Children's Novel Set in North Adams During Great Depression
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — New Williamstown summer resident Elizabeth Winthrop is writing a novel set in North Adams, and has gotten a warm welcome in the city as she has done research for the book.
"It's a historical novel for children told in letters, and it's part of a series called 'Dear Mr. President,'" Winthrop said in a recent interview. "And in my case I've been asked to write about the Depression and [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt]. So I have chosen to set it in North Adams with a 12-year-old Italian immigrant girl, second generation, writing to FDR and saying, 'This is wrong and that's wrong and what are you going to do about it?'
"And I have to make up her letters and I have to make up FDR's letters in return. So it's a fascinating project, because I have to learn everything I can about North Adams in the '30s, everything I can about the Italian immigrant experience, everything I can about FDR and what he was doing during those years and the whole Depression."
The purpose of the series is to introduce children, aged 8 to 12, to a historical era and then hope that they will move beyond it and read more. Supplementing the books will be a website with more information.
Winthrop would like to hear from anybody who has very specific and detailed memories of the Depression, 1934 to 1939, in North Adams.
"The people have been so incredibly helpful and excited about the project," she said.
She spoke to 86-year-old North Adams native Tony Talarico and several of his friends. Talarico told her that the Depression-era organization, the National Recovery Administration, cut his hours in half, from 80 hours a week to 40 hours a week.
"That's the kind of thing that will spur my fictional mind, so I can see the little girl writing to FDR and saying, 'Now, wait a minute, you cut my father's time in half, you know.' And FDR would write back and say, 'But more people have work now,'" Winthrop said. "So it's marrying the history and the story which is always the interesting part."
"I've always been fascinated by history. I love reading about it," she said. "I have two novels that are very popular called 'The Castle in the Attic' and 'The Battle for the Castle,' and they're time-travel books, where William, the 10-year-old boy, goes back in time to the 13th century. So I did a lot of research on 13th-century England."
She said these books are doing well thanks to the Harry Potter books craze, and "The Castle in the Attic" has been optioned for a movie. Writing historical novels has its challenges, however.
"You start out thinking, 'Gee, this is going to be easy,' because the history's right there, but it is always more complicated because you can't shove the history around," she said. "You have to fit your story into the context of the history. ...
"I feel it's really important to try and get the history correct. I want a North Adams resident like Tony [Talarico] to read this book and say, 'Yes, that rings true, that could have happened.'"
Winthrop has done a considerable amount of reading on FDR and has a personal connection to the Roosevelt family.
"My grandmother was Theodore Roosevelt's niece, so she was Eleanor Roosevelt's first cousin. So I heard a lot about FDR in that context in those years," she said.
What has she learned about the area in the Depression?
"In general, one thing I've learned is that North Adams did not suffer as badly from the Depression as a lot of other places and there's a part of me that says, 'Well, gee, I should have set this in the Dust Bowl,'" Winthrop said, noting that greater suffering in the Depression could be found in the Plains states, in New York City, and among the sharecroppers in the South.
"And I thought, 'Let's look at a town where there was definitely hardship and suffering but not as acute.' The other thing I've learned is, of course, most of the Italian families had huge gardens. And they always had had huge gardens," she said. "So they ate out of their gardens, and that alleviated. ...In New York you couldn't have a large garden, and in the Dust Bowl it would blow away. ...
"I learned that most of the mills here did not close down, but they cut back the salaries."
The book will include photos and graphics, including a timeline. If all goes according to schedule, the book will probably be published in the fall of 2001.
Winthrop's father and uncle, Stewart and Joseph Alsop, were both famous columnists. They wrote together for the Herald Tribune syndicate; later on, Stewart wrote for The Saturday Evening Post and Joseph kept on writing a column.
"So I grew up completely surrounded by writers. I'd come home in the afternoon and I'd hear that old clickety clack of the old Underwood typewriter, and it would be my father in the house," Winthrop said. "And I used to think, 'This isn't a very hard job. You know, he doesn't even have to go to an office.' You'd come in and there would be all sorts of interesting people sitting in the house being interviewed, like John Glenn or Robert Kennedy or LBJ ... but I was just a kid. I thought, 'Who are these boring old men,'" she said with a laugh. "But I did learn you could support a family by writing."
Winthrop grew up in Washington, D.C., and went to Sarah Lawrence College.
"They completely encouraged you being a full-time writer. They had a great writing staff, Grace Paley was there, E.L. Doctorow was there, and I loved studying there, and I wrote a lot of short stories," Winthrop said. "Then I went right from there to work for a publishing house in the children's book department. I really wanted to learn about children's books."
She started writing fiction full-time in 1974. She has written books for children and novels for adults.
"The great thing about children's books is, first, you finish them more quickly," she said. "Sometimes it doesn't work out, but if it works out, you might finish a book in a week."
"I have a very deep access to my childish self, so that makes it easy for me to write children's books, that part of it," she said. "I can connect to what a child would feel quite easily. I don't know why, it's just something I've never lost. I've had children, but I had this even before I had children."
Daughter Eliza is 25 and son Andrew is 23.
"So they're no longer sources for me. There was a time when I used to just chase them around and listen to everything they said and write it down," Winthrop said. "And one day I hear Andrew saying to Eliza, 'Don't tell mom, she'll just put it in a book.'"
Winthrop describes her two novels for grown-ups as psychological thrillers. "In My Mother's House" is about three generations of American women, opening in 1886 and closing in 1974. Her most recent novel is "Island Justice."
"It's about an island off the coast of New England and what happens there in the wintertime when all the summer people have gone away," she said. "So it's about community and all the good parts of it and all the terrible parts of it."
Winthrop and her husband, Jason Bosseau, just bought a place in Williamstown last November.
"Because I'm a writer I can move around and come up whenever I want, really," she said. "And my husband's a teacher, so he gets the whole summer off. So he and I came up for the summer. And we live in New York the rest of the time."
Winthrop had some familiarity with Berkshire County, as during the summer of 1969, she was a reporter for The Berkshire Eagle. Last year, they had come up to attend the Williamstown Theatre Festival.
She had long wanted to live in a college town, and often thought of Williamstown, though she hadn't been there very often. Driving around town, Winthrop suggested to her husband they buy a house there.
"It's was a very impulsive decision, but it was clearly the right one," she said. "One of the funny parts of this is the editor for the book I'm setting in North Adams is the sister of Lewis Cuyler, who was the North Adams Transcript editor. So, I had always heard about North Adams and of course I knew about it from writing on The Berkshire Eagle, and I loved the Berkshires.
"And when we first came here I drove over here quite a bit and read 'Steeples,' Joe Manning's book, very early on and I thought, 'Wow, this is a great town.'"
She has several writing projects in the works for both children's books and a novel for adults.
