The Dante Club
Front cover
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| Author | Matthew Pearl |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Mystery novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
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Publication date
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2003 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) and eBook |
| Pages | 372 pp (first edition hardcover) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 49260645 |
| 813/.6 21 | |
| LC Class | PS3616.E25 D36 2003 |
| Followed by | The Poe Shadow |
The Dante Club is a mystery novel by Matthew Pearl and his debut work, set amidst a series of murders in the American Civil War era. It also concerns a club of poets, including such historical figures as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Russell Lowell, who are translating Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy from Italian into English and who notice parallels between the murders and the punishments detailed in Dante's Inferno.
The work reached the top of several best-seller lists, including Borders, Washington Post, and Boston Globe, and also appeared on the New York Times Best Seller List.
The plot is largely fictional, although the main characters are real, including many of their biographical details. Supporting and background characters are mostly fictional, as are those directly involved with the murders.
The Dante Club begins with the murder of fictional Massachusetts Chief Justice Artemus Healey, who had avoided taking a position to stop or support the escaped slaves of the South. Found by his chambermaid near a white flag atop a short wooden staff, Healey had been hit in the head and then left in his garden to be eaten alive by strategically placed maggots and stung by hornets. Then Reverend Talbot, who was paid by the Harvard Corporation to write against Dante, was found dead in an underground cemetery, buried up to his waist upside down, his feet burnt and buried over money that he had accepted as a bribe.
Members of the Dante Club, a group of poets translating the Divine Comedy from Italian into English, notice the parallels between the murders and the punishments detailed in Dante's Inferno. The club, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and James Russell Lowell, sets out to solve the murders, fearing that the truth will ruin Dante's burgeoning reputation in America, thus making their translation a failure, as well as the obvious problem that they would be virtually the only suspects if they reported this information to the police. Then, Phineas Jennison, both a wealthy contributor to the Harvard Corporation and friend to the translators (a "schismatic"), is sliced open exactly down the middle—all killed in extreme fashion and undeniable resemblance to the punishments of people in Dante's Inferno.
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