Up until the final decade of the nineteenth century, the United States and the United Kingdom did not recognize copyright in each other’s creative works. Matthew Pearl Read Quote
For several years at the University of Virginia, students had an annual tradition of raising hell around campus, burning tar barrels and shooting pistols into the air. Matthew Pearl Read Quote
The intense media coverage of today’s campus shootings presents a double edged sword. On the one hand, it gives us a chance to think about and reflect on the causes; on the other hand, in a very small minority of unstable minds, the repeated telling of the stories can be interpreted as glamorous. Matthew Pearl Read Quote
Edgar Allan Poe, an earlier UVA student, once complained in a letter that his stepfather spoke to him as if Poe were one of the black slaves; some of the students at UVA surely felt the same about being told what to do by faculty. Matthew Pearl Read Quote
I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don’t necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it’s a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind. Matthew Pearl Read Quote
Harvard was also a little bit of a villain in my first book, ‘The Dante Club.’ I guess there might be a way to make Harvard more of a sympathetic presence, but it’s such a powerful institution that it more naturally lends itself toward not necessarily a negative but an obstructionist element in a story. Matthew Pearl Read Quote
When Dickens arrives in the United States in November of 1867, he’s already in questionable health. So by the end of the trip, he was really in failing condition, and really, he would never recover completely after this point, and you could sort of draw a straight line to his ultimate decline and death. Matthew Pearl Read Quote
Poe was plagued and haunted most of all by something pretty banal: poverty. Probably the most eccentric decision in life was to become a writer in an age when making a living at it was nearly impossible. Matthew Pearl Read Quote
When it comes to referring to Dickens’s life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian. Matthew Pearl Read Quote
