Background
While traveling with his family, Matheson was entranced by the portrait of American actress Maude Adams in Piper's Opera House in Nevada. "It was such a great photograph," Matheson reports, "that creatively I fell in love with her. What if some guy did the same thing and could go back in time?" Then Matheson researched her life and was struck by her reclusiveness. To create the novel, he resided for many weeks at the Hotel del Coronado (where the novel takes place) and dictated his impressions into a tape recorder while experiencing himself in the role of Richard Collier. Matheson based much of the biographical information about the character of Elise McKenna directly on Adams. The book's original title comes from a line in Shakespeare's Richard II (Act III, Scene 2): "O call back yesterday, bid time return."
Read more about this topic: Bid Time Return
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