THOMAS FLEMING, MASTER OF MANY LITERARY ARTS

"If I had to choose one word to describe Thomas Fleming as a writer, it would be master," says Sidney Offit, for three decades one of New York's most distinguished teachers of writing. "There is scarcely a literary form in which he has not demonstrated his truly amazing talent."

Fleming’s forty-nine year career as a writer amply demonstrates Offit’s thesis. His two most recent books, Washington’s Secret War, The Hidden History of Valley Forge, and The Perils of Peace, America’s Struggle to Survive After Yorktown, were main selections of the History Book Club . His most recent novel, The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee, was a featured alternate of the Book of the Month Club. Simultaneously Fleming has found time to be the chief consultant as well as a writer of the massive picture and text book, The Irish-American Chronicle, a history of the Irish-Americans, published on March 17, 2009. He also serves as Senior Scholar at the American Revolution Center at Valley Forge. In 2007 he was elected President of the Society of American Historians, an organization whose membership is limited to 250 historians, notable for both their scholarship and their literary ability.

Earlier in this first decade of the new century, Fleming startled his readers with two books that demonstrated his ability to write controversial history in fields far from the American Revolution, his chief subject for most of his career. The New Dealers’ War, FDR and the War Within World War II, was a penetrating unsentimental look at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s troubled presidency in the last four years of his life. The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I was an unsparing account of Woodrow Wilson’s failed presidency in the first great global upheaval of the 20^th Century. Both these books drew on -- and often substantiated – historical novels Fleming wrote in the 1990s, Loyalties, A Novel of World War II, and Over There. This ability to "twin" fiction and nonfiction is further evidence of Fleming’s remarkable versatility.

When Mark Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College, published Novel/History, a pioneering book about the role of fact in historical novels, he included Fleming’s bestseller, Time and Tide. Other novelists were asked to reply to an historian’s examination of the books. Carnes asked Fleming to write both sides of the discussion of Time and Tide -- a striking tribute to his multiple talents.

In 1999, Fleming used his forty years of studying the American Revolution to offer a highly original interpretation of one of the most tragic encounters in American history. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America explored the tangled motives and complex personalities of these two famous Americans in a joint biography that enthralled readers and reviewers. Thomas Slaughter of Notre Dame University declared: "Fleming gets the story right in ways that generations of historians have missed." The Chicago Tribune reviewer wrote: "Duel is at once fascinating and instructive. It is almost impossible not to love this book."

In 1996, Fleming’s nonfiction book, Liberty! The American Revolution, was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the History Book Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club. At a luncheon in Fleming’s honor, the director of the BOMC noted that sixteen years earlier, his novel, The Officers’ Wives was a main selection, making him the only writer in the club’s 70 year history to have main selections in both genres.

Fleming's 1960s novels about big city politics in the twilight of Irish-American power have been compared to William Faulkner's in their intense preoccupation with a slice of American geography -- in Fleming's case, urban. They are rooted in personal experience. His father was a right hand man of Frank Hague, boss of Jersey City.

Packed with insiders' lore, these novels feature troubled politicians and policemen coping with racial hatreds and moral corruption. Critic and novelist Roger Dooley called the books "a powerful fictional experience that relegates other novels on big city politics to the whimsical realm."

"Every city needs a Thomas Fleming," wrote former mayor of New York John Lindsay. Kevin White, former mayor of Boston, said Fleming's Rulers of the City was the best book he had ever read about big city politics. In his native Jersey City, All Good Men, the first of these novels, is considered the definitive account of the fall of the Hague Machine.

It was hardly surprising that TV producer Thomas Lennon made Fleming the principal commentator on his four-part PBS series about the Irish in America, "Long Journey Home." In early 2009, he was interviewed by the producers of a new series, "The Road to the White House," about the role of Irish-American political machines in Boston, New York, Chicago and Kansas City, in electing the first Irish-American president, John F. Kennedy. Produced by Irish Television, the show will be aired in the fall of 2009.

Thomas Fleming launched his career as an historian with a shower of praise for his 1960 book, Now We Are Enemies, the story of Bunker Hill. The New York Times reviewer declared it ""yields to no account in sheer readability." Dean of American historians Allan Nevins said his next book, Beat The Last Drum, the story of Yorktown, was "assuredly one of the outstanding historical works of the year." The Chicago Tribune called it "a masterly historian at his masterly best."

In 1975, Fleming began blending his novelist's skills with his historian's insights. The result was Liberty Tavern, which one reviewer called "the Gone with the Wind" of the American Revolution. The book sold three million copies in various editions. He followed this triumph with Dreams of Glory, which Delaware State University historian John Gardner called "the best spy novel ever written about the American Revolution -- and that includes James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy."

In these two novels, Fleming introduced the Stapleton family, a powerful New York-New Jersey clan that he has followed through American history in eight other highly praised novels -- The Spoils of War, Rulers of the City, A Passionate Girl, Promises to Keep, Remember The Morning, The Wages of Fame, When This Cruel War Is Over and The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee.

Remember The Morning describes the founding of the Stapleton clan in the tumultuous decades before the American Revolution. The story revolves around two extraordinary women, Dutch-American Catalyntie Van Vorst and African-American Clara Flowers. Linked by a girlhood as Seneca Indians -- they were captured in an early frontier clash -- they return to the white world and fall in love with the same man, a massive would-be soldier named Malcolm Stapleton. The narrative carries the reader through Indian wars, the 1745 Scottish rebellion in England and a slave revolt in New York to the eve of the Revolution. The Library Journal declared the novel was "a marvelously fresh interpretation of an era."

The Stapletons embody one of Fleming's most powerful themes -- the clash between American ideals and harsh political and economic realities. It is very similar to the spiritual and psychological conflicts that coruscated through his Irish-American novels.

While he was launching the Stapletons, Fleming found time to master yet another literary form. His biography of Thomas Jefferson, The Man From Monticello, was listed by The New York Times as one of the outstanding books of 1969. He followed this new departure with The Man Who Dared The Lightning, a life of Benjamin Franklin. Reviewing it, Richard D. Brown, Charles Warren Fellow at Harvard, wrote: "Thomas Fleming is to be congratulated."

The following year, Newsweek Books asked Fleming to edit Benjamin Franklin: a Life in his own Words. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said the result was "exact in its scholarship, vivid in its evocation." Fleming's next history book, The Forgotten Victory, about the 1780 battle of Springfield, N.J., was cited by the American Association for State and Local History for "brilliantly illuminating little known aspects of state and local history." Around this time he also wrote two highly praised books for the National Park Service, The First Stroke, on the battle of Lexington-Concord, and Downright Fighting, about the battle of Cowpens. He was the first "outside" historian to be invited to write for NPS.

In 1964, Fleming tackled an even more challenging piece of nonfiction -- a history of the U.S. Military Academy. Few books are more difficult than institutional histories. West Point, with its dozens of famous names and its century and a half of participation in the life of the republic, surely ranked among the most formidable of this thorny genre. Four years later, The New York Times declared Fleming's West Point: The Men and Times of the U.S. Military Academy "the best book ever written" about the school.

Fleming says his four years at West Point put him in touch with a group of people who are exemplars of his favorite fictional theme, the clash between idealism and realism in American life. "These men are taught to revere Duty Honor Country, the motto of the cadet corps. But in the real world of the army, applying these ideals can often lead to heartbreak and disillusion."

In 1975, Fleming published 1776: Year of Illusions, a narrative of America's most momentous twelve months. Henry Bragdon of The Christian Science Monitor wrote: "Seldom if ever have I read a book I can more unreservedly recommend." The American Revolution Round Table of New York named it the outstanding book of the year. Seven years in the research and writing, Illusions combined Fleming's narrative skills with startling insights on the War for Independence. With cool objectivity, he revealed that both sides began the year with crippling myths that the realities of the war swiftly exploded.

Twelve years after he finished West Point, Fleming published The Officers' Wives, a novel about three West Pointers and the women they married. The New York Times praised the "subtlety and intelligence" with which Fleming "probed the heart of the American experience over the last thirty years." The Washington Post reviewer called it "an emotionally wrenching experience," and confessed that at its close, "I wept." Novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford expressed amazement at Fleming's "extraordinary insight into women -- their thoughts and emotions, dreams and desires, all beautifully depicted in a book I found impossible to put down." The book's combination of intense personal dramas and its marvelously rich background -- the officers and their wives grapple with the ambiguities and frustrations of the Korean and Vietnam wars -- found a huge readership. The Officers' Wives sold over two million copies worldwide.

Fleming followed this success with a bestselling novel about the U.S. Navy in World War II, Time And Tide . Here he drew on his own experience as a sailor about the USS Topeka at the close of the war. Set in the Pacific, Time And Tide deals with the troubled captain and crew of the USS Jefferson City, a ship with a stain on her honor for ignominiously fleeing the battle of Savo Island. The New York Times called it "a blockbuster of a novel." The reviewer in The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: "Fleming is such an astute and convincing writer-reporter that the reader can grasp the confusion, fear, desperation, venality exultation and ultimately, the heroism that exist on the Jefferson City as she sails. 'That's the way it must have been, you conclude.'" The Chicago Sun-Times reviewer compared the novel to Melville's Moby Dick.

Fleming's next novel, Over There, was a riveting account of the American experience in World War I, seen through the eyes of a disillusioned general and a feminist woman ambulance driver. New York Newsday called it "a wonderfully readable story that blends breathless action and food for thought on every fascinating page...A woman's novel for men and a man's novel for women."

Fleming followed this with an even more ambitious book, Loyalties, about an American naval officer who becomes involved with the German resistance to Hitler. The Library Journal praised it as "a thrilling story of espionage and a morality play about people forced to make compelling choices between their perceptions of good and evil." The Stars and Stripes said the book demonstrated Fleming's "powerful ability to use fiction as a way of providing readers with astonishing new perspectives on world events."

Historian Kenneth Jackson of Columbia University has put Fleming's historical novels on reading lists for his courses. Jackson considers Fleming's blend of carefully researched fact and plausible fiction an excellent way to give their students a chance to experience history's impact on individual lives.

"That is the main reason I began writing historical novels," Fleming says. "To communicate the reality of history as an experience. Most history books deal clumsily, if at all, with emotion. Yet history was lived by passionate, caring, conflicted people. I think novels of the historical imagination (a phrase Fleming prefers to historical novel) are vital to bring the past alive."

Coming in November 2009 is Fleming’s latest nonfiction book, The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers. This exploration of the role of women in the lives of Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison is a book that Thomas Fleming was born to write. It brings into play the psychological skills and understanding of women that he has repeatedly demonstrated in his novels—and simultaneously widens our perception of the inner lives of the men who founded the United States of America.