Meet-the-Author Recording with Nathan Hale
One Dead Spy: A Revolutionary War Tale |
Nathan Hale introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating One Dead Spy: A Revolutionary War Tale.
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Nathan Hale: This is Nathan Hale. The name of the book is Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, book number one, One Dead Spy.
I'm not a historian; I'm a cartoonist, but I've always loved American history, and I've always been forced to love American history because of my name. It really is Nathan Hale. When I would start school every year, teachers would always ask me, "Oh, like Nathan Hale from history? Do you have famous last words?" They'd always ask me about it. When I began doing graphic novels, I didn't start with American history. My first graphic novel experience was doing the illustrations for a fairy tale series called Rapunzel's Revenge. When I did get a chance to start writing my own, I wanted to do American history. I thought it would be fun to dig deep into my namesake, Nathan Hale, and find out was he a good spy, what did he do, and how did he get caught. The story is really that adventure. It's also set against the backdrop of the Revolutionary War and all of the major events that were going on at that time. It's a nonfiction book, so everything that happens in there is a true piece of American history.
For each of the books in the series, research is really the name of the game. I just dig in and start reading as much as I can, primary sources when I can, particularly letters and journal entries that the people I write about have written. Those are the type of things that really give you a feel for their personality. One thing in One Dead Spy that makes a lot of kids laugh, and they assume that I made it up, there's a part in the middle of the book where a cow gets hit by a cannonball. Nathan Hale, in his journal, said, "Today I saw a cow exploded by a cannonball." Knowing my audience of third, fourth and fifth graders, I knew they would want to hear about this, so I put that scene in there. They just think it's me being a goofy author, but it's a real piece of history. The research, for me, isn't just finding the big pieces and how they fit together, it's also finding the weird little pieces that my readers really like, you know, like cows getting exploded.
One of the things that really fun in doing these history books is really discovering that history is never just one person's story. When you dig into all of this research, you find these side characters and these people who were just tangentially involved. One of the characters I really fell in love with in this particular story of the early parts of the Revolutionary War is Henry Knox, who was a little bookseller in Boston. He had a bookstore. He was crazy about cannons and artillery, but he'd never been in a war, and he'd never really got to mess with cannons or artillery. So when the war broke out, he was very excited to get on board and get involved because of his enthusiasm for things that explode. He goes on a crazy adventure that's a lot of fun to go retrieve a bunch of cannons in the dead of winter, and to watch this young bookseller's enthusiasm as he figures out how to move them on sledges, and then loses one through the ice and figures out a way to get it out.
It was just a super fun story that ended up being a big part of the book. I love digging up these stories about lesser known characters, especially if they have a really strong personality that comes through, or if they just do something really crazy.
This Meet-the-Author Recording with Nathan Hale was exclusively created in May 2019 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Abrams.