The Middle Generation: A Novel of John Quincy Adams and the Monroe Doctrine acquaints readers with the life and lesser-known accomplishments of John Quincy Adams. Why was his story an important one to tell?

I started paying attention to Adams when I read that he was the bridge between the Founders and Lincoln. He also correctly prophesied how the Emancipation Proclamation would end slavery in America: that the election of an anti-slavery President would cause the South the secede and that President would abolish slavery with an executive order (this is discussed in the novel in a section titled “The Prophet”).

Additionally, Adams is ranked by historians as America’s best Secretary of State. Foreign policy and national security have been a large interest of mine since I was 15 (I earned a concentration in national security law). I suspected this part of his life would be featured prominently in my novel about him, and when I discovered that the Monroe Doctrine was the winning chess move in a showdown between Adams and Metternich, Europe’s greatest diplomat, I knew I had my tale. I threw out my outline for a ten episode arc that covered his entire life and got to work on what became The Middle Generation.

How much research did you undertake for this book, and how long did it take to assemble it?

I accumulated over 400 pages of research notes that I referred to when writing every paragraph. I started by reading two biographies of Adams, a book about the 1815-1848 era, biographies of important side characters, and other books and articles. The most important source was Adams’ 51-volume diary, which the Massachusetts Historical Society digitized. The diary influenced every scene of the book.

I started researching in March 2022, and the book was released in November 2023 (the Doctrine’s 200th anniversary), so the whole experience lasted 20 months.

Did you find anything in your research of this story that surprised you?

What surprised me the most was that Adams was allied with Calhoun and Jackson and opposed to Clay in this period. Calhoun was his generation’s leading advocate for slavery, and he set the ideological foundation for the Confederacy; Jackson ethnically cleansed Native Americans in what’s called the Trail of Tears; and Clay was a centrist who supported slavery’s gradual abolition and who shared Adams’ belief in infrastructure. This makes Adams’ partnerships with Calhoun and Jackson a weird alliance of opposites. The realignment of Adams and Clay joining together against Calhoun and Jackson is one of the major plotlines in the novel.

Will this novel be the start of a series about famous people in history, or are you working on a different story?

The Middle Generation started out as a sister novel to The Eisenhower Chronicles, my novel about Eisenhower that highlighted his role in defending the world from fascism, communism, and nuclear weapons. I view The Middle Generation as a culmination of my first four novels, all of which dealt with American foreign policy and presidential history to varying degrees. I’m not sure there’s much more room for me to grow as a writer on these topics, so I’m going to deploy my JD and start writing about historic legal cases that involve civil rights issues. I’m starting with the trial of an enslaved man during the American Revolution.

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