Thomas Mallon

New poems by the poetry editor of "The Saturday Review of literature."

Thomas Mallon has masterfully appropriated a jubilant legend (and famous headline) of modern American history - Harry Truman's upset victory over Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election - and built around it a midwestern Midsummer Night's Dream. Set in Dewey's Michigan hometown of Owosso, this is the captivating story of a local love triangle that manages to mirror the national election contest. Just as the voters must decide, so must Anne Macmurray choose between two suitors - the ardent UAW organizer and his polar opposite, the wealthy lawyer who's certain he will ride to state-senate victory on Republican coattails. As they weave a small-town tapestry of dreams and secrets, the people of Owosso ready themselves for the fame that is bound to shower down upon them after Dewey's sure-thing victory. But as the novel - and history - move toward election night, we watch the citizens of Owosso - in particular, Anne Macmurray and her suitors - await the outcome of the election and a rearrangement of their fates in a climax filled with suspense, chagrin, and unexpected joy.

An investigation into the art and history of diary writing as well as a guide to the great diaries and private chronicles of the famous, the infamous, and the anonymous.

Historical novel about the competing claims of faith, love, and politics during the McCarthy era. Washington, D.C., early 1950s: a world of bare-knuckled ideology, hard drinking, and secret dossiers, dominated by such outsized characters as Richard Nixon, Drew Pearson, Perle Mesta, and Joe McCarthy. Timothy Laughlin, recent Fordham graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism, meets a handsome, profligate State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leading to Tim's first job and--after Fuller's advances--his first love affair. Now, as McCarthy mounts an increasingly desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on "sexual subversives" in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives. The novel moving between the Senate Office Building and the Washington Evening Star, the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATO's front line in Europe, energized by political drama, unexpected humor and heartbreak.--From publisher description.

Review

Blending fact with fiction, as he did so successfully in Aurora 7, Thomas Mallon here vividly recreates the tragic story of Henry and Clara Rathbone, the young couple who sat in the President's box on the night of Lincoln's assassination. Born of socially prominent families and raised as stepbrother and stepsister, Henry and Clara began a passionate love affair that thrived against the wishes of their parents and society around them. Henry had fought with distinction from Antietam to Petersburg, while Clara attracted the favor of President and Mrs. Lincoln. But their witnessing of the event that shook the entire nation changed their lives forever, leading to guilt, madness, and eventually murder. Relying on historical evidence, Thomas Mallon brings to life one of the most fascinating though little known tales from our nation's history. His talent as a novelist is fully in evidence in this astonishing and moving story.

"Nearly forty years have passed since Ruth Hyde Paine, a Quaker housewife in suburban Dallas, offered shelter and assistance to a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina. For nine months in 1963, Mrs. Paine was so deeply involved in the Oswald's lives that she eventually became one of the Warren Commission's most important witnesses.". "Mrs. Paine's Garage is the tragic story of a well-intentioned woman who found Oswald the job that put him six floors above Dealey Plaza - into which, on November 22, he fired a rifle he'd kept hidden inside Mrs. Paine's house. But this is also a tale of survival and resiliency: the story of a devout, open-hearted woman who weathered a whirlwind of investigation, suspicion, and betrayal, and who refused to allow her enmeshment in the calamity of that November to crush her own life.". "Thomas Mallon gives us a disturbing account of generosity and secrets of suppressed memories and tragic might-have-beens, of coincidences more eerie than conspiracy theory. His book is unlike any other work that has been published on the murder of President Kennedy."--BOOK JACKET.

From the author of A Book of One's Own and Stolen Words comes a delightful and wide-ranging investigation of the art of letter writing.Yours Ever explores the offhand masterpieces dispatched through the ages by messenger, postal service, and BlackBerry. Thomas Mallon weaves a remarkable assortment of epistolary riches into his own insightful and eloquent commentary on the circumstances and characters of the world's most intriguing letter writers. Here are Madame de Sevigne's devastatingly sharp reports from the court of Louis XIV, F. Scott Fitzgerald's tormented advice to his young daughter, the besotted midlife billets-doux of a suddenly rejuvenated Woodrow Wilson, the casually brilliant spiritual musings of Flannery O'Connor, the lustful boastings of Lord Byron, the cries from prison of Sacco and Vanzetti. Along with the confessions and complaints and revelations sent from battlefields, frontier cabins, and luxury liners, a reader will find Mallon considering travel bulletins, suicide notes, fan letters, and hate mail--forms as varied as the human experiences behind them.Yours Ever is an exuberant reintroduction to a vast and entertaining literature--a book that will help to revive, in the digital age, this glorious lost art.From the Hardcover edition.