From Six Days of the Condor to American Sky: James Grady on Nostalgia and the American Dream

How to write about the kaleidoscopic Sixties in the gloom of 2025? According to James Grady, author of the classic Six Days of the Condor and the new mid-century novel American Sky, the key is calibrating nostalgia with unflinching honesty about the past's complexities. "You can't just write about the past and not have a focus also on current times and really the future," Grady explains. The novelist’s approach involves fictionalizing personal experiences while ensuring memories of traumatic events like the JFK or MLK assassinations connect with the painful realities of MAGA America. Rather than romanticizing the Sixties, Grady emphasizes the civil rights violence, the generational divide, and the "silent majority's" anxieties alongside the era's optimism. Grady’s goal isn't to escape into nostalgia but to help readers understand how past dreams and failures shaped our present moment, making history a lens for understanding America’s current challenges.

1. Historical Fiction Must Connect Past to Present "You can't just write about the past and not have a focus also on current times and really the future. Otherwise it's like you're looking back at an old photograph of a horse and buggy. It's lovely, but it doesn't really speak to you."

2. The Danger of Elite Liberal Condescension "Starting in about 1975 and 1976, I saw a new kind of, quote, liberal or left-winger come into the power circles of Washington, D.C. They were elite-educated, Ivy League, and they did their best to ignore any working class roots that they had. They started to look down on the labor unions."

3. Fiction Can Reveal Truth Better Than Facts "So we can change the facts, but the facts are not necessarily necessary to reveal the truths... this is not a memoir where you have to be factual. This is fiction. And yet there's an echo of all of us."

4. True Rebellion Requires Positive Vision "I always think of the great French philosopher Albert Camus who said a true rebel says yes to something better instead of just saying no and rejecting and fighting. You've got to have something to fight for."

5. Literature Should Focus on Ordinary Americans "I think that a good author has to write about us, and you, almost more than they write about me... I want to know what's going on with someone in, you know, there's a town called Beaver Crossing, Nebraska, or, you know, Sonoma, California... Where real people are leading their lives and we learn from each other."

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