Louis Bayard’s Novel Research at the Library

Bestselling author Louis Bayard has written nine historical novels over the past two decades and has researched them all at the Library, poring over maps, sorting through personal love letters, consulting societal details of the lost worlds that he brings to life.

His latest novel, “The Wildes,” a fictionalized account of Oscar Wilde and his wife and children, was released this week. His penchant of weaving real people (Wilde, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, etc.) into fictional adventures is so distinctive that The New York Times recently referred to it as “Bayardian.”

Creating a distinctive literary style over two decades — with books set across several centuries and three continents — takes a lot of work. A lot of that gets done in the Library’s stacks, reading rooms and collections, spread across three buildings on Capitol Hill. He’s on the Library campus so often that he has his own researcher shelf (#1433) in the stacks just off the Main Reading Room. He has lauded Abby Yochelson, a now-retired reference specialist in English and American literature, in the acknowledgements of several books as his “research angel.”

“It just makes you feel more secure when you’re putting these worlds together because they’re all lost to time,” he says during a recent interview at a Capitol Hill restaurant a few doors down from the Library. “I’m trying to reanimate them, and the only way to do that is through books, through the stacks.” A moment later, he adds: “The book is always telling me what I still need to know. It’s often considerable. That’s when I dash back to the Library.”

Bayard is 60 and comes across much like his books do: urbane, witty, charming. He was born in New Mexico, grew up in Northern Virginia and went to college at Princeton. He got a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University and moved back to Washington, where he soon worked as a staffer for congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and for U.S. Rep. Philip Sharp (D-Ind.).

His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, he’s served as chair of the PEN/Faulkner Awards and taught at George Washington University. He often writes about pop culture for major newspapers and magazines. The father of two sons, he lives with his husband, Don Montuori, on Capitol Hill, just a few blocks from the Library.

He’s also settled into a professional routine — a book about every two years — and a consistent research method. Once he’s settled on a new character storyline, he heads to the Library’s website and on-site resources and starts digging.

Let’s look back at the beginning to see how he got here.

By his late 30s, he’d written two contemporary novels that were perfectly fine but didn’t catch on. He struck out on a new tack with the idea of writing a historical thriller, following the fictional Timothy Cratchit (Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”) into adulthood. Bayard pictured him in London’s seamy 1860s underbelly, where he stumbles across the bodies of two dead young women, each of whom has been branded with the same mark.

But how was one to fill out nearly 400 pages with those “teeming markets, shadowy passageways and rolling brown fog” of the London demimonde, as “Mr. Timothy’s” dust jacket would ultimately promise?

Bayard, with his journalism background, went to the Library to do his due diligence. He at first found the place confusing if not bewildering. The Library is filled with collections from different eras — it’s not like Google — and some parts of a single subject might be found in contemporary books, or maybe in personal letters of participants, others in histories published decades (or centuries) later and still more in maps or in long-forgotten newspapers and magazines. These can be in different divisions and sometimes in different buildings. They have come in over nearly two centuries and might have been cataloged in ways that would have made perfect sense in 1890 but not so much so in 1990. Some were online, some were not.

This is when he met Yochelson, a highly respected research librarian.

“It wasn’t an easy process to figure out,” he says, “and I needed my friend Abby to practically hold my hand. But once I was in, I found Henry Mayhew, who was this amazing social scientist who was basically walking through the streets of London in the Victorian era and taking notes about everything he saw, the statistics, man-on-the-street interviews, everything. It was just like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve found the treasure trove. I’ve found gold.’ ”

The book sold well and drew strong critical reviews, and Yochelson was delighted to see some of the research she helped him find turn up in the book.

“I still remember he wanted to know what banking was like in Charles Dickens’ England,” she said in a recent phone call. “ ‘Would you get a check? What was a photography studio like?’ All sorts of things. Two years later, the book comes out and I would come across something and go, “Oh, there it is!”

She and Bayard have kept up their friendship, though she is modest about her help. “There are ‘research angels’ all over the library,” she says.

Research magic struck again for his next book, “The Pale Blue Eye,” set at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, in 1830, when a young cadet named Edgar Allan Poe becomes caught up in a grisly murder mystery. (Poe really did attend the academy.) In the Geography and Map Division, Bayard came across a layout of the campus that showed, right in the middle, an icehouse. He made a copy of the map, kept it with him while writing to ensure accuracy and made the icehouse the central focus of the investigation.

That book did even better and was turned into a 2022 film starring Christian Bale.

In researching “Roosevelt’s Beast,” a tale about supernatural evil in the Amazon rainforest that has devastating effects on Kermit Roosevelt, the president’s son, he came across love letters in the Manuscript Division between Kermit and his fiancé, Belle Wyatt Willard. They were so touching that he used excerpts verbatim in the book.

“What have I done that God should choose me out of all the world for you to love — but as He has done this, so perhaps He will make me a little worthy of your love,” Willard wrote, in one passage Bayard quoted. “May He keep you safe for me! I love you, Kermit, I love you.”

One hundred and ten years later, you can still hold the hotel stationery on which she wrote, see how delicately she pressed the pen into the paper. The passion, the intensity, the intimacy of her writing — it really does bring goosebumps.

It’s that kind of immediacy, Bayard says, that brings his lost worlds to life, that brings modern readers the touch of lives long gone.

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