Photography and World War I
PICTURES, 1918 began with my wanting to write about
photography, which is something I got involved with in third grade, when my mom
and dad gave me a box camera and a kit for processing film and printing
pictures. I set my novel in a much earlier time period, though, partly
because some World War I-era family photos had fueled my imagination about what
life on the Texas home front was like then.
To research PICTURES, 1918, I pored over old insurance
maps, phone books, and county histories, and I drove the back roads of Texas in
my effort to write the town of Dust Crossing the way it would have been, if it had
been.
Of course, setting a book during the First World War
also meant delving into the political and social history of the time. That
was largely library work, and my absolute best resources were the microfilmed,
small-town newspapers of the day. They gave me, in their headlines and
personals columns, grocery ads and calls for patriotic action, the parameters of
my characters' lives.
From AUTHOR AT A GLANCE Jeanette Ingold
Copyright ©1999 by Harcourt Brace
