The Good Lord Bird: A Novel by James McBride

Interview Highlights

Gary Panter

"The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what's been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring. Not all of it, but I wanted to kind of thrust him into the Jesse James category or the Western category so that people would appreciate, you know, what he really was and what he tried to do."
A portrait of Brown and Frederick Douglass is at the heart of James McBride's The Good Lord Bird, a new novel with an unlikely narrator: a 12-year-old Kansas Territory slave named Henry Shackleford. Brown liberates Henry after a confrontation with Henry's master. He calls the boy — who has fair, curly hair and is dressed in a potato sack — Little Onion, but he thinks Henry is a girl, and to stay safe, Henry doesn't contradict him.

“The Good Lord Bird,” an unusually funny look at John Brown’s violent crusade against slavery

Podcast: Inside The New York Times Book Review: James McBride’s ‘Good Lord Bird’

Calling all comedy fans! The following scenes, set in the American slave era, were produced this year or last. Which is from a Hollywood blockbuster, which from a Comedy Central series, and which from a magnificent new novel by the best-selling author James McBride?

"Listen, don't meet your heroes. If you meet your heroes, you're always going to be disappointed. Frederick Douglass was a great man, but would I want my daughter to marry him? Probably not. That doesn't mean that I don't think he's a great man. ...

David Reynolds’s new book, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. Reynolds, Distinguished Professor of English, is also the author of Walt Whitman’s America, a highly praised work that earned him the prestigious Bancroft Prize in History in 1996. John Brown, Abolitionist (Knopf, 2005) offers a complex and profound reassessment of the man Reynolds calls “a Puritan warrior” and “America’s most famous dissident.” A fierce opponent of slavery all his life, Brown acted only after concluding that the abolitionists and their tactics of nonresistance and persuasion had failed.

 To Purge this Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown in 1970, Stephen B. Oates wrote what has come to be recognized as the definitive biography of Brown, a balanced assessment that captures the man in all his complexity. The book is now back in print.

John Brown

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