Moved by the cultural upheavals sweeping across the U.S., Kluger left publishing and devoted five years to writing Simple Justice, which The Nation hailed as “a monumental accomplishment” and the Harvard Law Review termed “a major contribution to our understanding of the Supreme Court.” It was a finalist for the National Book Award, as was Kluger’s second nonfiction work, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. When the Tribune folded, Kluger entered the book industry, rising to executive editor of Simon and Schuster, editor-in-chief of Atheneum, and publisher of Charterhouse Books. As a young journalist, he wrote and edited for The Wall Street Journal, the pre-Murdoch New York Post and Forbes magazine, and became the last literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune and its literary supplement, Book Week. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision outlawing racially segregated public schools, and Ashes to Ashes, a critical history of the cigarette industry and its lethal toll on smokers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.īorn in Paterson, N.J., Kluger grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Princeton University, where he chaired The Daily Princetonian. His two best known works are Simple Justice, considered the definitive account of the U.S.
Richard Kluger is an American social historian and novelist who, after working as a New York journalist and publishing executive, turned in mid-career to writing books that have won wide critical acclaim. In The Sheriff of Nottingham, Kluger has woven an engrossing medieval tapestry that transports the reader beyond the mists of time and legend to witness the struggle of a singular character seeking to act honorably in a time ruled by savage impulse and civil uproar. The boys are treated with respect and kindness by the sheriff and his family until a year later when King John thunders into the castle courtyard at the head of his entourage and, in a fury over a new Welsh uprising, roars at Philip, “Hang the hostages – hang them all – and at once!” How Sheriff Mark responds to this grim command forms the moral core of the novel. Thirty sons of Welsh warlords are consigned to Philip’s castle as royal hostages on the orders of the king to ensure that their volatile fathers behave themselves back in chronically rebellious Wales. Storytelling at its most gripping comes in the novel’s powerfully moving centerpiece. Here are dark intrigue and adroit statecraft, hand-to-hand combat and sharp wits in collision, an avaricious ruler attempting to seduce his sheriff’s wife on Christmas night, and the hatching of the Magna Carta itself at Nottingham Castle one fine September eve in 1213 (along with the reasons why Philip Mark is specifically mentioned in that immortal document). In vital, dramatic colors, Kluger paints a panorama of that England at the dawn of modernity and its principal players and events. Posted to Nottinghamshire in 1208 as the crown’s chief law officer, he is answerable only to King John himself, a monarch who has been handed down to posterity – perhaps not altogether fairly – as an unredeemed tyrant presiding over a tumultuous age. Philip Mark, a soldier of fortune from Touraine in the heart of France and actually cited by name in the text of the Magna Carta as objectionable to the king’s barons, is a complex figure, a man with a heart, a conscience, and deft political instincts. Through a fusion of art and documented fact, Kluger portrays a far different sheriff.
Now, with his novel, The Sheriff of Nottingham, Richard Kluger turns the timeless tale on its head in a vivid, compassionate narrative based upon authentic and quite startling history. He remains to this day, fed by Hollywood versions of the legend, the hateful, impotent foil to that celebrated bowman, Robin Hood. Has there ever been a less lovable character in folk literature than that craven creature, the nameless Sheriff of Nottingham?
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