ROMAN à CLEF

A '''roman à clef''' or '''roman à clé''' (French for "novel with a key") is a novel describing real-life events behind a façade of fiction. The 'key' is usually a famous figure or in some cases the author.
The reasons an author might choose the ''roman à clef'' format include:

★ Satire

★ Writing about controversial topics and/or reporting inside information on scandals without giving rise to charges of libel

★ The opportunity to turn the tale the way the author would like it to have gone
Since its original use in the context of writings, the ''roman à clef'' technique is also used in the theatre and in movies, like ''The Great Dictator'', which satirized Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Contents

Notable ''romans à clef''

References

See also

Notable ''romans à clef''

★ The novels of 17th century French writer Madeleine de Scudéry.

★ The novels of Jack Kerouac, most famously ''On the Road'' and ''The Dharma Bums''.

★ Virtually all of the novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) presuppose a knowledge of English intellectuals and currents of thought of the time.

★ ''Glenarvon'' (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb which chronicles her affair with Lord Byron (thinly disguised as the title character).

★ ''The Blithedale Romance'' by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a fictional account inspired by, but not specifically depicting, Hawthorne's experiences at the Brook Farm experiment.

★ ''The Lady of Aroostook'' depicts Emily Dickinson's romantic engagements with several men.

★ ''Röda rummet'' (''The Red Room'') by August Strindberg presents thinly-disguised depictions of intellectuals of the period.

★ ''Crome Yellow'' (1921), ''Antic Hay'' (1923) and ''Those Barren Leaves'' (1925) by Aldous Huxley are all satires of contemporary events.

★ ''The Sun Also Rises'' by Ernest Hemingway is a disguised account of Hemingway's literary life in Paris and his 1925 trip to Spain with several known personalities.

★ ''The Benson Murder Case'' (1926), the best-selling first entry in the series of detective novels by S. S. Van Dine featuring detective Philo Vance, is based on the unsolved murder of bridge expert Joseph Elwell, who was found shot to death in a room locked from the inside, minus his toupee, physical circumstances which are duplicated in the novel.

★ ''The Moon and Sixpence'' by William Somerset Maugham follows the life of Paul Gauguin, especially his time in Tahiti.

★ ''Tender Is the Night'' by F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts acquaintances of Gerald and Sara Murphy in the 1920s.

★ ''Point Counter Point'' (1928) by Aldous Huxley includes easily detected portraits of Huxley's friends D.H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry.

★ ''Roman à clef'' is one of the many dimensions of '' (1928) by Virginia Woolf.

★ In her novel ''Broderie Anglaise'', Violet Trefusis represents her lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West and Vita's with Virginia Woolf in the form of a heterosexual romance. She also weaves the affairs of her mother, Alice Keppel, with Edward VII into the book.

★ ''Mephisto'' by Klaus Mann. Mann's brother-in-law, the actor Gustaf Gründgens, was so offended by the main character Henrik Hoffgen (based on Gründgens himself) that the novel was banned after a libel case.

★ ''The Bell Jar'' by Sylvia Plath, her semi-autobiographical novel, detailing a young girl's attempts at suicides and her mental breakdown.

★ ''The Things They Carried'' (1990) by Tim O'Brien is widely considered a truthful if knowingly distorted account of the author's experiences in Vietnam and subsequent methods of coping with the war's aftermath.

★ ''All the King's Men'' (1946) by Robert Penn Warren is loosely based on the rise and fall of Louisiana governor Huey Long.

★ Dominick Dunne's novels depict various upheavals in high society, with many thinly-veiled prominent persons among the casts of characters. Among the novels and respective cases alluded to are ''The Two Mrs. Grenvilles'' (the shooting of Belair Stud owner William Woodward, Jr. by his wife, Ann Arden Woodward); ''People Like Us'' (the downfall of a socially-ambitious junk bond trader, thought to be a conflation of John Gutfreund, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky); ''A Season in Purgatory'' (the Michael Skakel/Martha Moxley murder case) and ''An Inconvenient Woman'' (the Alfred S. Bloomingdale/Vicki Morgan affair and ensuing scandal).

★ ''Primary Colors'' (1996) about Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, published anonymously but later confirmed to have been written by Joe Klein.

★ ''The Devil Wears Prada'' (2003) about a woman constantly bullied by her boss while working as an intern at a fashion magazine. Although author Lauren Weisberger worked as an intern at Vogue magazine, she denies that the book's antagonist, Miranda Priestly, is modeled after the magazine's editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.

★ ''The Washingtonienne'' (2005) based on the author Jessica Cutler's sexual affairs as a congressional intern with various men in Washington, D.C.

★ ''The Body Politic'' (2000) by Lynne Cheney in which a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while making love to his mistress. [1] [2] [3]

★ ''Heart of Darkness'' by Joseph Conrad mirrors his own journey up the Congo. The character of Kurtz is most likely a compilation of several different colonial officials. The story inspired the film ''Apocalypse Now''.

★ The protagonists of both ''Tonio Kröger'' and ''Death in Venice'' are representations of Thomas Mann.

★ ''The Ugly American'' by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, a book that criticized American foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War; the book uses the fictional country of Sarkhan (a fictionalized Vietnam) as the setting and includes several real people, most of whose names have been changed.

★ ''Ravelstein'' by Saul Bellow is a thinly disguised memoir of friendship between Allan Bloom and Bellow. Also from Bellow is Humboldt's Gift, about his friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz.

★ In Mexican literature, Martin Luis Guzman's ''La Sombra del Caudillo'' was inspired by accounts of the abuses of the Revolutionary Party during the 1920s when ex-president Álvaro Obregón was Mexico's most powerful personality.

★ ''This All Happened'' (2000) by Michael Winter was inspired by his time with the Burning Rock Writers Collective in St. John's, Newfoundland.

★ ''Lunar Park'' (2005) by Bret Easton Ellis is partly a fiction ghost story and an autobiographical novel describing Ellis' early years of fame and his difficult relationship with his father.

★ ''The Rape of the Lock'' by Alexander Pope, inspired by a story recounted by his friend involving stolen hair.

★ ''Postcards from the Edge'' by Carrie Fisher which outlines the often-strained relationship between Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds and Carrie's substance abuse.

★ ''Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'' by Jeanette Winterson.

★ ''Second Crossing'' by N. A. Diaman a semi-autobiographical coming-out novel set in San Francisco at the end of the Beat Era.

★ Salman Rushdie's ''Midnight's Children''

★ Stephen Fry's ''The Liar''

References

★ William Amos, ''The Originals: Who's Really Who in Fiction'', (London: Cape, 1985) - ISBN 0722110693

★ Brian Busby, ''Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit'' (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2003) - ISBN 0676975798

See also

★ Allegory

★ Autobiographical novel

★ Literary technique