For nearly 30 years, Laurie Halse Anderson has been writing highly acclaimed books for young people of all ages: picture books, middle grade historical fiction and YA contemporary novels. Her many honors include the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2023; she is also known for her committed work against both book censorship and sexual violence. Her new novel, Rebellion 1776, explores the chaotic time of the start of the American Revolution in Boston through the eyes of a servant girl. Anderson spoke with PW about her fascination with disease and history, the thrill of delving into digitized primary sources, and what draws her to continue writing about the founding years of this country.
You’ve written several novels set in the era of the American Revolution, as well as the picture book Independent Dames. The most recent novel, Ashes, was published in 2016. Why did you decide to return to that era to write Rebellion 1776?
I got Covid very early after the start of the pandemic, at the end of March 2020, and I got through it, but it was a long and boring time. While I was recovering, I rewatched the HBO series about John Adams, which showed scenes of Adams and their children getting inoculated against smallpox. I watched it several times, then went down the internet rabbit hole of primary sources to learn what really happened. The truth was much more interesting than the HBO version. And here we are, five years later with this book!
I admit that I’m a little fascinated by disease and history. My first historical fiction novel was Fever 1793—about the yellow fever that killed about 10% of Philadelphia’s population. During the lockdown, I heard from families who were reading Fever 1793. It’s good to read about intense events at a historical remove, especially when we’re going through intense events ourselves. And really, we read history to help us understand our lives today.
Once I started researching the smallpox epidemic of the 1770s, boy, did it feel familiar to where we were in 2020. Abigail Adams’ letters detailing the inoculation process and her family’s recovery from smallpox in Boston during the eventful summer of 1776 really were the spark for this novel. At first, actually, I thought I would write a picture book about smallpox but my editor Caitlin Dlouhy said, “No, I think it’s a novel.”
My book covers the traumatic effects of the Siege of Boston, the growing political divide within families and communities, and the frightening smallpox epidemic, which threatened everything. One reason I continue to write about this era is because I think we could do a better job depicting the state of the colonies at the start of the Revolution in recognizing that independence was not a done deal. Lots of people supported the King and people were quite divided. It blew me away when I started learning how many families during those years stopped talking to each other because of vehement political disagreements. And kids like my main character in Rebellion 1776, 13-year-old Elsbeth Culpepper, were simply caught up in these events. The historical events that shape our world have a much deeper impact on children than on adults. That’s also why I continue to write about the Revolutionary War and the years after it. Kids who grew up during that tumultuous time —like Elsbeth—became the founding generation of our country.
Today’s children are also coming of age in the middle of unpredictable and challenging events. If we can spark their curiosity about our history, they’ll want to learn more about how our nation got to where we are today. The past doesn’t hold all the answers, but understanding it can help prepare them to navigate the future. It’s important to tell the history accurately, though. Generations before us didn’t tell the whole story; they mostly told the stories of rich white men. Now, though, we have digital tools that allow us to access a variety of primary sources in a way we never could before. Before the internet, we’d have to drive to little towns all around the country to try to uncover unpublished primary sources. There was a certain charm to that process, but I don’t really miss it.
How did the availability of digital primary sources affect the research process for Rebellion 1776?
I started working on Fever 1793 in 1993. I didn’t have a laptop. I had a spiral notebook and I went into dusty archives and handwrote my notes. By the time I started working on Rebellion 1776, everything had been digitized—thank you, scholars! I worked on this book during the pandemic and so I couldn’t travel anywhere. No one could, of course. But I was able to do the immense amount of research this book required entirely via the internet. I relied on the incredible primary source collection of materials about Boston before and during the Revolution that has been digitized by the Massachusetts Historical Society. For example, I was able to read Abigail Adams’s uncle’s letters in which he inventoried all of his furniture and belongings, and use that information to authentically furnish the house where Elsbeth is working as a servant. Then I went to various museum websites to view images of the furniture and other objects he mentions so I could describe them accurately. That level of research also made it possible for me to describe Elsbeth’s sewing supplies, and the sailmaking supplies her father uses. I had an embarrassment of riches in terms of source material for this book.
When did Elsbeth emerge as your main character, and how did you create her voice?
I knew from the start that I wanted to write about a kid from a working-class family. I first had to understand the main character of Boston, and then I had to create a character about my reader’s age. I wanted to write about class—not about an enslaved child, as in my earlier books. I knew that many middle-class people had servants supporting their middle-class lives. I wanted to show her not just as a servant. I wanted to show how different the lives of working-class kids were from those of the middle-class.
Elsbeth’s voice addresses the reader a little more directly than the characters in my earlier books do. We don’t know how kitchen maids would have spoken in those times, so I didn’t want to try to replicate that. I wanted to create the voice of a character who would be somebody my readers would want to go to school with, while still respecting how people spoke during that period.
When and why did you decide to begin each of the 43 chapters with a quotation from a primary source?
This goes all the way back to Fever 1793 and my editor on that book, Kevin Lewis. I was whining to him about having so much primary source material that I hadn’t used and he helped me see that there was space to add these voices to set up the themes of each chapter. Since then, all of my historical fiction books include quotations from primary sources at the start of each chapter. I now keep many documents of thematic quotations as I am researching. I start putting the quotations into very early drafts and if the chapter changes, often the opening quotations change. Using these helps me focus on what the purpose of each chapter is. In fact, if I’m struggling to find a quotation for a chapter, it usually means I am still struggling to shape the chapter.
What’s next for you? Do you think you are done with writing about the American Revolutionary era or is there more you still want to explore?
I can never say never! I think historical fiction sometimes gets a bad rap—kids often roll their eyes when somebody mentions it. In fact, I often advise teachers to call my books “adventure novels.” I think kids are actually drawn to historical fiction for the same reason they are drawn to fantasy: the world-building is the same. You can escape into historical fiction and fantasy in the same way.
I seem to bounce back and forth between middle-grade historical fiction and contemporary YA fiction. While I was working on Rebellion 1776, every once in a while I’d hear a stray thought about a contemporary YA book, so I think that’ s probably what’s next. But it’s still much too early to say anything more.
Rebellion 1776 by Laurie Halse Anderson. Atheneum/Dlouhy, $18.99 Apr. 1 ISBN 978-1-4169-6826-9
