Matthew Pearl Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

In the first of two interviews, Matthew Pearl explains his fascination with the 19th century and how he came to write The Technologists; in the second, he talks about his interest in Dante, and his first mystery/novel, The Dante Club, which blends fact and fiction into a captivating thriller that will surprise readers from beginning to end.

The Technologists is a thriller revolving around the very first class at M.I.T. It is my fourth novel and my third set in Boston of the nineteenth century. I'm sometimes asked what it is about that time and place that appeals to me. I might need some psychoanalysis to answer. Like many other things in the creative process, I was drawn to the setting as much by accident and instinct as by a deliberate process. The first story I conceived as a novel, which would become The Dante Club, brought me to 1865 through historical fact - that was the year that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow gathered some friends together to help him finish his groundbreaking translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, and that was the subject matter I wanted to pair with a mysterious story.

Though I came to it by chance, I found I enjoyed writing and researching about the nineteenth century. The more I immersed myself in it, the more I wrote in it, leading into more novels.

Though I had not planned to become such a long-running tourist to the nineteenth century, I recognize some specific elements that keep me there. I've always been fascinated by origins. What it was like to be the first at something. In The Technologists, the first students at M.I.T. were ...