Dante's Inferno in the flesh...

The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most widely read and influential American poet of the 19th century. After his wife's fiery death, he found solace in his project to create the first American edition of Dante's Inferno. Fellow Harvard poet/professors James Russell Lowell and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Longfellow's publisher J.T. Fields supported his efforts and soon became known as the Dante Club.

The powers that be at Harvard, fearful that Dante's work would infect American thought with superstition and fear, opposed the project and mounted a strenuous effort to end it.

Matthew Pearl received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1997, won the Dante Society of America's Dante Prize, then entered Yale law school, where he began writing a novel based on the story of the Dante Club.

The result is a literary thriller of extraordinary breadth and depth. Pearl has recreated the gritty underbelly of Boston in the 1860s. He has blown life into several dusty historic icons. Overlay that with the tale of a serial killer who replicates the horrific details of Dante's graphic circles of Hell, and you've got one of the most gripping, compelling, exciting novels of recent times.

I don't read many book reviews, because the reviewers almost always tell me too much. I like surprises. I hope you do, too, because I'm stopping right here. Just read The Dante Club.


Matthew Pearl