Karen Joy Fowler's Booth is a novel published in 2022 and set in 1822. It tells the story of a secret family that moves into a cabin in the woods nearly thirty miles outside of Baltimore. Specifically, the novel follows Junius Booth, a celebrated actor who endeavors to have ten children over the course of sixteen years. As each child is progressively born, the country grows closer and closer to Civil War.
Junius Booth was the father of the infamous assassin John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln one horrible night at Ford Theater. Fowler wanted to explore how history was shaped and formed, and how the critical players in history influenced events.
When she started writing the book, Fowler didn't intend to draw a parallel between the United States of the 2020s to the United States in the times leading up to the Civil War. But after Donald Trump was elected President, she said, she began to notice how the issues that ultimately led to the Civil War were never really fully rectified. And those feelings are certainly reflected in her work.
Not only that, Fowler intended to comment on the problem of gun violence in the United States, which she sees as a massive problem. In an interview, Fowler said, in fact, that "John Wilkes Booth is probably the most famous man with a gun in all of American history." Broadly, Fowler's novel is an exploration of history. However, more specifically, the novel is an exploration of the characters within history and how their experiences - in childhood and otherwise - shaped them and their actions.
