 at 1:56 PM on September 14, 2007

Nevermind - not in the last century -- reading too fast.
posted by ejaned8 at 1:57 PM on September 14, 2007

D'oh! I also missed the "last century" bit. That pretty much disqualifies all of mine.
posted by fancypants at 1:57 PM on September 14, 2007

I want to say that Iris Rainer Dart's Beaches and its sequel Beaches II (yes, the ones upon which the movie was based) feature celebrities as almost cameo characters. I know that Gorman Bechard's The Second Greatest Story Ever Told features a number of media, religious, and political figures as characters. (It tells the story of God's daughter coming to Earth in the mid-'80s. Quite good, actually.) There is also a series of alternate history anthologies edited by Mike Resnick which pretty much primarily feature famous figures of all sorts — Alternate Presidents, Alternate Kennedies, Alternate Warriors, Alternate Outlaws, and Alternate Tyrants.
posted by WCityMike at 2:06 PM on September 14, 2007

This question is fun: Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates, about Marilyn Monroe.
posted by mochapickle at 2:20 PM on September 14, 2007

Older than you want, but Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like The Sun fits the rest of your criteria (about Shakepseare).
posted by mds35 at 2:21 PM on September 14, 2007

...And Road to Wellville, by TC Boyle, about the man who invented corn flakes. I'd argue that Devil in the White City by Erik Larson could count as fiction simply because of the writing style...
posted by mochapickle at 2:31 PM on September 14, 2007

Just barely in the last century - Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow is probably the classic in this genre.
posted by dropkick queen at 2:49 PM on September 14, 2007

a bunch of tim powers' stuff. "declare", "last call", "expiration date" are the ones i've read.

and speaking of spy stuff, "the company" (recently adapted by TNT for tv) has real and fictional people intermingled.
posted by rmd1023 at 3:02 PM on September 14, 2007

The Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer. Someone looking for novels might reject these because you'll find 'em in the Sci-Fi section, but all of the characters were real people.

Also, unsure where the 'recent' line gets drawn -- I would'n't consider Ragtime recent, so this series isn't, either; as the last volume came out in '83. Therefore, I second Devil in the White City.
posted by Rash at 4:46 PM on September 14, 2007

Chang and Eng
posted by bondcliff at 6:07 PM on September 14, 2007

Carter Beats the Devil features a number of historical characters, not least Carter himself, but is heavily fictionalised.
posted by thoughtless at 6:17 PM on September 14, 2007

Robert Anderson, Little Fugue (Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes)

Beryl Bainbridge, Young Adolf (yup, Hitler)

Pat Barker, the Regeneration trilogy (various WWI folks, including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen)

Christopher Bram, Father of Frankenstein (director John Whale; the source for the film Gods & Monsters)

Colum McCann, Dancer (Rudolf Nureyev)

Jay Parini, Benjamin's Crossing (Walter Benjamin)

Gore Vidal, the various twentieth-century volumes in his America series (politicians, Hollywood types, even Vidal himself)
posted by thomas j wise at 6:22 PM on September 14, 2007 [1 favorite]

Dominick Dunne, Another City, Not My Own (fin-de-siecle Los Angeles, with a certain emphasis on the OJ Simpson trial)
posted by box at 8:29 PM on September 14, 2007

This isn't in the last century, but I read Margaret George's Autobiography of Henry VIII this summer and I really enjoyed it. It was very readable, and pretty accurate.
posted by lilac girl at 9:39 PM on September 14, 2007

Two more Beryl Bainbridges - Every Man for Himself (which I haven't read) and The Birthday Boys. First is about the Titanic, second about Scott's expedition to the South Pole.

Are you asking because you want to read more books like this, or are you working on something?
posted by paduasoy at 12:44 AM on September 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Thank you, thank you! What a phenomenal list!
posted by annabellee at 6:05 PM on September 16, 2007

Real people figure as secondary characters in these but still critical to the story:

Alan Turing in Cryptonomicon

A whole bunch of real baseball players in Shoeless Joe, including the title character, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and also J.D. Salinger. In the movie version, Field of Dreams, they kept the baseball players (probably because they were mostly dead) but rewrote the J.D. Salinger character as a fictional reclusive writer.
posted by derMax at 5:08 AM on September 17, 2007

Yesterday's NYT had a glowing review of David Leavitt's new novel, The Indian Clerk, about the relationship between Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, a clerk from India with no formal training who became one of the great math geniuses of the 20th century.
posted by mediareport at 7:46 AM on September 17, 2007