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A roman à clef or roman à clé (French for "novel with a key") is a novel describing real life, behind a façade of fiction. "Key" in this context means the table you can use to swap out the names, see figure.
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
- The opportunity to portray personal, autobiographical experiences without having to expose the author as the subject
- Avoiding self-incrimination or incrimination of others that could be used as evidence in civil, criminal, or disciplinary proceedings
Biographically inspired works have also appeared in other literary genres, art forms, and media; for example, the film Citizen Kane, a thinly disguised biographical film about William Randolph Hearst; Victor Hugo's banned play, Le Roi s'amuse, the basis for the opera Rigoletto; as well as Dreamgirls, the Broadway musical and the film of the same name, both based on the career of The Supremes.
[edit] Notable romans à clef
[edit] Fiction
- The novels of 17th century French writer Madeleine de Scudéry (1607-1701).
- The Rape of the Lock (1714) by Alexander Pope, inspired by a story recounted by his friend involving stolen hair.
- Glenarvon (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb which chronicles her affair with Lord Byron (thinly disguised as the title character).
- Virtually all of the novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) presuppose a knowledge of English intellectuals and currents of thought of the time.
- The Blithedale Romance (1852) by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a fictional account inspired by, but not specifically depicting, Hawthorne's experiences at the Brook Farm experiment.
- Ruth Hall (1854) by Fanny Fern (Sarah Payson Willis) describes Fern's own struggle to become a successful newspaper columnist, and puts her family (including her brother, Nathaniel Parker Willis) and two of her early editors in a most unflattering light.
- The Lady of Aroostook (1879) by William Dean Howells depicts Emily Dickinson's romantic engagements with several men.
- Röda rummet (The Red Room) (1879) by August Strindberg presents thinly disguised depictions of intellectuals of the period.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde in which the three main characters are coded homosexual men.
- The Green Carnation (1894) by Robert Hichens is based on the relationship between Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.
- The protagonists of both Tonio Kröger (1903) and Death in Venice (1912) are representations of Thomas Mann.
- The Fiery Angel (1908) by Valery Bryusov depicts the real-life triangle of black magic, obsession and love between himself, Andrei Bely and Nina Petrovskaya while describing a story of witchcraft in 16th Century Germany.
- The Moon and Sixpence (1919) by William Somerset Maugham follows the life of Paul Gauguin, especially his time in Tahiti.
- Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves (1925) by Aldous Huxley are all satires of contemporary events.
- The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, commenting on the prohibition of alcohol sales.
- The Sun Also Rises (1926) 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.
- 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 Orlando: A Biography (1928) by Virginia Woolf.
- All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) by Erich Maria Remarque is based on his experiences as a soldier during World War I.
- Look Homeward, Angel (1929) by Thomas Wolfe
- The Novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957)
- Tender Is the Night (1934) by F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts acquaintances of Gerald and Sara Murphy in the 1920s.
- Mephisto (1936) 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.
- All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren is loosely based on the rise and fall of Louisiana governor Huey Long.
- Power Without Glory (1950) by Frank Hardy is an unveiled and highly critical account of the life of Australian business man and political figure John Wren (referred to by Hardy as John West). Hardy, a socialist, blamed Wren for what he saw as the corruption of the Australian Labor Party during the early 20th century. Hardy was sued for criminal libel for having depicted Wren's wife having an affair.
- In her novel Broderie Anglaise (1953), 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.
- The novels of Jack Kerouac, including On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958).
- The Ugly American (1958) 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.
- The Idle Warriors (1962), Kerry Wendell Thornley's novel based on his old acquaintance from the Marine Corps, Lee Harvey Oswald.
- The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath, her semi-autobiographical novel, detailing a young girl's attempts at suicides and her mental breakdown.
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson, a fictionalized account of Thompson's trip to Las Vegas in a drug-induced haze.
- A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K. Dick, a fictionalized account of Dick's experiences in the 1970s drug culture. Dick said in an interview, "Everything in A Scanner Darkly I actually saw."[1]
- The Lords of Discipline (1980) by Pat Conroy, supposedly about the integration of the first black cadets into The Citadel. The accuracy of the events depicted within is vehemently denied by other alumni who attended at the time.
- Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981)
- Queenie is a 1985 novel by Michael Korda, nephew of Alexander Korda and the actress Merle Oberon. Throughout her life, Oberon had gone to great lengths to disguise her mixed-race background. In the novel, Queenie Kelley (Oberon was known in early roles as Queenie O'Brien) is a girl of Indian and Irish descent, fair enough to pass for white.
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) by Jeanette Winterson, a lesbian bildungsroman (novel of education).
- 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 (1985) (the shooting of Belair Stud owner William Woodward, Jr. by his wife, Ann Arden Woodward); People Like Us (1988) (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 (1993) (the Michael Skakel/Martha Moxley murder case) and An Inconvenient Woman (1990) (the Alfred S. Bloomingdale/Vicki Morgan affair and ensuing scandal).
- The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) by Tom Wolfe is widely considered to be based on many notable people of 1980's New York City society.
- Postcards from the Edge (1987) by Carrie Fisher which outlines the often-strained relationship between Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds and Carrie's substance abuse.
- Story of My Life (1988) by Jay McInerney implies that the cause of protagonist Alison Poole's "cocaine-addled, sexually voracious" behavior is her father's abuse, including the murder of her prize jumping horse. McInerney has stated in interviews that Poole was based on his former girlfriend, Lisa Druck, later known as Rielle Hunter.
- East Is East (1990) by T. Coraghessan Boyle, set in a writers' colony, includes thinly veiled depictions of many well-known writers of the late 1980s.
- 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.
- Stephen Fry's The Liar (1991)
- Primary Colors (1996) about Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, published anonymously but later confirmed to have been written by Joe Klein.
- Ravelstein (2000) by Saul Bellow is a thinly disguised memoir of friendship between Allan Bloom and Bellow. Also from Bellow is Humboldt's Gift (1975), about his friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz.
- The Devil Wears Prada (2003) about a woman constantly bullied by her boss while working as an assistant at a fashion magazine. Although author Lauren Weisberger worked as an assistant at Vogue magazine, she denies that the book's antagonist, Miranda Priestly, is modeled after the magazine's editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
- 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolaño, which places the hundreds of real rape/murders in Juárez, Mexico in a fictional border-town in the State of Sonora (west of Juárez).
- 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 Washingtonienne (2005) based on the author Jessica Cutler's sexual affairs as a congressional intern with various men in Washington, D.C.
- Niki Stevens from television's The L Word is rumored to be based on actress Lindsay Lohan.
[edit] In other media
[edit] References
[edit] See also
