Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling historian and novelist and together with American journalist and author Anderson Cooper she co-authored Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. She talks about the project, how it came together, and her own bestselling fiction on this week’s Joys of Binge Reading.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today on Binge Reading Katherine Howe talks about working with Anderson to write one of the Washington Post's Notable Works of Nonfiction for 2021.

We’ve got our usual free books offer. This week it’s a group of authors offering clean and wholesome holiday romance. You can check it out on The Joys of Binge Reading website for the links or subscribe to our newsletter so it lands in your mailbox with the links there ready for you to click. Don’t forget exclusive bonus content on Binge Reading on Patreon, including the Getting-to-Know-You Five Quickfire questions from Katherine on www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading.

Where to find Katherine Howe:

Website: http://www.katherinehowe.com

Twitter: @katherinebhowe

Instagram: @katherinebhowe

Links for this episode:

Alva Vanderbilt /Belmont/Vanderbilt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alva_BelmontSalem Witch trials: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-trials-175162489/Edith Wharton: https://www.edithwharton.org/discover/edith-wharton/Edith Wharton novels:The Age of Innocence: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53835.The_Age_of_InnocenceThe House of Mirth: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17728.The_House_of_MirthEthan Frome: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5246.Ethan_Frome

As usual all our links for this episode can be found on the website the Joys of Binge Reading.com

What follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to the show notes in The Joys of Binge Reading.com for important mentions.

But now here's Katherine.

Introducing author Katherine Howe

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Katherine, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you with us.

Katherine Howe - historian and novelist

Katherine Howe: Thank you so much for having me, Jenny. I'm delighted to join you.

Jenny Wheeler: You are a New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction in your own right, but recently you've also co-authored one of the prominent books of the year and that's Anderson Cooper's family story, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Is this your first co-authoring project?

Katherine Howe: It is. I did a little bit of co-authoring of a screenplay with another friend, and I've taught writing for many years, so I was accustomed to a collaborative approach to writing, but this is the first time it's actually come to the world in book form. It was a really exciting project to do.

Jenny Wheeler: How did it come about that you got enlisted for the project?

Katherine Howe: We knew that Anderson was going to be working on a book and it was going to be a history book. Of course, he is a celebrated author in his own right. For your audience in New Zealand who might not know him as well as we do in the US, he is a broadcast journalist on CNN, which is one of our big cable news networks.

He also does many other things. He does the New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square and things like that. He is a prominent person, and he had written a couple of memoirs. He did a memoir of his own, and he did a co-author project with his mother.

Collaborating with Anderson Cooper

His mother was Gloria Vanderbilt. So, he knew he wanted to do a history book, but I think he was looking for someone who had more experience writing history, because writing history is a little bit different from writing memoir. We were fortunate that our various representative put us in touch with each other.

It was very exciting because we found in the course of preparatory conversations that we had ...