Bookworms

The genteel surroundings of the Massachusetts Historical Society library in the Fenway would seem to inspire more daydreaming than study. Yet this is where a surprising number of best-selling authors get most of their work done. They resist curling up in the leather-and-walnut chairs beneath portraits of notable early Americans. Or entering into discussions with the great history teller on the premises, the society's distinguished director, William M. Fowler Jr. Instead, they sit as if in elegant captain's quarters and work in quiet solitude on everything from epic novels to biographies.

These writers nose through old diaries, letters, and newspapers and study maps, portraits, and other articles from the past. But what they find is often fresh and relevant.

For one project, David Hackett Fischer, the author of more than eight books researched at the library, looked at broadsides, newspapers, and letters to learn more about the 1800 presidential race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. He found the campaign was ferocious, not unlike the current presidential contest. "It was a close-run thing," says Fischer, a history professor at Brandeis University. "People were deeply embedded in their own purposes and values." And like today, the politics were intensely personal.

Society librarian Peter Drummey isn't surprised to learn how valuable the materials can be. "People want to define history as social science and objective analysis of information, but it's wonderfully romantic and full," he says. "These are people just like us, who don't live right now. And we have the evidence of them."

To write his book John Adams, David McCullough used the library's letters and writings from the Adams family and Thomas Jefferson. McCullough's current project, on one year during the American Revolution, 1776, draws on a wide range of letters and diaries of major figures, ordinary soldiers, and civilians on both sides of the war. For her book Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston, Nancy Seasholes says she found "invaluable" the reconstructed maps of 17th-and 18th-century Boston property holdings. The papers of abolitionist Timothy Pickering helped Garry Wills research Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power. For an upcoming multigenerational family memoir, John Sedgwick consulted the Sedgwick family archives, which include the works of a judge, minister, and several Harvard professors.

Writers work at desks in the general reading room on the first floor. Half-hourly chimes from a clock lend a homey air. The comfortable setting gives the assurance that it's really OK to be sifting through someone else's diaries and letters. It's here that Fischer, burrowing into Paul Revere's business records, "was looking for a curio" about the man. "On the back of a bill, in the Revere papers there, I found a love letter to his wife," Fischer says. "And I put that in my book."

Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved black who sued for her freedom in 1781, didn't keep a diary. What survives is a bracelet made of beads she is shown wearing in a portrait at the historical society. Drummey treasures the bracelet. "Holding it is different. It's a connection with the past, but it's the romantic part of this work. . . . The true strength of [the library] is not just in holding these very famous collections but in how the collections of letters and diaries knit together." As it happens, Theodore Sedgwick, whose papers are at the historical society, represented Freeman in gaining her freedom under the Massachusetts Constitution written by John Adams.

Some documents upend our cherished and sometimes distorted notions about historical figures, and others remind us how times have not changed as much as we might think. Jefferson took great care in expunging self-incriminating letters from his collection. But there remains the letter he wrote to a cousin about the fine that James Callender was given under the Alien and Sedition Act. Callender was a scandalmongering journalist who'd been secretly hired by Jefferson to smear Adams in the election of 1800.