Amazon.com Review
Best of the Month, May 2009: The early American tree-hugger and pioneering thinker Henry David Thoreau did a bad, bad thing back on April 30, 1844. A year before he settled into the “simple life” at Walden Pond, he struck a match to start a cooking fire in the dry woods around Concord, Massachusetts and accidentally ignited a forest fire that consumed 300 acres. The events of that chaotic day appear to have altered the course of Thoreau’s life and American history. More recently, this historical footnote sparked the creation of
Woodsburner, a terrific debut novel from John Pipkin.
Woodsburner offers a nuanced portrait of a young and less recognizable Thoreau, whose philosophy begins to materialize as the flames lay waste. The talented Pipkin simultaneously presents a vivid picture of mid-19th century New England on the cusp of unstoppable change through a cast of characters: a sadistic and misguided preacher, a desperate bookseller, and an isolated immigrant laborer harboring painful secrets. Their lives are forever changed by the fire which serves as a powerful metaphor for the destructive passions that consume us, as well as the eternal struggles between human society and the natural world.
--Lauren Nemroff
Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with John Pipkin 
Question: How did the idea for
Woodsburner come to you?
John Pipkin: Although I have always admired Thoreau’s insights, many of which I think are still just as relevant today as they were 150 years ago, I really had no intention of ever writing a novel about Thoreau. In fact, I was working on an outline for an entirely different book in the fall of 2003 when I came across a brief line in the
Harper’s Index:
Estimated acres of forest Henry David Thoreau burned down in 1844 trying to cook fish he had caught for dinner: 300. The irony was striking: to think that one of America’s iconic environmentalists might have been driven—at least in part—by his remorse over having brought about the destruction of the very thing he so loved. Thoreau’s biographies mention the incident, but no one has explored the influence that this fire may have had on Thoreau’s naturalist philosophy. The forest fire takes place at a time in Thoreau’s life when his professional ambitions seem to have come to a standstill. By the age of 26, he had been unable to support himself by teaching, writing, and working as a handyman of sorts, and he had not yet built his famous cabin at Walden Pond. At the start of 1844, Thoreau was relatively unknown, but after the fire he finally begins the work for which he would be remembered. So I began to wonder if it were possible that an accidental forest fire had somehow helped change the landscape of American literary history.
Question: Without giving too much away from the novel, can you tell us a little about how Thoreau accidentally started such a huge forest fire?
John Pipkin: Well, it actually started with a simple act of carelessness, as I guess most forest fires do. On April 30, 1844, Thoreau went on a boating trip with a friend, Edward Sherman Hoar. After catching some fish, they decided to row ashore at Fair Haven Bay (a few miles south of the town of Concord) and build a fire to cook their fish into a chowder. There had been no rain for weeks, so the woods were exceptionally dry for springtime in New England, and, to make matters worse, the day was far too windy to build a fire safely. Thoreau proceeded to do so anyway, and as soon as he lit the kindling the wind blew the flames into the dry grass nearby. From there it spread into the Concord Woods and rapidly moved north toward the town before being extinguished by Concord’s residents, who beat back the flames and cut down trees to create firebreaks. Ironically, Thoreau and Hoar had initially forgotten to bring matches with them on their trip, but they met a shoemaker at the river’s edge who lent them some.
Question: What record do we have of the actual fire of 1844? Does Thoreau ever mention it in his writings?
John Pipkin: The main record of the fire is a newspaper article that appeared in the Concord Freeman on May 3, 1844. The article does not mention Thoreau or Hoar by name, but says that the fire “was communicated to the woods through the thoughtlessness of two of our citizens.” Thoreau writes about the fire at length in his journal, but he does not do so until six years later, in 1850. In his entry he appears both guilt-ridden and defensive, sometimes saying that he “had felt like a guilty person—nothing but shame and regret,” while at other times he insists that “I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein... it was a glorious spectacle, and I was the only one there to enjoy it.” It is striking, I think, that Thoreau could not bring himself to record the event at the time it occurred, but six years later he evidently still felt moved enough by the experience to wrestle with his guilt in his journal.
Question: What were the implications of the fire? How was Thoreau regarded after the fact among fellow Concordians?
John Pipkin: One of the most interesting things, I think, about the article in the Concord Freeman is that it reflects how Americans in early-nineteenth century New England were already growing concerned over nature’s vulnerability to human recklessness. The article concludes: “It is to be hoped that this unfortunate result of sheer carelessness, will be borne in mind by those who may visit the woods in [the] future for recreation.” By the 1840’s this area of New England was already beginning to show signs of deforestation due to the spread of agriculture and the growth of Concord as a transportation hub. What many people don’t realize is that, thanks to reforestation efforts in the 20th century, there are actually more trees at Walden today than there were in Thoreau’s time. So you can imagine the outrage of the people of Concord (not to mention those who owned the burned property) when they discovered that some of the last portions of untouched woodland in the area had been reduced to ash. The owners of the property were prepared to take legal action against Thoreau, but Hoar’s father compensated them for their financial loss. Nevertheless, the people of Concord were angry at Thoreau for what he had done, and some continued to refer to him as the “woodsburner” for years afterward.
Question: With this novel, you pose the possibility that the fire was the catalyst that caused Thoreau to retreat to Walden Pond and begin his writings. How likely is this idea?
John Pipkin: I think it is entirely conceivable that had Thoreau not burned down 300 acres of woodland and evoked the anger of the residents of Concord, he might not have decided to live by himself and focus on his writing when and where he did. For some time before the fire, Thoreau had spoken of his wish to go off and live alone in the woods somewhere, to concentrate on his writing and observe the passing of the seasons, but by the spring of 1844 he still had no definite plans to fulfill this ambition. Similarly, although Ralph Waldo Emerson had often mentioned to Thoreau that he would like to buy some land at Walden to spare the trees from the woodsman’s ax, it is not until after the fire that Emerson finally buys a plot of land at the pond. And the following summer, at the encouragement of William Ellery Channing, Thoreau builds a cabin on Emerson’s plot and moves in for two years. I do think that the fire served as a catalyst for Thoreau in a number of ways. The tragedy underscored the fragility of the natural world at a time when people were just beginning to view the countryside as a place where they could escape from city life. From his journal entries, it seems that the guilt Thoreau felt may have driven him to seek recompense from nature. And if nothing else, the fire may have forced Thoreau to spend some time away from Concord, where he could not walk the streets without hearing whispers of “woodsburner” behind his back.
Question: What are some interesting things you learned about Thoreau in your research?
John Pipkin: There are many curiosities about Thoreau’s life that have not become part of the mythology that now surrounds him. For example, he was actually christened David Henry Thoreau, but later switched his first and middle names. To this day, some people credit him with having “invented” raisin bread, and he was locally famous for growing the largest, sweetest melons in Concord and for throwing popular melon parties. And more seriously, when Thoreau was thirty-three he underwent anesthesia in the form of ether (a relatively new technique at the time) and had all of his teeth pulled. Apparently he was very satisfied with the set of false teeth his dentist fashioned for him afterward. But probably the most interesting, and most significant fact I learned was that Thoreau’s father, John, ran a pencil making business in the sheds behind their home, and Thoreau Pencils were regarded at the time as the best pencils made in America. The quality of the pencils was due largely to Henry David Thoreau’s rediscovery of an old formula for blending graphite with Bavarian clay to produce pencil leads of varying hardness. The old method for making pencils involved the tedious process of splitting the wood lengthwise, cutting a groove, filling it with a lead paste, and gluing the halves together again. But Henry David Thoreau’s reformulated lead was hard enough to withstand being cut into thin rods, so the pencil wood could be drilled and the lead rods tapped in. He invented new machines for cutting the lead into thin rods and for drilling holes into the pencil wood. He also built a spring-driven tabletop mill for grinding the lead into a fine powder, resulting in more consistent pencils. On the day of the fire, Thoreau was taking a break from his work at the pencil factory, which was his main occupation at the time.
Question: The novel is full of several characters aside from Thoreau. They are funny, eccentric, surprising, and completely original. How did you develop these characters and their subplots?
John Pipkin: Thoreau is not the only character in the book in need of some catalyst to move his life in a new direction. All of the characters are leading lives of “quiet desperation” on the day of the fire, and through each I tried to approach some aspect of the American experience in order to explore what the New World represented to the many different people who came here in search of a new life. In the period stretching between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, even America itself seemed to be searching for its identity—for its sense of self as a nation. At the same time that people continued to arrive on America’s shores in pursuit of the American Dream, there was already a sense in the young nation that something had been lost, some sense of promise unfulfilled. It is no surprise that during this period, Emerson delivered his “American Scholar” address in which he calls for America to develop its own literature, its own art, its own philosophy. It was a fertile, exciting, and transformative period in American history, and I eventually decided that I wanted the fictional characters in Woodsburner to reflect the promises of the New World, the seemingly unlimited resources of early America, and the sense of possibility and uncertainty present in a young country that—for all its potential—could not yet lay claim to a cultural or intellectual tradition of its own.
Question: What was the most challenging part of writing this novel? Most fun?
John Pipkin: Well, probably the most challenging part of writing this historical novel was walking the tightrope between fiction and history. Woodsburner is a novel first, so the book’s first responsibility is to engage its reader with fictional stories. In any historical novel, careful research is a necessity, but in the end it’s the made-up stuff that is really the most important: the characters, their fears and desires and hopes, and the interweaving plots that constitute their lives. At the same time, I wanted to make sure that these invented stories did not contradict known historical facts. I wanted the fictional stories, as much as possible, to encourage readers to look at the history they feel they already know and reconsider it in a different light. At times, there was a real temptation to include historical anecdotes that seemed interesting for their own sake—at the risk of overwhelming the fictional narrative—so the biggest challenge was to use historical research to support the story, while not allowing the research itself to become the story. The real story here is about the individual characters, and that was the most enjoyable part of the writing the novel, developing the lives and personalities of the characters who populate it.
(Photo © Kenneth Gall)
Review
“What a terrific tale John Pipkin spins! He has taken a dramatic episode in the life of Thoreau and the history of Concord, Massachusetts, where I have lived for over thirty years, and transformed it into a gripping and profound work of fiction. More than a century and a half ago, my fellow Concordian, Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Walt Whitman. 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career.' The same can now be said to the wonderfully talented Mr. Pipkin.”
—Doris Kearns Goodwin
“Thoreau's biographers commonly have made little of the incident, but John Pipkin takes the lighting of that fateful match as the starting point of his intelligent and often lyrical first novel,
Woodsburner…. As the fire spreads, his Thoreau springs to life, meditating defensively about accident and intention…and when Pipkin surreptitiously incorporates sections of Thoreau's journals into his character's perspective, he creates a Thoreau who rationalizes with adolescent piquancy…. Pipkin also beguilingly conjures as assortment of appealing characters who find themselves in or near the Concord woods the day Thoreau set fire to them…. Since
Woodsburner is, in effect, a wily fictional prequel to 'Walden,' Pipkin's motley characters, taken together, suggest how our vintage Thoreau, a Thoreau of history as well as fantasy, came to be.”
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The New York Times Book Review “Wonderfully grandiose…. Pipkin's portrait of a nation in flux is energetic and optimistic. It's also a remarkably constructed piece of fiction—vibrant, solidly plotted and lyrically yet efficiently composed—and should be a contender for the year's important literary awards.”
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The Boston Globe“John Pipkin's brooding first novel,
Woodsburner, starts on the morning of April 30, as Henry David [Thoreau] squats on the bank of Fair Haven Bay and strikes a match he bummed from a shoemaker. The novel ends that evening, as the blackened forest glows in the darkness and soot snows down on the town of Concord. Over the course of this momentous day, Pipkin moves back in time and across the Atlantic, describing several other characters whose lives are lit by their own fires and altered by Thoreau's conflagration.
The ingenious nature of this structure grows clearer with each haunting chapter. The fire that 'flows like brilliant liquid' through Concord Woods is a natural engine for a terrifically exciting story, and Pipkin conveys such a visceral impression of the 'clever flames crouching in the branches' that you can feel the heat radiating off these pages….
But just as captivating are those characters Pipkin has invented, men and women consumed by their own passions. They provide a fascinating impression of the nation when it was still young and swelling and struggling to define itself. They see the Concord fire through their own private flames—fire is everywhere in this novel—and Pipkin allows them to brush up against each other in the most subtle and ingenious ways.”
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The Washington Post“[A] brilliant first novel… rich and memorable…. [Woodsburner] crackles with heat and energy, as we see these characters tested by the flames, scorched by their passions, beliefs and hopes. John Pipkin uses Thoreau's own sentence like a match, to spark a vision of a younger America poised at a moment of self-definition.”
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The Times-Picayune, New Orleans
“
Woodsburner is Pipkin's first novel, but, with its complex structure and top-notch prose, there's not a page that reads like the work of a novice…. The result is, well, transcendent.
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The Christian Science Monitor *starred review* “This is a powerfully rendered debut about an infamous moment in American literary history…. Pipkin does an excellent job of bringing the people and environs of historic Concord to life…. A fascinating fictional exploration of a seminal American event.”
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Library Journal*starred review* "An inglorious episode in the life of 19th-century author and environmental saint Henry David Thoreau is the subject of Pipkin’s impressive debut novel. In 1844, a year prior to his memorable tenure at Walden Pond, while hiking with a friend on the fringe of woods not far from bustling Concord, Mass., Thoreau impulsively lit a match in dry weather during a high wind, starting a fire that would consume 300 acres of valuable forest and farmland. An initial focus on Henry’s guilt and panic unfolds into ongoing portrayals of the lives of three other men variously affected by the conflagration, as independently lived and as briefly linked to the life of Thoreau. Norwegian immigrant farmhand Oddmund Hus, still haunted by images of the fire ignited when the ship that had borne his family to America exploded in Boston Harbor, yearns for his dour employer’s buxom Irish wife, and agonizes over whether the recent brush fire he tended had made him the inadvertent 'woodsburner.' Boston bookseller Eliot Calvert, painfully aware of compromises made to support his demanding family, assists volunteer firefighters manfully, but envisions the catastrophe in relation to the unwritten climax of his (hilariously jejune) stage play. And insanely jealous preacher Caleb Dowdy, long estranged from his more temperate clergyman father, seeks purification for his own sin (withholding the promise of salvation from an innocent man falsely accused of child molestation) in the cleansing power of the great fire. Pipkin tells their stories in a breathlessly exciting present tense, layering in substantial information about the credos and conflicts of the new England Transcendentalists.... The author succeeds brilliantly in portraying a young country struggling to shape its idealistic energies into something concrete and enduring. The consequent successes and failures are movingly encapsulated in 'Odd' Hus’s emotional, climactic vision of destruction, rebirth and renewal. A superb historical fiction as well as a complex and provocative novel of ideas—Pulitzer Prize material."
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Kirkus Reviews“
Woodsburner deftly weaves big thoughts about fate, religion, and commerce with the burgeoning adventure of America between the Revolutionary and Civil wars, and an unexpected good measure of humor. It's a novel carried effortlessly by Pipkin's engaging, provocative prose and the often-surprising stories of his characters, and culminates in an exciting battle of epic proportions against nature itself. It is, in Pipkin's capable hands, the event that will shape Thoreau's philosophy. Like the almost irresistible urge to stare and meld with the dangerously destructive element of fire, readers will be pulled inexorably toward the heat ignited by the fires of each character's story…. It is a book that will keep you up all night racing toward the last page, and then will leave you longing for more. Do yourself a favor and give up a day for this one.”
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Jackson Free Press“Pipkin's research into the event and the era seems impeccable. The book is rife with interesting historical trivia: how lead pencils were made, the proper use of a mulling poker, how raw coffee beans were roasted. And the author's language nicely captures the tone and diction of 19th-century American English…. This is an ambitious and complex fiction…. Pipkin's
Woodsburner is an impressive debut.
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Minneapolis Star Tribune“The story is infused with moments of genuine drama, peril and suspense.
Woodsburner is edifying, engaging and satisfying, an exemplary illustration of how fiction can illuminate the past, bring history to life and make it feel as fresh and relevant as the present day.”
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The Dallas Morning News"
Woodsburner doesn't read like debut fiction. It is a mature historical work by a writer who happened upon a small footnote in American history and fanned a flicker into an imaginative, complex novel that humanizes an American icon.”
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San Antonio Express “If for no other reason, John Pipkin deserves a lot of credit for the breadth and ambition of his first novel
Woodsburner. Fortunately there are numerous other reasons to recommend this clever little book.”
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The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star "Witty, bawdy, philosophical, touching, and humorous,
Woodsburner is a novel I didn't want to end. While Pipkin's book celebrates a sense of both the abundance and fragility of Thoreau's Nature, it also creates a new American Adam and Eve, thoroughly flawed from the beginning but ultimately victorious in their shared joy. Much as in our own time, the characters struggle with their desire for life-shaping change, the age-old stirrings of the body, and economic necessity along with their quests for spiritual, intellectual, and artistic fulfillment. This book is packed with interesting ideas, vital characters, and vivid writing."
—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of
Ahab's Wife and
Four Spirits“Characters whose inner lives are richly and complexly rendered, a suspenseful narrative, and impeccable period details make
Woodsburner an exceptional debut. Pipkin tells his story with the verve and authority of a veteran novelist, and the result is a book that, once begun, compels the reader onward to the very last sentence.”
—Ron Rash, author of
Serena“Pipkin captures Thoreau's pre-Walden days with great insight and authority. And like all good historical fiction,
Woodsburner forges new connections and blows fresh air through a well-worn legend.”
—Dominic Smith, author of
The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre"Most readers know Thoreau's Walden as a treatise on man's respect for nature, but Pip...
