Late-19th-century America, with all its chaotic change and immense potential, seems to have been the perfect place to become not someone else, but someone new.

I have always been interested in the idea of self-reinvention.

As someone who has long loved history and reads a lot of history, especially when you get a distance like 130 years, these people can seem almost mythical, and you need something tangible to make them real.

As I have encountered difficult moments in my own life, I have been privileged to learn from the great men I have come to know as a writer.

With the Lincoln assassination, the South didn't feel it could mourn along with the North. But Garfield was beloved by all the American people. He was trusted and respected by North and South, by freed slaves and former slave owners. Also by pioneers, which his parents had been, and by immigrants.

I'm very interested in science.