What made you decide to write this non-fiction work? It’s a period that has always fascinated me—a time that set our country on its present course. And it was a natural “prequel” to my last book, “Ike and Dick”—about the relationship between President Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
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Can you talk about your experience of researching this non-fiction work? And the dates of when you began researching and when your research was complete? I was lucky enough to get it done just before Covid arrived. It was unending research, starting in 2014, for more than five years—and took me to Missouri, Washington, Berlin, and Seoul, Korea, among other places. This sort of project doesn’t stop until the publisher says “no more changes.”
What is the date you began writing this piece of non-fiction and the date when you finished writing the piece of non-fiction? I began writing in 2014, and finished the final draft in the summer of 2021.
Where did you do most of your writing for this non-fiction work? Our apartment New York City, and a place we have near Ithaca, N.Y.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I work only on my computer, often with music (many genres), starting in the morning. I don’t drink anything alcoholic.
Please include an excerpt of one FACT or one set of FACTS that you were most impacted by in this non-fiction work. The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. A favorite was finding a private memoir by the concert pianist Eugene List, who played for at Truman’s Big Three dinner in Potsdam, in 1945. He wrote, “But now and then, as I played, I would glance up and there would be Churchill or I would glance up and there would be Stalin. It was like a wild dream.”
Excerpt from Page 37
Army Staff Sergeant Eugene List was a twenty-seven year-
old concert pianist, who’d been drafted as a rifleman. “The
whole thing had an air of unreality about it,” List wrote, in an unpublished memoir. “I remember concentrating with all my might on the eighty-eight keys of the piano, which represented something familiar and real that I could hold on to. But now and then, as I played, I would glance up and there would be Churchill or I would glance up and there would be Stalin. It was like a wild dream.”
Click to read the biography of Eugene List from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_List
Eugene List: Piana Conerto in C major, K.503 – Movement 2 (Mozart)
Click to read about the Big Three Dinner in Postdam in 1945 from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Conference
Click to preorder THE TRIALS OF HARRY S. TRUMAN available on March 8, 2022 from Amazon.
Why was this one fact or one set of facts so compelling for you to discover and to write about? I love the way people may suddenly find themselves in incredible surroundings