Allen Appel (born January 6, 1945) is an American novelist best known for his series about time traveler Alex Balfour. In the series, fictional characters are interwoven with actual historical people and events.
Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Appel grew up in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He graduated from West Virginia University in 1967 and moved to Washington, D.C., where he found work as an illustrator and photographer. He made his mark with a series of collage illustrations for the Sunday magazine section of The Washington Post , and this work led to his first book, Proust's Last Beer: A History of Curious Demises (1980), a collaboration with writer Bob Arnebeck. Appel's imaginative black-and-white collages illustrated Arnebeck's profiles of people and animals.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Appel wrote a half-dozen genre novels, but was unable to get them published. He finally scored with Time After Time , published in 1985 by Carroll & Graf. The story follows New School history professor Alex Balfour as he is tossed back and forth between present-day New York City and the Russian Revolution of 1917. While seeking an explanation for his unusual situation, Alex attempts to save Czar Nicholas and his family. In the course of the novel, he encounters Ivan Pavlov, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Grigory Rasputin.
Along with favorable reviews, the novel received recognition from the American Library Association as one of the Best Young Adult Novels of the Year. [1] The novel gained more readers in a Dell Laurel Edition with cover art by renowned illustrator Fred Marcellino, and it was reprinted again as a Dell mass-market paperback in 1990.
Time After Time is the first of what became known as the Alex Balfour series, although the author usually refers to it as the Pastmaster series. The appearance of real-life historical figures became an expected device in the series.
The sequel Twice Upon a Time (also published in 1985), prominently featured Mark Twain and George Armstrong Custer, as it was set both around and during 1876's Battle of Little Bighorn, which was an American Library Association nominee in the Best Young Adult Novel of the Year category.
Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth and Franklin D. Roosevelt are characters in the third book, Till the End of Time (1990), which was set in 1945 during the closing months of WWII. Subsequently, it too became an ALA nominee.
In Time of War (2003), the fourth in the series, takes place during the American Civil War, with both Ambrose Bierce and Abraham Lincoln being major characters.
Meanwhile, The Test of Time (2015), the fifth and most recently published Pastmaster book, is set in New York City, circa 1910, and features the return of an older Mark Twain, with appearances by both Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, who were that era's leading two inventors.
(Note: Originally intended to be the third Pastmaster novel, Sea of Time, set aboard the Titanic in 1912, was written in 1987, but went unpublished until late 2012, when it was released as a Kindle eBook exclusive on Amazon by the author.)
Appel's work as a photographer is represented by the Kathleen Ewing Gallery. [2]
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel In Search of Lost Time, originally in French and published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.
In Search of Lost Time, first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche, is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early 20th-century work is his most prominent, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory. The most famous example of this is the "episode of the madeleine", which occurs early in the first volume.
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. The term was coined by Daniel Oliver in 1840 in First Lines of Physiology: Designed for the Use of Students of Medicine, when he wrote,
If we separate from this mingled and moving stream of consciousness, our sensations and volitions, which are constantly giving it a new direction, and suffer it to pursue its own spontaneous course, it will appear, upon examination, that this, instead of being wholly fortuitous and uncertain, is determined by certain fixed laws of thought, which are collectively termed the association of ideas.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1885.
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by a Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.
Anthony Dymoke Powell was an English novelist best known for his 12-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975. It is on the list of longest novels in English.
Dary Matera is an author who specializes in real-life casebooks. He is from Chandler, Arizona.
The Mysterious Stranger is a novel attempted by the American author Mark Twain. He worked on it intermittently from 1897 through 1908. Twain wrote multiple versions of the story; each involves a supernatural character called "Satan" or "No. 44". All the versions remained unfinished.
Chatto & Windus is an imprint of Penguin Random House that was formerly an independent book publishing company founded in London in 1855 by John Camden Hotten. Following Hotten's death, the firm would reorganize under the names of his business partner Andrew Chatto and poet William Edward Windus. The company was purchased by Random House in 1987 and is now a sub-imprint of Vintage Books within the Penguin UK division.
A book series is a sequence of books having certain characteristics in common that are formally identified together as a group. Book series can be organized in different ways, such as written by the same author, or marketed as a group by their publisher.
Warren H. Carroll was the founder and first president of Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He authored multiple works of Roman Catholic church history.
Roughing It is a book of semi-autobiographical travel literature by Mark Twain. It was written in 1870–71 and published in 1872, as a prequel to his first travel book The Innocents Abroad (1869). Roughing It is dedicated to Twain's mining companion Calvin H. Higbie, later a civil engineer who died in 1914.
Thraxas is a series of twelve fantasy novels written by British author Martin Millar under the pen name Martin Scott. The first eight were originally published in the United Kingdom by Orbit Books between April 1999 and May 2005. The remaining four titles were self-published by Millar, between March 2013 and April 2022. The series has been generally positively received, and has produced one World Fantasy Award winner.
Robert Paul Holdstock was an English novelist and author best known for his works of Celtic, Nordic, Gothic and Pictish fantasy literature, predominantly in the fantasy subgenre of mythic fiction.
Time After Time is a novel by Allen Appel, first published in 1985 by Carroll & Graf. It launched the Alex Balfour series of time travel novels, which the author usually refers to as the "Pastmaster" series.
Nameless Detective is the protagonist in a long-running mystery series by Bill Pronzini set in the San Francisco area.
The Territorial Enterprise, founded by William Jernegan and Alfred James on December 18, 1858, was a newspaper published in Virginia City, Nevada. Published for its first two years in Genoa in what was then Utah Territory, new owners Jonathan Williams and J. B. Woolard moved the paper to Carson City, the capital of the territory, in 1859. The paper changed hands again the next year; Joseph T. Goodman and Dennis E. McCarthy moved it again, this time to Virginia City, in 1860.
Randall Silvis is an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and teacher.
Jean-Auguste-Gustave Binet, also known as Binet-Valmer, was a Franco-Swiss novelist and journalist. The trademark element of his style was the almost clinical precision with which he dissected the psychologies and motivations of his characters.