Author's Journal ...

My Love of Historical Fiction

Most of the readers of YANKEE GOLD likely enjoy historical fiction. I’ll begin this discussion by telling you something about my experience with that genre. I’m not sure whether I began to love the genre through a book I read or whether the subject of Stephen Elkins caused me to read historical fiction.

Somewhere between the ages of 8 and 10 my father and I walked a street below the campus of Davis & Elkins College and my father pointed to the two lovely homes on the hill above. He told me that Stephen Elkins had a young career in the west, in New Mexico. He became a politician there and was elected Congressman. My dad didn’t know why Elkins had stayed in the east and married a woman whose father was a West Virginia senator. I told Dad that since no one in our new little town of Elkins knew anything about Elkins’ early career, I sensed a scandal. I wasn’t wrong.

As a child I read a great deal. I was an only child and we had no relatives in West Virginia where we moved from Pittsburgh when I was eight. I read the usual fare for my era: Heidi, the Nancy Drew series, and Little Women. Somehow, I was introduced to All This and Heaven Too by Rachel Field. I was spellbound and hell bent on getting more. That’s how my reading and writing career began. I loved the era of Rachel Field’s ancestors and the stories surrounding the laying of America’s transatlantic cable. Her writing set off my fascination with American history