With my father, the tranquility of farm life could be transformed in an instant when he lost his temper. In a matter of seconds, any man who had offended him would be down and bleeding in the dust. (Today, he would have found himself in jail on a regular basis.) He was a talented light-heavyweight boxer who plied his trade during the 1920s and 1930s, if not quite at the level depicted here. He was a veteran of more than seventy pro fights whose career began exactly as Jake’s does, with a promoter walking out to a beet field to recruit one of the laborers to face his champion. The bout against Lionel Kane depicted at the beginning of the Hard Times section is a pastiche of his memories of the fight game, beginning with the advice he always gave me when he was trying to teach me to box: “Always hit a nigger in the head and a fat man in the stomach.” I could never remember whether it went that way or the other way around, so I have tried to incorporate that uncertainty into the text. (Using the N-word, incidentally, posed another difficulty. My father’s regular use of the word led us to the edge of blows more than once—a fight I would have lost. I don’t like to hear the word and I certainly didn’t want to use it—but if I didn’t, the passage would have been wholly inaccurate. It’s impossible to portray the casual racism of that time without using the language the characters would have used.) In the fight chapters, I also used my own experience as a sportswriter. I have covered world title fights featuring boxers such as Mike Tyson and Trevor Berbick and I have interviewed Larry Holmes and Muhammad Ali. One of my closest friends is a former world middleweight champion, so boxing is one sport I understand thoroughly. I had the most fun, however, with the peripheral characters that are drawn more or less from life, if in a different era: the sportswriter Ed Floate, the radio broadcaster Wade Wynkoop. I looked up from ringside one very warm night at the fights and saw an obese boxing promoter wearing a floor-length fur coat. He lives on in the character of Moe Spitzer.

This is a sweeping family epic that takes place over ten years. Is there a reason you wanted to keep it solely within the 1930s? Did you find this restraint helpful or restrictive?