News of the World Study Guide

Born in Salem, Missouri, Paulette Jiles grew up in the American Midwest and studied Romance languages at the University of Missouri. After graduating, she moved to Canada and worked as a journalist for eight years before making her first foray into poetry. Jiles first gained literary acclaim with her poetry collection Celestial Navigation, which won Canada’s most prestigious literary prize in 1984. Jiles went on to publish works across a variety of genres, from memoir to fiction, mostly set in the Midwest. Her novel Enemy Women (2002) won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and News of the World (2016) was a finalist for the National Book Award. After getting married, Jiles moved to Texas where she has lived intermittently since 1991. She currently lives outside a ranch outside San Antonio, and has several grandchildren.

The mid-19th century was a tumultuous time in Texas. The territory was part of the Spanish Empire from 1690 to 1821, when it became part of the newly independent Mexico. Hoping to spur development, the Mexican government encouraged emigration from the United States, with the result that white settlers soon vastly outnumbered Mexicans. In the 1830s, Mexican and Anglo Texans united to rebel against Mexico and establish the Republic of Texas; but the United States soon annexed the fledgling state, fighting a war Mexico (the Mexican-American War) to establish its dominance. Slavery was permitted in Texas, and it joined other Southern states in voting to secede from America in 1861. After losing the war, Texas underwent the process of Reconstruction, in which the federal government appointed local officials to “rehabilitate” the state, dissolve slavery, and ensure national loyalty. For various reasons, including federal corruption, local intransigence, and widespread racism, Reconstruction was a national failure. By 1876, the Texas government had re-segregated Texas schools and imposed poll taxes on African American citizens. Although the world that Captain Kidd and Johanna inhabit in News of the World is extremely ethnically heterogeneous, it’s also characterized by inequality and violence.

The Civil War and its aftermath, especially as it unfolded in the Midwest, has proven fertile literary ground for American writers. Cold Mountain, winner of the 1997 National Book Award, traces one Confederate soldier’s journey home through dangerous territory. In Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, which won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize, a young family struggles to build a new life in the tumultuous, developing western states. These novels both explore the western frontier and its influence on American culture and national consciousness in the 19th century. Bret Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” set in 1850, also provides a glimpse of life on the dangerous, rough-and-tumble western frontier. The seminal novel about the Reconstruction Era (the period immediately following the Civil War, from 1865-1877) is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Discussing the slavery’s lasting repercussions for formerly enslaved people, Beloved provides a perspective missing from many books about this period (including News of the World). Readers looking for a nonfiction introduction to Reconstruction should consult A Short History of Reconstruction by Eric Foner, leading expert in this period.