![]() ![]() ![]() In 1962, when I began writing the book, the civil rights movement still had the quality of conciliation Martin Luther King, Jr.’s grand and impossible dream was dreamed in a spirit of amity, concord, and the hope of a mutual understanding. ![]() ![]() Like any writer who is honest with himself, I knew that Nat Turner had defects and vulnerabilities-Faulkner remarked that we novelists will be remembered for “the splendor of our failures”-but that it was hard not to feel a I certain fulfillment that fall, more than five years after having sat down at my desk on Martha’s Vineyard, determined to re-create, out of an extremely sketchy and mysterious historical record, the life of a man who led the only significant slave revolt in our history, and to try to fashion in the process an imagined microcosm of the baleful institution whose legacy has persisted in this century and become the nation’s central obsession. I am stressing these outward signs of success only to point up the reversal of fortune the book would soon undergo. There was a lavish movie contract from Twentieth Century-Fox and an admiring review in the New Republic from one of America’s pre-eminent historians. I was also gratified to have the blessing of both the Book-of-the-Month Club and The New York Review of Books. ![]()
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