Erik Larson discusses 'Dead Wake' book at College of DuPage
Erik Larson's search for the subject of his next book was like looking for a spouse.
"You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find one that kisses back in a not creepy way," the persistent author said.
Larson, a self-described "animator of history," revealed the back story to his latest work, "Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania" to a nearly sellout crowd he left frequently laughing at College of DuPage's McAninch Arts Center in Glen Ellyn Tuesday night.
Larson started with a disclaimer of sorts: He doesn't seek to inform.
"My goal is to create as rich a historical experience as I possibly can," he said.
Though we know what happens - spoiler: the Lusitania sinks - Larson strives to tell a story where readers suspend that knowledge and allow themselves to fall back in time. To write this kind of history, Larson, known for "The Devil in the White City," relies on archives - letters, transcripts, reports, telegrams.
"It's about finding the right bits and pieces that will light a reader's imagination," said Larson, who splits his time between Seattle and New York. "And then arranging those pieces in as compelling manner as possible so that we - me included - can experience an event the way the people who lived it did as it unfolds through their eyes as if we did not know the ending."
The maritime history buff joked that he considered a retelling of the Titanic sinking, if it had not done by director James Cameron "and Celine Dion." He also was reluctant to take on the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, a British passenger ship torpedoed during World War I by a German submarine.
"It just seemed to me too obvious and too familiar," a disaster glossed over by "our high school teachers" in order to get to the "good stuff": America's entry into WWI, he said.
"More or less on a whim," Larson went to his favorite library in Seattle, checked out a "whole bunch" of titles and discovered a pattern.
"There was relatively little attention paid to the sinking itself, to the human dimension more than the political drama surrounding it and then following it," Larson said.
Instead of becoming hung up on the diplomacy, Larson focuses in on that humanity. One grisly discovery? During the sinking, on a calm, quiet Irish Sea, one lifeboat crashed on top of another - both fully loaded with fleeing passengers.
That meticulous research drew suburban fans to the Q-and-A at the MAC, hosted by the College Lecture Series and the Daily Herald Author's Circle Book Club. Larson's books are "told in a format that's like reading a novel," said Marilyn McCarty-Fulton, who joined her book club in the audience.
In his research, Larson also shed a respectful, but "dull," image he had of President Woodrow Wilson. The romantic came across his love letters to his girlfriend, a 40-something divorcee, at the Library of Congress.
"They were just the most passionate outpourings of longing and need and passion," he said. "I was like when I finished reading this I said, 'I need a cigarette.'"
Readers can join the Author's Circle Book Club for free at events.dailyherald.com. Members get a 20 percent discount on tickets to Author's Circle events and can win VIP tickets to meet the authors.