Larry Zuckerman
Historical fiction, kept real
I write novels about independent-minded people who resist injustice and seek hope and strength through love
In a few words
I grew up in an authoritarian household where I felt like a dissident, finding liberation decades later in a fulfilling marriage. That’s why I write about people from traditional backgrounds who break societal taboos during intolerant times and suffer disapproval and shame. For them, love may appear within reach, but do they dare open up to it and risk heartbreak?
My latest novel to explore these themes, To Save a Life (Cynren Press, 2025), was a Foreword INDIES Award finalist. Reviews praised my empathic characterizations and vivid portrayal of early 1900s New York immigrant life, noting the social and political issues that mattered then and still do.
Tell me . . .
what historical eras you like
how you first got hooked on historical fiction
Or ask me . . .
why so many novels start in the wrong place (it’s true!)
how I get my ideas for books
In more words
I grew up in an authoritarian household where I felt like a dissident, finding liberation decades later in a fulfilling marriage. That’s why I write about people from traditional backgrounds who break societal taboos during intolerant times and suffer disapproval and shame. For them, love may appear within reach, but do they dare open up to it and risk heartbreak?
My latest novel to explore these themes, To Save a Life (Cynren Press, 2025), was a Foreword INDIES Award finalist. Reviews praised my empathic characterizations and vivid portrayal of early 1900s New York immigrant life, noting the social and political issues that mattered then and still do.
I write about the crushing power of shame and what it means to have a voice, issues I’ve wrestled with ever since I was thirteen. But my work has other roots as well.
In 1944, my father saw Sir Laurence Olivier perform speeches from Shakespeare’s Henry V for American soldiers stationed in England. The experience moved Dad so much that years later, my parents—who’d met in a high school play—named me for Olivier.
I grew up hearing recordings of his speeches and felt secret pride that these words belonged to me. As my family often attended the New York theater, I began to dream that I’d write plays and enthrall audiences someday.
(Olivier and Merle Oberon on the set of Wuthering Heights, 1940. Courtesy Film Daily.)
History, another of my father’s passions, rubbed off on me too. I read biography, history, and historical fiction, devouring portrayals of other times, places, and cultures. History felt personal, as if I’d lived it, and offered an inexhaustible source of drama. I tried to grasp how people in the past saw themselves, separate from how I viewed them—an outlook that has since served me well as a historian and novelist.
No surprise that when I went to college, I majored in theater. The bigger surprise might be how well that has prepared me to write novels. For first drafts particularly, I imagine my characters performing onstage, which helps me ground them physically in their surroundings. During revisions, when I flesh out how I’ve set a scene or sharpen dialogue or let conflict deepen, I’m relying partly on what the theater teaches.
As experienced writers know, nothing is wasted; you just have to make good use of what you have. That’s what I’ve tried to do.
I write about shame . . .
because I think it’s the most powerful emotion in the world and responsibvle for great misery. The only antidote I know is empathy, which the main characters in my novels strive to offer.
In Western cultures, the expulsion from Eden of Adam and Eve, pictured here in a detail from a fifteenth-century fresco by Masaccio, might just be the definition of shame.
Or, if you prefer, consider “Seein’ Things,” Maxfield Parrish’s 1904 illustration of a child thinking that figures in the dark are mocking him. No doubt he has something to hide and fears public rebuke for it. That’s shame in the making.
(From Eugene Field, Poems of Childhood, Scribner, 1904. Courtesy New York Public Library.)