"For All the Nails: Robert Sobel Reimagines the American" Topic

… Revolution

"This is the world Robert Sobel (1931-1999) created in his 1973 novel For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga, the most famous counterfactual fiction about the American Revolution. Upon publication, Kirkus Reviews called FWOAN "quite brilliantly done" and this book "for both amateurs and practitioners of historiographic folderol" has prospered as a classic of a genre of fiction recently repopularized by TV shows like The Man in the High Castle and For All Mankind. FWOAN even has an active online fan community, as seen in the For All Nails fan timeline that migrated from Usenet to alternatehistory.com.[1]

Counterfactual fiction about the American Revolution tends to fall into two camps. There are utopias like Turtledove and Dreyfuss's 1995 The Two Georges, which sees British North America as a ‘super-Canada' of slower technology but settled social relations. There are dystopias like Richard Meredith's 1973 At the Narrow Passage in which the failure of the American Revolution significantly retards the spread of liberal democracy. These camps are both Americentric – the American Revolution is key to world history, diverting its course leads to profound change for better or worse. But FWOAN is neither utopia nor dystopia – merely different. By doing so, Sobel makes profound arguments about contingency, change, and the overall importance of the US War of Independence within the "Age of Revolution."

With this in mind, FWOAN shines as a worthy subject of historical analysis. Historical fiction is a way of talking about history at least as important as academic historiography, as M.J Rysza-Pawlowska recently showed in their look at how Alex Haley's Roots and its subsequent TV adaptation shaped historical understanding in the 1970s. Sobel's novel is a work of "fictional non-fiction" – written as a general survey of North American history from the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 to the then-present. The American Bicentennial decade, the 1970s saw many counterfactuals about the American Revolution published, such as the aforementioned Meredith book, Gordon Eklund's 1975 Serving in Time, and Robert W. Russell's 1974 play: Washington Shall Hang: A Drama of Lost Revolution. But these works of science fiction and stagecraft have very little in common with Sobel's work…"

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Armand