Sheldon Greene

Most Americans learn the Revolution as a story set in a narrow strip of land from Boston to Yorktown. The familiar images are Boston Harbor, Lexington Green, Independence Hall, Washington at Valley Forge and Cornwallis’s surrender in Virginia. Sugar islands, Jewish merchants, slave revolts and French arsenals in the Caribbean seldom appear on that stage. In Pursuit of Happiness , Sheldon Greene keeps all the famous events in view. Washington’s crossing of the Delaware and the Christmas Eve attack on the Hessians are part of the mental landscape of his characters. So are the early actions of the Marines and the French king’s crucial arms assistance. What he does differently is to shift the main camera south, onto a Caribbean island where sugar and slavery are the everyday reality. From that angle, the war for American independence looks less like a clean origin myth and more like one episode in a much wider and more compromised struggle. Sheldon Greene sets Pursuit of Happiness in...

Sheldon Greene’s career, at first glance, looks like a split screen. On one side is a life in law and policy: much of it in public interest law; impact litigation for the rural poor, drafting statutes, work on national energy and immigration policy, founding roles in major institutions. On the other side is a shelf of Sheldon Greene novels that travel from Caribbean sugar islands to a near future California Republic, from nineteenth century railheads to a Jewish boarding school in a failing steel town. A body of work that critics have begun to treat as literature on justice and identity and as fiction inspired by legal careers . Seen more closely, the split disappears. Greene’s fiction and his legal work are twin approaches to the same set of questions: Who belongs where. What justice might look like. How people keep their dignity when history and institutions are against them. His novels are not position papers. They are page turning stories that invite readers to inhabit mor...