FAQ's

I think it's funny how I get the same questions over and over. I don’t mind answering questions—far from it—but for every person who asks one, I’m guessing there are more people who were thinking the same thing but never brought it up.

So, without further ado, here’s a list of Frequently Asked Questions about 1871. And keep the questions coming—each one is good!


How much of this story is true?

Like any novel, it’s ultimately fiction, but most of the events in the story are true. I decided early on that I wasn’t going to violate any historical facts, because the true story was too incredible to pass up. But at the same time, I did have a fictional story that I wanted to tell. So I took the best of both worlds, and I made sure that all the fictional details were consistent with real history.

For example, anytime Simon writes an article for the Tribune, that article is real—it ran in the paper exactly as I described it, and you can find it in the Tribune archives. I also made sure the geography checked out. And anytime we meet a historical figure, the novel stays true to what we know about the real person.

In a few places, the historical facts were unclear. For example, nobody really knows what happened during the first ten or fifteen minutes of the fire. There were plenty of eyewitnesses, but nobody wanted to take blame for anything. If you read the witnesses’ testimonies, it’s perfectly clear they’re all fudging the truth to cover their own behinds. So I took the undisputed historical facts, and I had to use my judgment—and sometimes my imagination—to fill in the blanks.

At the end of the day, this is my interpretation of the Chicago Fire, nothing more and nothing less. Like any version of history, it’s up for debate. Some historians may dispute the decisions I made, and I’m fine with that. But so it is.


I never knew the Lincoln family lived in Chicago. Did they really live through the fire the way the book described?

Yes. I had to fictionalize a few details, because Robert Lincoln was zealous about guarding his family’s privacy, so he didn’t leave many records behind. But the thrust of the story is 100% accurate.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, I’ve never found a Chicago Fire book or a Lincoln book that has gone into this in any detail. So I might be the first person to write about it. Even so, I have to be honest and say that was never my plan; my original outline didn’t even include the Lincolns. I just stumbled across their story when I was doing my research. The true story was so juicy that I couldn’t resist using it, and the rest is history—literally.


Did you get cooperation from the Tribune, or from any of the real people’s families?

I contacted some of them as part of my research. But I didn’t ask for anybody’s cooperation, because I didn’t want to be beholden to them.

Legally, I didn’t need anyone’s permission. That’s one advantage to writing about this period: all 19th-century books are in the public domain, so I could freely use excerpts from the Tribune or any other publication from that time.

To me, it’s important to be honest about what happened, and I wanted the freedom to do what was right for the story. Sometimes that meant having to show people in an unflattering light. I was worried that some of the families might get offended, and I certainly didn’t want the Tribune Company breathing down my neck. So I did my homework the way any researcher would, and I left it at that.