Boston: a novel

The decision to write this novel was taken at nine-thirty P.M. (Pacific Coast time), August 22nd, 1927: the occasion being the receipt of a telephone message from a newspaper, to the effect that Sacco and Vanzetti were dead. It seemed to the writer that the world would want to know the truth about this case; and his judgment proved correct, because there began a flood of cablegrams and letters from five continents, asking him to do the very thing he had decided upon. A “contemporary historical novel” is an unusual art-form, and may call for explanation. So far as concerns the two individuals, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, this book is not fiction, but an effort at history; everything they are represented as doing they actually did, and their words have been taken from their letters, or from the dictation of friends and enemies. All others who played important parts in this drama likewise appear as they were, and under their own names. Paralleling the Sacco-Vanzetti case throughout the book is a story of business and high finance which will be recognized as a famous law case recently carried to the United States Supreme Court. I have used the incidents of this case as material for my fiction; but the characters which I have invented to enact this story are wholly fictitious, and bear no relation whatever to the real persons in the case, who are entirely unknown to me. There is one simple rule for guidance in reading the novel: the characters who are real persons bear real names, while those who bear fictitious names are fictitious characters. The writer has been visiting Boston off and on for twenty-five years. The first visits had to do with the novel “Manassas,” and involved meetings with the city’s old-time heroes, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frank B. Sanborn, Julia Ward Howe. The later visits, having to do with “The Brass Check,” “The Goose-step” and “Oil!”, involved a change of view-point not without its interest to students of our history. Nevertheless, it should be said at the outset that what is great in Boston finds due recognition in this story. Those who have made the city’s glory have never been its rulers, but always a “saving minority,” and that minority is there to-day, and it is active. The task has not been approached in a spirit of grudge; on the contrary, the…