An Ignoble Experiment: An Absolutely Pivotal Moment in American History

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review.
View this email in your browser

Photograph courtesy of Annette Gordon-Reed.

"Having Johnson in the White House at that time was the worst thing that could have happened to this country," said Annette Gordon-Reed in her Art of Nonfiction interview when discussing her biography of the Reconstruction-era president Andrew Johnson. "The president is a symbol of the nation, the spirit of the nation, and to have a man who, at that absolutely pivotal moment in American history, when we were supposed to take a different direction after the war, was not equal to what was required was devastating. The consequences of that are incalculable."

This week, we've unlocked our Art of Nonfiction interview with Gordon-Reed, conducted by John Jeremiah Sullivan, which appears in issue no. 238 of the Review.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Nonfiction No. 11
Annette Gordon-Reed

INTERVIEWER

You're a writer who tends to insist on the subtleties of things. Is it getting harder to do that as the ideological temperature rises?

GORDON-REED

I sometimes worry about being misinterpreted, but I can't stand going along with things just to make people happy. There's no point differentiating individual people through research if you're not going to take what you find out about them and make it a part of your historical interpretation. The other day I was talking with Peter [Onuf], who is rereading Trollope, about how novelists have more of a chance of lasting than historians do. We get supplanted pretty easily. The only way you have a shot at extending your shelf life is by seeking to find and write what you think is the truth, as near as you can tell it.

From issue no. 238 (Winter 2021)

To read more from issue no. 238, including fiction by Chetna Maroo, why not subscribe?

You'll receive four print issues a year plus unlimited digital access to our seventy-one-year archive.