—Susan Belasco and the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, including research assistants Sarah Chavez, Anastasia Bierman, Ryan Oberhelman, Danielle Metcalf, and Laura Dimmit.
—Matthew Clouse, for his research on turn-of-the-century health resorts and regimens, and Roxanne Wach, for her research on the mediums and clairvoyants of the period.
Thanks also to the many others who have offered support, insight, and inspiration along the way: Janet Lura, Judy Slater, Kurt Andersen, Lauren Ceran, Kate Bernheimer, John Keenan, Leo Adam Biga, Kathy Patrick, LeAnn Messing, Jessica Regel, emily danforth, Wanda Ewing, Loretta Krause, and Greg Michalson and the exceptional Unbridled Books. And, as always, much love and admiration to my parents, Larry and Donita.
And a special thanks to the booksellers (especially the Bookworm of Omaha) who serve novels and novelists so tirelessly.
Author’s Note
The Omaha World’s Fair, as depicted in The Swan Gondola, is a fictional approximation of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898. For my interpretation of the event, and of turn-of-the-century Omaha, I relied primarily on the collections of the Omaha Public Library (for which I thank Gary Wasdin, OPL executive director; thanks also to Kyle Porter, Amy Mather, Patrick Esser, Martha Grenzeback, and all the fine librarians and staff members of OPL). I also appreciated the extensive index of newspaper articles compiled by historian David Wells, and I benefitted greatly from reading the 1898 editions of the Omaha Bee via the website of the Library of Congress. Some excellent portraits of nineteenth-century Omaha can be found in A Dirty, Wicked Town by David L. Bristow and Impertinences, a collection of articles by Omaha World-Herald columnist Elia Peattie, edited by Susanne George Bloomfield.
From that foundation of fact, I developed the fiction, shaping the novel and its details around the demands of character and plot. And the narrator brings along his own biases, filtering his portrait of Omaha and its people, rich and poor, through the perspective of a young man who grew up in the alleys. To learn more about the Expo as it actually was, visit http://trans-mississippi.unl.edu for photographs, documents, and Expo publications.
Though some real-life personalities of the time (such as President McKinley and some of the lunch guests at the Pink Heron Hotel) do make appearances in the novel, all the novel’s main characters are imagined. There was a John A. Wakefield who served as the exposition’s secretary, but I know little about him, and the character of William Wakefield is in no way based on him. I simply liked the name; John A. Wakefield’s wife, whom I know even less about—I’ve yet to even stumble across her first name—was one of the Expo’s first archivists, putting together scrapbooks that are still housed in the special collections of the Omaha Public Library.
But long before I became interested in the Expo, I was interested in The Wizard of Oz, and the wizard’s balloon emblazoned with the name of his hometown: Omaha. I grew up in Nebraska and was always curious about the wizard’s humble origins as a ventriloquist’s apprentice (as briefly described in L. Frank Baum’s original novel of 1900). Though The Swan Gondola is not a retelling of the Oz myth, I did consult Baum’s novel frequently, particularly the centennial edition with annotations by Michael Patrick Hearn. Throughout The Swan Gondola are many allusions to Baum’s novel and to the novel’s illustrations by W. W. Denslow.
I’d also like to note: the paragraph from The Female Offender in chapter 21 is a direct quote from the 1897 criminal study by Professor Caesar Lombroso and William Ferrero; a line about census figures in chapter 5 is paraphrased from Official Guide Book to Omaha and the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition; and chapter 9 features lines from a speech given by John L. Webster during the opening-day ceremonies.
The Swan Gondola: A Novel Page 42