Fragment of history inspires a blockbuster first novel for Lent

By Wilson Ring, Associated Press writer

TUNBRIDGE, Vt. -- Four years ago, Jeffrey Lent was in his late 30s, living in Asheville, N.C., and working as a distributor for The New York Times while he pursued his lifelong passion for writing.

He had three unpublished novels to his credit and was starting to think that he might never realize his dream of making a living as a fiction author. Then he focused on a snippet of untold American history: During the Civil War a Union soldier met a former slave, married her and took her home.

"I knew it was all or nothing," Lent says.

He sat down to write, and after 40 or 50 pages he knew he had it. Less than two years later, he had a manuscript. And only days after "In the Fall" was offered to publishing houses, Lent was choosing between multiple book deals and six-figure advances.

One of the first things he did was leave North Carolina and move back to Vermont, where he spent much of his childhood. He bought a 150-year-old farmhouse on 50 acres of land where he can write and indulge his love for horses. He recently talked about his novel in an interview at his office in an old barn across a narrow dirt road from his Tunbridge home.

"In the Fall" was released in April to adoring reviews from the heavyweights of the literary world, including The New York Times Review of Books and the Book of the Month Club, which made "In the Fall" a main selection. National book store chains are promoting the book all-out -- almost unheard of for a first-time novelist.

"In the Fall" is a multigenerational story that begins during the Civil War when Vermonter Norman Pelham goes South to fight and then comes home with his bride, Leah, who fled North believing she had killed her former owner. The book ends in the 1920s after one of Norman's grandchildren learns the dark side of the family history in North Carolina.

Newsweek says the book has "the echoes of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy ... but the presiding geniuses of this dark novel's painterly, poetic scenes are Robert Frost and Winslow Homer, great outdoorsmen and lovers of the land, but also flint-eyed Yankees who never saw a paradise that didn't have a snake."

For Lent, 41, the commercial success and literary praise was a long time coming. He said he started reading at 4 and started writing shortly thereafter.

In the 1930s, his grandfather, one of the first members of the back-to-the-land movement, left New York City and bought a small farm in the southern Vermont town of Grafton. Both of his parents also journeyed from New York to Vermont where they did everything from milking cows to tapping maple trees for syrup.

Lent was born in Vermont and spent much of his childhood in North Pomfret and western New York state, in the Finger Lakes region. He watched as the family farm tried and ultimately failed to make the transition to 20th-century agriculture.

"In a sense I grew up with a foot in the 19th century," he says.

And that helped him when it came time to write: "I had a lot of arcane bits of knowledge tucked away in the back of my brain."

Lent studied at the now defunct Franconia College in New Hampshire and Purchase College in New York.

While Lent learned his craft by writing and reading voraciously, he never became involved in the writers' workshop phenomenon. He wrote his first novel, which was never published, in college.

After college he spent several years casting about before getting back to writing seriously and then getting married. While he kept writing, both poetry and fiction, he had no commercial success. But he kept at it.

"Writing came first; making a living came second," says Lent. "Once I did that, I found situations that allowed me to write full time."

Lent's most recent unpublished novel, which he described as an 800-page story about an old man looking back over his life, almost sold.

"Now I am very grateful it didn't," he says. "There were a lot of weaknesses in the writing."

He used the earlier, unpublished works to hone his craft. He said he had no interest in resurrecting those earlier works for publication.

"I've got a big folder of the most wonderful rejection letters you can ask for," he says.

Still he plugged on. He went through a couple of small inheritances to fund his passion and maintain his family. He was beginning to lose hope that he'd make it.

"Beyond the desire and talent, you have to have a sense of discipline," Lent says.

By 1996, Lent, his wife and their young child were living on a small farm in western North Carolina. He was working as a wholesale distributor for the Times, which left his days free to pursue his writing.

"I remember thinking to myself, 'You've got a great life.' I knew that if it meant dying with 25 unpublished novels that is what it would be."

Then came "In the Fall."

He started the book in February 1997. He worked seven days a week until June 1998 when he finished it.

"In the Fall" spilled from his fingertips with ease. "There were times when a paragraph or scene would come into my head fully written," he says.

He then spent four months editing it before marketing it.

The novel went to publishers on a Thursday in December 1998. By Monday he was dealing with the offers.

"It was a pretty heady time," he says.

Lent has finished the first draft of second novel. He won't say what it's about other than to say it is set in Northern New England and loosely based on a historical incident. And he has an idea for a third novel.

"I've got a full plate," he says.

"In the Fall." Atlantic Monthly Press, $25.

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