"Imagining Boston" is on hold. Please visit the links to read the outline and research archived on my new website.
I"m the author of the epic novel of Brazil and the non-fiction work, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression . I worked with James A. Michener for two years on his South African novel, The Covenant.
Brazil
I searched for the story of Brazil for five years, a literary pathfinder wandering in quest of the untold saga of the Brazilians and their epic history.
In these pages, I share my mighty journey of twenty thousand kilometers across the length and breadth of Brazil in 1981. I traveled through the heart of a nation in which the flame of freedom was newly lit after years of military dictatorship, the journal I kept colored by the voices and emotions of the era.
I explore the exhaustive processes that go into the making of a novel with a first draft of three-quarters of million words written in the old-fashioned way, by hand. I reveal the early genesis of my ideas for plot lines and characters, the detailed planning of my outline.
Of all the accolades a writer could hope for at the end of an epic work like Brazil none brought more joy than a simple question asked by the famed Brazilian historian and sociologist Gilberto Freyre.
"I should like to know if Uys had an unpublished jornal intime of a Brazilian family?"
There was no private journal, just the will to understand the Brazilian "thing" and a passion for writing and storytelling, which lies at the heart of every good novel.
Riding the Rails
During the Great Depression, more than a quarter of a million teenagers left their homes and hopped freight trains looking for work or adventure. This is their story.
I first became interested in the boxcar boys and girls when I read Boy and Girl Tramps of America by Thomas Minehan, who rode the rails with the young nomads in summer 1932. I suggested to my son, Michael, a film maker, that the subject would make a powerful documentary. The suggestion led to the award-winning PBS "American Experience" film, Riding the Rails, made by Michael and Lexy Lovell.
In the book, I draw on 3,000 letters from boxcar boys and girls sent to the documentary makers. I had access to 40 hours of filmed interviews with 20 men and women chosen as potential candidates for the film.
Many letters are handwritten, as from old friends sharing honest-to-God stories. Time and again, I held a letter in my hand and felt a connection to a lonely boy or girl standing beside the railroad tracks 60 years ago. It left me with a deep sense of the inner strength and faith of ordinary Americans and their belief in this land.
We learn of their struggle to survive on the streets of America and know their bitter disappointments, their sense of loss of childhood, their frustrations at the lack of opportunity. “When I think of all this traveling across the land, searching for the things we had lost, there is a place inside my chest that still hurts,” recalls one rider.
When they left the rails and got a hold on their lives, they never let go. Many tell of keeping the jobs they found for 30 or 40 years. And the girls they met, too: many write joyously of their enduring devotion to the sweethearts they married when they settled down. Their stories told in their own words resonate with the pluck and courage they showed in going to seek a better life.
Illustrated with rare archival photos and drawing primarily on letters and oral histories of three thousand men and women who hopped freight trains, Riding the Rails brings to life a neglected saga of America in the 1930s. Self-reliance, compassion, frugality, and a love of freedom and country are at the heart of the lessons these teens learned.
This unforgettable narrative of a daring generation of America's children who rode the rails in search of a better life is a powerful reminder of what might turn up around the next curve. They are an inspiration to all who share a nostalgia for the road and the freedoms sought there.
James A. Michener, one of America’s best-loved authors, won the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. His books topped the New York Times best-seller list. Michener was at the peak of his career, when he took the ideas and words of a young immigrant from South Africa and told the world they were his own.
I was that young South African. I worked with Michener for two years from 1978 to 1980, a collaboration that produced The Covenant. I plotted the book with Michener, I did the major research, and I wrote thousands of words for key sections of the novel.
These archives contain examples of my original handwritten drafts that Michener retyped and pasted into his manuscript, my plot lines and character sketches. The items in these pages range from the profound to the seemingly trivial as with names of characters derived from my personal circle of friends.
When our work was completed, Michener penned an author's note for his book in which he wrote:". . . Working together for two years, we read the finished manuscript seven times, an appalling task. I thank him for his assistance."
As these pages show, my contribution to The Covenant went far beyond an exhaustive reading and revision of a finished manuscript.
In an age of zero tolerance for purloined words, I marvel at statements by Michener that he came to see as gospel: “I write every word of my books;” “I do all the research myself;” “One of the saddest aspects of my writing is that I have never come upon any young person of obvious talent whom I might have helped to a professional career.”
The story of my collaboration with Michener is discussed in a chapter of Stephen J. May’s biography, Michener: A Writer’s Journey.
“Michener committed a scarlet literary crime and used his celebrated status in publishing to get away with it, ” concludes Stephen May.
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