Source Materials
On his website, Simmons implies that his younger brother Wayne is the real-life model for the character Lawrence ("Larry") Stewart, as he himself is the model for Dale, as they were as boys in 1960 Elm Haven, Illinois. The brothers' friends, as they were as boys in the same year, are the models for other characters: Mike O'Toole and Jim Hatten, for Mike O'Rourke and Jim Harlen, respectively, and Kevin Hasselbacher, for Kevin Grumbacher. Simmons states that Brimfield, Illinois, where he lived for part of his childhood, "is the source of his fictional 'Elm Haven'." The novel's Old Central School is based upon Brimfield School, which was torn down in 1960. Some of the incidents in the novel, such as the free show and the fair, are also based upon similar events that took place in Brimfield during Simmons' boyhood.
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“Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)