I think people have a negative view of history and that it’s boring on the page, but it wasn’t boring when it happened. This reads like I’m reading it in real-time,” or that this was somebody’s diary or a record of what was happening at the time because history is exciting as anything. I want somebody to pick up a book of history and say, “This doesn’t read like a history book. My goal, with writing non-fiction, is to try to make it read like a story. You enjoy storytelling about real events and people with a unique style or genre. I think that experience prepared me, and probably a lot of my colleagues who ended up writing books, to be able to write 100,000 words, particularly, after you’ve been doing these pretty long narrative pieces for a while. I think what was the most helpful about my experience in journalism was, back when I was doing this, editors would say, “Go ahead, write 7,000 words on this, write 10,000 words on this.” It was a freedom of storytelling that you don’t have in print today. She was living in a complex in South Philadelphia. Her history still remained and somewhat defined her. It was a woman who was a descendent of slaves. For another story, I randomly picked a name out of the phone book and wrote about this person. I spent a long time really getting a blow-by-blow of what had happened and how it impacted the community. There was a car crash in South Philadelphia that killed six or seven children in a van and devastated that community. I covered profiles, politicians, and was a little bit of a jack-of-all-trades.Th e thing I most enjoyed was taking a story and really examining it. I loved the dark side of storytelling in that way.

I started off at a weekly newspaper called Philadelphia Weekly covering everything from murderers to serial killers. Wanting to bring women to the forefront in history, her books feature women in a central role. Her career started as a young journalist, where she found a passion for gathering details this led her to writing historical non-fiction novels. Author & Historian Karen Abbott is a New York Times best-selling author of Sin in the Second City, American Rose, and Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy.

Karen abbott author