Fiction Offers a First Rough Draft of History

For centuries, novelists have contributed a rough first-draft of history through their fiction. Undeterred by rapidly unfolding events such as wars, civil unrest, plagues, and famines, which do not necessarily produce clean story lines, writers rush to make sense of the chaos in their midst.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Émile Zola embarked upon an ambitious cycle of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, which traced the history of a single family living under the reign of Napoléon III. Zola wrote several novels as a form of running commentary on life under Napoléon, who ruled as president and emperor of France roughly between 1850 and 1870—practically a third of Zola’s life. One of Zola’s novels within the cycle, L’Assommoir, was a study of alcoholism and poverty in working-class Paris—a thoroughly contemporary portrait of society as he saw and heard it.

The early twentieth century ushered in a rash of social realism lightly cloaked in fiction. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) shone such a harsh light on the meatpacking industry, the story inspired real-life regulatory reforms. The astute critic and novelist Rebecca West penned a novel in 1918, The Return of the Soldier. Viewed at the time as the first notable novel about World War I written by a woman (which I amend to: written by anyone), the story concerned a shell-shocked soldier returning from war in the hopes of being reunited with his first love. Like Sinclair, West designed fictional characters to showcase current-day headlines—even as those headlines were still being written.

Some of the most famous novels of the last two centuries eschew serious social realism in favor of biting satire as a way to “report” the news of the day—and perhaps catch readers off-guard in the process. Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift is a pointedly unflattering send-up of the moral and bureaucratic pettiness that characterized British politics at the time (!). The novel’s commitment to magical realism (from the tiny Lilliputians to the giant Brobdingnags) offers readers sufficient distance from the real world to perceive truths about the times they were living in, as Torys and Whigs battled for power.

Not surprisingly, satire’s capacity to both reflect and distort the lens of history flourished in the twentieth century. From George Orwell’s Animal Farm to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the hard edges of fascism, war, and other destructive forces were held up to the bright lights of the authors’ imaginations and then given back to us in story forms so compelling, we read these works to this day. In addition to creating memorable characters, books like these strike a vein of such clarity, the knowledge becomes indelible. The enduring meaning of the phrase “catch-22” arose from the absurd fog of then-modern warfare—a fictional conception of a particular historical moment that resonates deeply.

Responding to the loud and messy developments that make for sensational newspaper headlines is not the only way novelists have processed history. Many writers focus on the social and cultural values of their time, offering pointed commentaries through their fiction. They are historians of manners, in a sense. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, about small-town life, and Dodsworth, about how the upper-crust lives, come to mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald offered astute, up-close renderings of wealth and its corrupting influences. And before either of them, there were those inimitable social ethnographers, Henry James and Edith Wharton.

All of which brings us to today, an era that arguably offers an embarrassment of riches when it comes to choosing subjects for novels that presage historical scholarship. Gary Shteyngart borrowed tropes from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a fourteenth-century masterpiece about the Black Death, to produce Our Country Friends, published in 2021, while the Covid pandemic was obviously still raging. In it, a group of friends and acquaintances gather in a country house in upstate New York to wait out the pandemic. They hunker down for six months, the relationships among them sifting and changing.

Also in 2021, Jodi Picoult released Wish You Were Here, about a woman working at Sotheby’s whose life is thrown into disarray by the arrival of a dangerous virus. An excerpt of the synopsis reads as if it’s lifted from a current news article: “Almost immediately, Diana’s dream vacation goes awry. Her luggage is lost, the Wi-Fi is nearly nonexistent, and the hotel they’d booked is shut down due to the pandemic. In fact, the whole island is now under quarantine, and she is stranded until the borders reopen.”

In addition to social realism, satire, and the psychological novel, speculative fiction is an especially satisfying lens for imagining the near future as a means of analyzing the present—and exploring how the choices we make today could yield disastrous consequences tomorrow if we’re not careful. As author and critic Mark Leyner puts it, “The most shocking dystopian speculation is not clairvoyant or even extrapolative; it’s simply attentive — it discerns what’s right here, right now. It’s a matter of recognition.” A great example is Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores (2025), which serves up a Texas town laid to waste by economic and political ruin in 2038. All it takes is a few disastrous nudges from our present era to create a dystopia where nobody wins.

My latest novel, Tent City (here and here), set in a plausibly near future of late-stage capitalism, covers territory not unlike Flores’s. The novel follows the disastrous unraveling of a family and their small town as the economy falls completely apart. I love asking “What if…?” What if the American Dream became unattainable? What if the end of prosperity begins at home? How would people behave toward one another once money, jobs, and any semblance of security disappears? Who would emerge as winners and losers in this scenario?

Novelists have earned a place at the table when it comes to defining history’s impact on people and societies in any era. Like historians, novelists study trends and events and extrapolate from there to make meaning of human experience. Perhaps the only real difference between the novelist seeking to offer a rough draft of history and a trained historian is in how they choose to deploy their imaginations.

The history of literature is littered with the history of history. I hope writers will continue to mine this territory and report back to us the truths that only fiction can tell.

This essay originally appeared in Books are Our Superpower on Medium.

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