(Nonfiction; Scribner’s, 2007)
In 1947 Eleanor Clark traveled to Rome on a Guggenheim Fellowship, aiming to complete a novel in progress. But the book faltered there; “good-bye novel,” Clark wrote in a later introduction to the nonfiction book about Rome that she drafted in the novel’s stead. “In an unborn stage,” she continued, “[the novel] may have drifted down the Tiber and into the Mediterranean; if so, it would perhaps have been in splendid company from the pen of Keats, among so many others.”
