Susan Bacon
Memphis author Susan Bacon won a silver medal in the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards (often styled the IPPY Awards) for her debut historical thriller The History Teacher. The novel was released in the autumn of 2019, and it won second place for Best Regional Fiction/Mid-Atlantic Region.
The History Teacher’s IPPY Award success is, in a sense, also a feather in the cap of Memphis magazine, as Bacon cut her teeth as a writer working for this publication. Though Bacon’s new novel of Cold War-era intrigue is her debut as a novelist, she is no stranger to working as a writer. She's a journalist, ghostwriter, and an award-winning copywriter as well.
Originally from Delaware, Bacon moved to New York, where she studied at Barnard College before working, for a time, at a magazine there. After her time in the Big Apple, she moved to Memphis, left to work in Washington, D.C., and then returned to the Bluff City. “That’s my trajectory,” she says.
In college, Bacon studied history, and her concentration was contemporary European history, which comes into play in The History Teacher. “I had intended to study journalism in college, but I went to Barnard College in New York and they didn’t have a journalism program,” she explains. “So I just went ahead and studied history, and then I worked for a magazine briefly in New York.”
“I’ve written several books on my own, and then I have ghostwritten some books,” Bacon says. “I started out as a journalist here in Memphis at Memphis magazine.” She has written speeches and books about the politics of parenting, and she has ghostwritten books as well. Are Our Kids All Right?, her second book is, of her nonfiction, her personal favorite. “It was a pretty heavily researched book on the quality of child-care in the United States.”
Perhaps owing to her history degree or her work as a journalist, meticulous research is still a part of Bacon’s process. “I sprinkle news stories throughout the book. I tried to do a lot of research so that the history is accurate. In the end, I ended up weaving in an awful lot of reality.” Still, she says, “I’ve always wanted to write a novel. It’s really a treat for me. I had an awful lot of fun. As you may know, it’s hard to be tied to facts all the time.”
Still, though Bacon draws much of the novel from her imagination, there’s a strong foundation of fact and history that makes The History Teacher feel grounded in reality.
“Back in the ’90s, when I was in Washington, between my two books, I got really interested in the Alger Hiss case,” she says. Hiss was an American government official who was accused of being a Soviet Union spy in 1948 and convicted of perjury in connection with the charge in 1950. “That was a long time ago, but I kept the manuscript I was working on and that became the seed for this story. When I first moved to Memphis, I wrote a novel, kind of an experiment, and I put that in a drawer and then I said I'm going to take that Hiss story and I'm going to build something from it.”
The novel examines the cost of privilege and wealth — and the interconnected worlds of politics, business, and high society. It’s well worth a read.
For updates on Susan Bacon and The History Teacher go to susanbacon.com.
