While I am tremendously, wildly, and undeservedly blessed to be at Notre Dame, studying under who I am, and in the academic community here that is very healthy, when I read the wonderful stuff that Jill Lepore, an early Americanist at Harvard, I get a little wistful. Lepore is a writer par excellence, and it would have been a great honor to work with her.
Her latest piece in the New Yorker speaks to the relationship between novelists and historians, two storytellers in our culture.
Money quote:
Historians and novelists are kin, in other words, but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes. The literary genre that became known as “the novel” was born in the eighteenth century. History, the empirical sort based on archival research and practiced in universities, anyway, was born at much the same time. Its novelty is not as often remembered, though, not least because it wasn’t called “novel.” In a way, history is the anti-novel, the novel’s twin, though which is Cain and which is Abel depends on your point of view.