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My novel Seeing
Calvin Coolidge in a Dream appeared in Spring of 1996 in hardback (see left), in
October that year in paperback (see below). It received several rave reviews, was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year"
and had a clear shot at a National Book Award until the awards committee found out (by
asking me) that I was not a U.S. citizen.
The novel is a domestic comedy on the theme-- well tried by
previous writers (W. Shakespeare, J. Austen, A. Trollope etc.)-- of a rather vain and
foolish man being outwitted by a cunning woman. It is NOT a historical novel about
the Coolidge Presidency. Calvin Coolidge is merely a prop, a plot device. The
novel is set entirely in the early 1990s. Most of the people in it are Chinese
immigrants to the U.S.A.
In spite of the book's not being about Calvin Coolidge, Sheldon Stern, historian at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, was so taken with it he invited me to address a scholarly conference titled Calvin Coolidge: Examining the Evidence, held at the Library in July 1998. My address, "A Novelist Takes on Calvin Coolidge", was printed up in the New England Journal of History, Vol. 55, No. 1. It is reproduced on this web site and explains well enough, I hope, what the 30th President is doing in a book about 1990s Chinese immigrants.