Interview: Brenda Wineapple on Her Reading Life and Tackling the Scopes Trial

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

That Mary Anning, a young, self-taught fossil hunter, was the first to discover and excavate large dinosaur skeleton fossils near her home in Lyme Regis, England, and became one of the foremost contributors to paleontology.

What do you read to relax?

Relax? Well, often poetry: the strangely consoling Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the witty Emily Dickinson and, recently, Louise Glück. Whitman, too, never fails, even when he’s annoying. Plus, I’ve discovered the addictive mystery writer Tana French.

What are your favorite works of historical fiction?

I never thought I liked historical fiction, but my list is long: Pat Barker’s “Regeneration,” with her depiction of W.H.R. Rivers, the psychiatrist whose paradoxical duty is to heal men shattered by war’s insanity so that they might fight again; Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”; Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall”; David Ebershoff’s “The Danish Girl.” But my very favorite is Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian,” where Hadrian says, “Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.” Then, she adds, “Not all our books will perish.”

What’s the secret to compelling history writing?

No secret but narrative: a dramatic plot, characters, momentum, very strong sentences and, of course, conflict.

What did you believe needed to be known about the Scopes trial that wasn’t already amply discussed in other accounts?