Don Quixote is remembered as a dreamer, but he was, in the first instance for his creator, a cautionary tale about the bewitching danger of reading fiction. When Cervantes wrote what is considered to be the first modern novel, he did so having witnessed the explosion of printed texts thanks to the invention of the printing press, and his story chronicles what happens to hapless readers who are sucked into the dreamy world of fiction's unreality. Poor Don Quixote envisioned himself as a swashbuckling knight like those in the chivalric stories he consumed, and his metastasized imagination got him into heaps of trouble. He mistook inns for castles, flocks of sheep for advancing armies, and, most memorably, windmills for giants. Cervantes did not just give readers a unique portrait of an outlandish, romantic, and impractical schemer—he also inspired the word “quixotic” to describe others like him.

History shows us that Cervantes had real reason for concern about readers’ close identification with make-believe characters. Take the responses to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which ends in the suicide of its hero. Soon after publication, European and American commentators sounded the alarm over what appeared to be a frightening spike in suicides. They piled example upon example of young men, who were discovered in a pool of their own blood, with references to Werther in their suicide notes. Goethe profoundly regretted that some readers “thought that they must transform poetry into reality, imitate a novel like this in real life and, in any case, shoot themselves.”Footnote ¹ The epidemiology of historical suicides is still more art than science, and so it remains unclear to what degree the “Werther effect”—a term for suicide contagion coined two centuries later by sociologist David P. Phillips—really took effect. Nevertheless, the abundant anecdotal evidence was enough to suggest that parents of heartsick and impressionable young men had reason to worry. Cervantes thought bringing fictional characters into real life could make one foolish. Goethe had demonstrated that it could be fatal.

Don Quixote's knights dramatize how fictional people can leap off the page and into a susceptible reader's consciousness, while Goethe's Werther extends the leaping from individual imagination to shared lived experience. In Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (2009), literature scholar Blakey Vermeule observes:

And, she might well have added, they can jump out of art altogether.

This helps to explain a longstanding cultural phenomenon. It is the force behind an entire entertainment industry that repurposes novels into musicals and literary characters into leading ladies. It is the impulse behind a relatively new genre: what literature scholar Jeremy Rosen refers to as “minor character elaboration”—narratives that take a minor (or imagined) character from a major work and spin a new story with that character as protagonist. Examples are Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Aimé Césaire's A Tempest (1969), Louise Gouge's Ahab's Bride (2004), and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad (2005).Footnote ³ But it is also how we get dogs named Faust and cats named Guinevere; Gulliver's Theme Parks, Dorian's Mirror Works, and Alice's Tea Shoppes; illnesses labeled Munchausen syndrome by proxy and Oedipus Complex; and towns named Trotwood (Dickens) and Esmeralda (Hugo). As literary theorist Wayne Booth has shown, reading novels enables us to make “friends and commonwealths” with their characters. They are “the company we keep.”Footnote ⁴

But surprisingly, until recently, precious little scholarship by historians has examined the presence, meaning, and influence of literary characters—their afterlives—in modern American life. To be sure, there is no shortage of histories of books, print culture, and reading. There are also plenty of reception studies (and what some authors call “biographies”) of books. And there are studies that trace the history of literary characters as they make their way from text to text, text to stage, and stage to screen. Books like Susan Tyler Hitchcock's Frankenstein: A Cultural History (2007) and David Bevington's Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (2011) are just two examples. While terrific reads, these and similar studies cleave close to the characters, widening out only occasionally to examine the social, political, economic, religious, and intellectual contexts of their uses and re-imaginings. They will likely frustrate historians who want more systematic attention to the historical conditions that lead to characters' change over time, why they achieve or lose intellectual viability at particular moments, or become commercially exploitable when they do.

There are, however, glimmerings that suggest that scholars are picking up on the possibilities of this historical approach. A small set of recent studies demonstrates how characters can take on lives outside of the imaginative work in which they first made their entrance on the world stage. They show how characters can go from textual fabrications to cultural touchstones.

George Cotkin's inventive and playful Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick (2012) reveals that the hunt for characters can be as exciting if nowhere near as frustrating as the hunt for that inscrutable great White Whale. Like the original, Cotkin's book is divided into 135 “chapters” (more like mini-essays), with each one lifting up some character, theme, or event in Melville's majestic narrative, and using it to trace the novel's posthumous journey through American life while also commenting on the culture it helped to create. It is a wild ride. Cotkin locates sightings of the White Whale and his obsessed hunter Ahab in everything from politics to painting to popular culture. There are innumerable intimate examples, such as literary critic Newton Arvin's discovery in Queequeg's and Ishmael's homoeroticism a way of releasing his own stifled sexuality and allowing himself to tumble into bed and into love with a beguiling twenty-one-year-old Truman Capote. But there are also more public ones. The most obvious example is an expensive commodity likely now in your hand, on your desk, or in your baby stroller's cup holder. Starbucks coffee got its start in Seattle in 1971 after English teacher Jerry Baldwin, history teacher Zev Siegl, and writer Gordon Bowker were disappointed with their “really bad” espressos and thought it was time to bring fresh roasted coffee to the city. Initially Bowker wanted to call the shop Pequod's after the whaling ship, but Terry Heckler, the graphic artist who eventually came up with the mermaid logo, intervened: “No one's going to drink a cup of Pee-quod.” They eventually settled on Starbucks after Ahab's conscience-ridden first mate. There are oodles of other less-known paeans to Melville's cast of characters, especially its two leading men, Ahab and Moby-Dick: Captain Ahab's Fine Seafood, Ahab rap lyrics, Moby the rock musician, Moby-Dick pubs, and Moby-Dick whale meat (“lean red meat high in protein”).Footnote ⁵ Greil Marcus was not exaggerating when he observed that Moby-Dick “is the sea we swim in.”Footnote ⁶

It turns out historians are quite good at researching fake people. Bob Batchelor's Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel (2014) retells how F. Scott Fitzgerald's book got off to an inauspicious start when it appeared in 1925. The Great Gatsby was greeted with so-so reviews and mediocre sales, and thus showed no signs that its protagonist would, one day, be widely regarded as a warning about the potential nightmares lurking within “the American Dream,” a symbol of the “American character,” and indeed “the major literary character of the United States in the twentieth century,” at least according to the critic Harold Bloom.Footnote ⁷ But Fitzgerald's untimely death in 1940 sparked a modest revival of interest in his work, just in time for the burgeoning mass market paperback industry to see commercial potential in this breezy, slim novel and make it available to a new generation of readers. Batchelor examines how Gatsby was made and remade in a variety of contexts in the postwar period. His native habitat may have been the Roaring Twenties, but he found a comfortable home in the 1980s’ “greed is good” morality of Gordon Gekko and the intransigent “morning in America” optimism of Ronald Reagan. In the midst of the Iran Contra hearings in 1987, Reagan's speechwriter, Anthony R. Dolan, published an op-ed in The New York Times likening his boss to an idealized Gatsby, one “with an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness” and “steady self-assurance,” which was wanting in all of the President's carping critics on the left. A month later, columnist Anthony Lewis responded with astonishment that Dolan would compare his boss to a figure of “utter falsity and emptiness,” bereft of a moral compass. “Could Anthony Dolan have remembered the book when he compared President Reagan to Jay Gatsby? Had he read it? No matter. We can be grateful for the insight, no matter how inadvertent it may have been.”Footnote ⁸

Long before Jay Gatsby's superficiality began cutting deeply into discourses of American material riches and moral bankruptcy, the character of Jo March was endearing herself to generations of Little Women readers eager for models of female intellectual independence and self-sovereignty. Barbara Sicherman's Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (2010) explores how a literary character like Jo can become the virtual amanuenses of real lives in the making.Footnote ⁹ Louisa May Alcott's feisty, curious, courageous young heroine has been a figure who, for over a century, has “stirred imaginations and fostered female ambition.” Sicherman demonstrates beautifully how private, solitary reading “could later be transmuted into public acts.”Footnote ¹⁰ She argues that Jo was a gateway drug for intellectual girls who grew up to choose careers as professional intellectuals. The 10-year-old Simone de Beauvoir was enchanted with Jo when she read Little Women in translation in post–World War I Paris. Before de Beauvoir discovered that she was a member of the “second sex” of humankind, she identified herself “passionately with Jo, the intellectual.” Jo's intellectuality struck de Beauvoir as a mark of her “superiority” to her sisters: “I, too, felt I was entitled to consider my taste in reading and scholastic success as tokens of a personal superiority which would be borne out by the future. I became in my own eyes a character out of a novel.”Footnote ¹¹ Cynthia Ozick similarly confessed: “I read ‘Little Women’ a thousand times. Ten thousand. I am no longer incognito, not even to myself. I am Jo in her ‘vortex’; not Jo exactly, but some Jo-of-the-future. I am under an enchantment: Who I truly am must be deferred, waited for and waited for.”Footnote ¹² Likewise Ann Petry recalled the importance of Jo for her self-making:

By examining the afterlives of Jo March, Sicherman reveals how intense identification with a literary character can awaken historical subjects to a new understanding of themselves, show them possibilities for maneuvering in the worlds, and goad them to turning their ambitions for themselves and their world into lived realities.

Fictional characters need to come to life on the page before they can play a role in readers’ lives. On rare occasion we are graced with an origins story directly from the author, such as Richard Wright's “How Bigger Was Born” (1940). But more often than not, it will be left to historians to figure out their parentage. Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014) offers a model of such a genealogy as she retraces the prehistory of Wonder Woman in the women's suffrage campaigns of the 1910s, investigates her improbable birth in Harvard University lecture halls and laboratories, before following her contested presence in Second Wave feminism. Her Wonder Woman is not merely a cypher for looking at the paths of feminist campaigns in twentieth-century American life; indeed Lepore shows her to be “the missing link” between the feminism of the dawn of the century and Second Wave feminism in its twilight.Footnote ¹⁴

The Secret History of Wonder Woman offers a model of a genuinely historical approach to the biography of fictional characters. Though the ruby red–lipped, golden eagle–bustiered, lasso-swinging heroine is never far from view in the narrative, Lepore places her within the larger cast of real-life human beings who helped create and remake her in ways that met the needs and expectations of their desired audiences. Feminists in the early 1970s wrestled over the appropriate uses of Wonder Women in their politics of recognition and struggles for economic equality and sexual liberation. Ms. Magazine (July 1972) boosted “Wonder Woman for President,” the feminist newsletter Sister featured a drawing of her swinging a speculum instead of her lasso, while the radical feminist Redstockings lamented that this exaltation of a sexpot cartoon character “reflects the anti-people attitude of the ‘liberal feminists’ and the matriarchists who look to mythical and supernatural heroines … while ignoring or denigrating the achievements and struggles of down-to-earth women. It leads to the ‘liberated woman,’ individualist line that denies the need for a movement.” Lepore seems to agree. Superheroes “are excellent at clobbering people; they're lousy at fighting for equality.”Footnote ¹⁵

Perhaps no literary figure in the past fifty years has been adored as much as Harper Lee's Atticus Finch. Joseph Crespino's Atticus Finch: The Biography (2018) explores the culture from which Atticus came and how the fraught landscape of American society influenced his life course. He follows Atticus's biography, from his origins in Harper Lee's father A. C. Lee (an Alabama lawyer, state legislator, and newspaper editor, and who was the inspiration for her protagonist), through his creation and development in Go Set a Watchman (written in 1957 but not published until a year before her death in 2015) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), through actor Gregory Peck's embodiment of him in the 1962 film version, which would be the image of Atticus inscribed in American political culture. Crespino deftly interlaces the textual and celluloid Atticuses with local politics in Monroeville, state politics in Alabama, and national politics more broadly. Atticus Finch inhabits the same social and political landscape as Brown v. Board of Education; White Citizens’ Councils; Birmingham police dogs and fire hoses turned on youthful nonviolent civil rights protesters, and Martin Luther King Jr. writing a letter in a Birmingham jail. Crespino demonstrates how the “icon of the liberal white Alabaman was … crafted on a studio lot in California,” and how this screen version of Atticus premiered in December of 1962 just two weeks before George Wallace took the governor's office. “Thus did George Wallace and Atticus Finch, the id and the superego of the descendants of the Confederacy, enter together the mainstream of American political and cultural life.”Footnote ¹⁶ Atticus's biography shows the ways in which an imaginary character has a real life history—in this case, one that uniquely illuminates a larger story about the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.

Lest one doubt that make believe characters are unique lenses onto, as well as collaborators in the shaping of history, the astonishing career of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom provides a century and a half of evidence making this unmistakable. Adena Spingarn's Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitor (2018) performs the careful historical puzzlework necessary to examine how a seemingly uncomplicated, unobjectionable, and one-dimensional literary character went on to become an extraordinarily controversial figure. From the moment he came to life with the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Beecher's tender, self-sacrificing slave became the premier figure with and through which to think about race in general and blackness in particular. Not only was Uncle Tom's Cabin the second best-selling book of the nineteenth century (with the Bible as the first) and, thanks to over a dozen translations, a global phenomenon, but the book also gave birth to an entire industry of Uncle Tom spin-offs in plays, musical performances, films, and memorabilia. However, Uncle Tom also had “an active life outside of expressive culture,” as he figured into political debates, social commentary, and even public policy in the form of the “Uncle Tom's Cabin Law” of 1906, which sanctioned the censorship of potentially racially incendiary entertainment.

Spingarn's history shows how Uncle Tom began his American career as a symbol of Christian purity and virtue among whites as well as blacks. But at the turn of the last century, as African American intellectuals and artists sought to refashion themselves as “New Negroes”—independent, self-reliant, and unapologetic for being so—this once vivid exemplar of “moral grandeur” came to look more like a symbol of obsequiousness. Uncle Tom now came across as a cheerful supplicant, a betrayer of the race, eventually becoming what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has called “the ultimate instrument of black-on-black derogation.” Spingarn's study shows that there should be nothing self-evident in Malcolm X's derision of Martin Luther King Jr. as a “modern Uncle Tom” who worked to “keep Negroes defenseless in the face of … attack.” There needed first to be a shift in social, political, and economic conditions to make this “hero of the nineteenth century … become a danger to the race.”Footnote ¹⁷ Uncle Tom's long and complicated life outside the pages of Stowe's novel shows that readers’ relationships to fictional characters are real in a literal sense, even if the object of their scorn or adoration is not.

Given the omnipresence of literary characters in twentieth-century American sites other than literature, we might ask what other histories of their cultural biographies might yield. Just think of the possibilities: the American career of Robin Hood as a window into competing ideas about wealth distribution, social equity, and fairness in American life; Hester Prynne's American afterlife as a study of female sexuality, single parenting, or social stigmatization; the peregrinations of Willy Loman as a history of failure, mediocrity, or American notions of modern tragedy. The potentials are endless: Hamlet (madness), Lady Macbeth (female ambition), Frankenstein (the promises and perils of science and technology), Sherlock Holmes (logic and evidence), Gregor Samsa (modern estrangement), Scarlett O'Hara (Old South in American memory), The Invisible Man (alterity), Humbert Humbert (perversion), John Galt (atomistic individualism). Even better, histories attentive to these characters’ migratory patterns are bound to yield cultural uses and interpretations that we cannot even begin to imagine.

For every Ahab, Gatsby, Jo March, Wonder Woman, Atticus Finch, and Uncle Tom roaming the modern American landscape, there are innumerable other fictional literary characters—nouveau riche woodcutters (Ali Baba), materialistic businessmen (Babbitt), and totalitarian specters and spectators (Big Brother)—animating a moral controversy or sharpening the terms of cultural criticism and political debate. As some of us teeter on the edge of despair in our historical moment, perhaps we should turn to great literature—whether it be classic or contemporary—for a better understanding of the figures who haunt our world: larger than life, eerily vacant, tormented by ghosts, tormentors of others. Even the weightiest of characters can provide moral buoyancy and intellectual agility, helping to keep us afloat and negotiate the tides. After all, make believe characters helped make American history. Some of them are more real than the “real” people we know.