Jonathan Daniel Wells

How did you become a writer?

I grew up surrounded by books, especially novels, since my father was a professor of nineteenth-century American literature before he retired. It wouldn’t be true to say, however, that I was a prolific reader until I went to college and especially to grad school at the University of Michigan where many classes expected us to read a few books a week. And only recently have I really worked hard to become a writer as well as an academic historian. Among academics, history writing tends to be very direct and heavy on evidence and argument. But with The Kidnapping Club I really tried to be conscious of not just of the evidence but also the accessibility of the prose.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

There are some great writers who are historians, and I have tried to use them as models. I think some of best prose comes from scholars such as Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Walter Johnson, and David Waldstreicher. In terms of fiction, I so admire writer such as Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead. My students right now are reading Morrison’s A Mercy, a wonderfully rich novel about the Black experience in colonial America.

When and where do you write? 

I tend to write first thing in the morning after coffee, when my own personal energy is at its highest. Then I usually turn back to it in the late afternoon. I need to be comfortable and not claustrophobic so I often write on our enclosed back porch. I am easily distracted so I need near complete silence, which is sometimes hard to come by!

What are you working on now? 

Two projects: One is about the Draft Riots in NYC in July 1863 and the broader issue of racism in the Civil War north. The other is a sequel of sorts to my very first book titled The Origins of the Southern Middle Class(2004).

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I think I have mostly avoided that by working on more than one project at a time. If I get stuck on one book or article, I have another I can go to.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

It is important to turn off email and other distractions and notifications.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Try as much as possible to write every day, or at least with as little time away as possible. I have found that the longer you are away from a project the higher the hurdle becomes to get yourself mentally re-engaged.

Jonathan Daniel Wells, Ph.D., is Professor of History in the Residential College, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Origins of the Southern Middle Class: 1820-1861 (2004); Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (2011); The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century (2011); and A House Divided: The Civil War and Nineteenth-Century America (second ed., 2016). His most recent books are Blind no More: African American Resistance, Free Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War (2019) and The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War (2020).