Why Write Historical Fiction?

My novel Prairie Ashes (2025) is centered around the events and afterlives of the Illinois Mine War, a 1930s coal country civil war fought between the establishment United Mine Workers and the renegade Progressive Miners of America.¹ People often ask me: why write a historical novel, instead of just writing a history book about the Illinois Mine War?

Untitled photo, possibly related to: Mechanical cutting machine that increases coal production, Old Ben number eight mine, West Frankfort, Illinois, date unknown, public domain via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Cover of Prairie Ashes. Photo provided by the author.

This is a fair question. A century ago, author E.M. Forster wrote that every student knows that “the historian records whereas the novelist must create.”² If my goal is to record a moment of US labor history, why turn to a fictive mode? 

My kneejerk answer is that I wrote the novel because I am a novelist. My discipline is English, not History. That is not a good enough answer, though. I do not want to be the man with a hammer who thinks every problem is a nail. Some projects might be best served through fiction, but other projects are better served through nonfiction. The distinction between “historical fiction” and “history” is only a few centuries old. The literary scholar Michael McKeon examined the inventory list of a seventeenth century bookseller, noting the range of genres–including biography, travelogue, and popular romance–listed under “history.” “By modern standards,” McKeon observes, “the most pressing problem raised by such usage is the absence of any will to distinguish consistently between “history” and “literature,” “fact” and “fiction.”³

Cover of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

It would take a couple hundred years for these lines to be fully drawn. Daniel Defoe, one of the originators of the English novel, presented his early historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), under a pseudonym, as “Observations or Memorials of the most Remarkable Occurrences.”⁴ Over the following century, novelists claimed a space where they openly departed from fact into imagination, with the goal of providing readers with experiences of subjective interiority. In the early nineteenth century “historical fiction” began to emerge as a particular genre in which these subjective experiences are set in the past.⁵

Imagination is a vital tool that any writer must deploy to access aspects of the past. In her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman, an influential English professor whose work spans disciplines, argues for “critical fabulation” as a tool to encounter experiences of Black history that have been omitted from the archive.⁶ I originally began researching the Mine War⁷ because I wanted to understand a hidden part of my own family’s history. Writing my novel allowed me to go beyond what is factually knowable about this suppressed radical working-class history. 

Wife of unemployed coal miner. Zeigler, Illinois, date unknown, public domain via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

A key moment in my novel takes place during the 1933 Women’s March, when thousands of white-clad Progressive Miners of America Women’s Auxiliary members occupied the streets of Springfield, Illinois, advocating for their liberatory cause. As a historical novelist my intention was not to document the fact that this march occurred. Rather, I wanted to enter into the experience of being present at this moment of collective action. I wanted to imagine walking through the streets of Springfield when they were filled with hope. I wanted to know what it felt like to believe that another world was possible.

PMA Women’s Auxiliary gathered on the Statehouse lawn, Jan. 25, 1933, courtesy of Sangamon Valley Collection, Lincoln Library, Springfield, Illinois.

Contingent Magazine is grateful for the assistance and guidance of the Lincoln Library’s Sangamon Valley Collection in the development of this mailbag.

1. Ben Nadler, Prairie Ashes (American Buffalo Books, 2025).
2. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Edward Arnold Publishing, 1927), available through Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/70492/pg70492-images.html
3. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 162–63.
4. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (E.Nutt, J. Roberts, A. Dodd, J. Graves, 1722), available through Project Gutenberg,  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/376/pg376-images.html
5. For the purposes of historical fiction, “the past” is often defined as sixty or more years before the time of writing. This somewhat arbitrary definition originates from Sir Walter Scott’s influential first historical novel: Waverly, or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814). Scott’s Waverly novels, followed by James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels in the US helped solidify historical fiction as an independent, popular genre. Generally, though, the idea is that the setting is distant enough that the author could not have personally observed it. 
6. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, (2) (2008): 1-14. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.
7. The Illinois Mine War began in 1932 in Downstate Illinois, when rank and file members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) protested that the union’s increasingly centralized and authoritarian leadership, led by John L. Lewis, were siding with mine operators in forcing a reduced wage scale. After union leadership suppressed a popular vote on the issue, the protesting miners left and formed their own union, the Progressive Miners of America (PMA). This split soon led to inter-union warfare, including widespread retaliatory shootings and bombings. During the war’s first years, socialist, anarchist, and feminist activists played key roles in the PMA and its Women’s Auxiliary, and leftist concepts of mutual aid and autonomy circulated popularly in what is often regarded as a conservative region. As the PMA itself became an established, bureaucratized union, leadership purged the members of the union’s leftist faction. Subsequently, activists faced federal prosecution for their roles in the war. After federal regulatory intervention, both the UMWA and the PMA accepted the same wage scale, essentially creating dual unions without ideological distinction. For further reading, see: Stephane E. Booth, “Ladies in White: Female Activism in the Southern Coalfields, 1932–1938,” in The United Mine Workers of America: A Model of Industrial Solidarity?, ed. John H. M. Laslett (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 371–392; Caroline Waldron Merithew, “‘We Were Not Ladies’: Gender, Class, and a Women’s Auxiliary’s Battle for Mining Unionism,” in Journal of Women’s History 18, (2) (2006): 63–94. https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2006.0039; Carl D. Oblinger, Divided Kingdom: Work, Community, and the Mining Wars in the Central Illinois Coal Fields during the Great Depression (Illinois State Historical Society, 2004).