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The
2005 Award
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The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
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Nominated by:
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| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| In
1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club - poets and Harvard
professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James
Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields - are finishing America's
first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable
visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College
are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration
of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as
the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbour. The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realises that the gruesome killings are modelled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
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Matthew Pearl graduated from Harvard University summa cum laude in English and American Literature in 1997, and in 2000 from Yale Law School, where he wrote the first draft of The Dante Club. In 1998, he won the prestigious Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America for his scholarly work. He is also the editor of the new Modern Library edition of Dante's Inferno, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He grew up in Fort Lauderdale and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Dante Club is his first novel. He can be reached via his website, www.thedanteclub.com. |
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