Colson Whitehead’s Ode to 1970s New York

The historical novel, once considered the height of kitsch—Henry James described it as “condemned … to a fatal cheapness”—has staged a remarkable comeback over the course of the last several decades. In his forthcoming study Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon, the literary scholar Alexander Manshel argues that the historical novel has steadily emerged as the single most prestigious genre of contemporary literature in the twenty-first century. He observes that nearly three-quarters of all novels short-listed for major American prizes since 2000 have been historical fiction, and that historical novels account for 70 percent of those most frequently assigned in universities. Recent, lavishly acclaimed historical novels by Yiyun Li, Olga Tokarczuk, Hernan Diaz, Hilary Mantel, and Elena Ferrante bear out the thesis. “Literary fiction has never been more historical—nor historical fiction more literary—than it has been over the last forty years,” Manshel concludes.