![]() ![]() And it wasn’t because he was an “important” writer, though lord knows what that even means anymore. I didn’t love the work of John Jakes because he was a good writer. ![]() When I was done, I thought I knew a lot about American history. Within a month, I savaged the entire eight volumes of “The Kent Family Chronicles,” which told the story of the inheritors of The Bastard and also some people who ended up working for the family. I tore through it quickly and easily while dipping the contents of a box of Triscuits one by one into a tasty container of port-wine cheddar cheese spread. ![]() There it sat on my family’s middlebrow bookshelf, alongside ‘The Eye of the Needle,’ ‘The Bourne Identity,’ ‘The Mirror Crack’d,’ ‘The Thorn Birds,’ and many other books that I also soon read once The Bastard broke the seal. It was an absurd pre-Revolutionary War melodrama, but was, nonetheless, the first book “for adults” that I ever read. I read his novel ‘The Bastard’ at age 10, in 1980. I try not to let the deaths of people I didn’t know personally affect me, but news of John Jakes’s death filled me with a bit of nostalgia. The author John Jakes died last week at age 90. ![]()
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