Behind the Book with Gail Carson Levine

My favorite character in Dave at Night is Solomon Gruber, Solly, because he sees straight through to what’s important: an unprotected, grieving boy—Dave. Occasionally, Solly mentions his son, the “alrightnik,” disapprovingly. When I was unsure about the book’s ending, I wrote a scene with the son, which I wound up cutting. Here’s a description of him that didn’t make it into the book:

 

He had the same bags under his eyes as Solly, even though he was much younger. His nose was long and thin like the nose on the woman in the photograph on Solly’s piano. He had pale brown eyes and a narrow chin. The bags under his eyes were the only things that bagged or sagged about him. He wore a black wool coat with a velvet collar. The coat looked like someone had ironed it five minutes ago. Peeking out from under the velvet collar were a gray scarf, the top of an extra-white shirt, and a blue-and-black striped tie. His shiny black shoes looked like they had floated an inch above the melting snow—there wasn’t a bit of slush on them.

 

Dave at Night is historical fiction, my only novel without a shred of fantasy. It’s the first novel I ever wrote, the one I learned to write novels on, but it didn’t start out as a novel at all. It began as an eight-page fantasy picture book about a boy who’s an orphan who has magical dreams at night about a childless couple who have magical dreams about him. They meet in real life and love each other. The couple adopts Dave and everyone lives happily ever after.

No one would publish it. At that time, none of my manuscripts had been published. But an editor liked the story and asked me to expand it into a chapter book. I did and discovered I’m a novelist. After many revisions and a new editor, the book finally got published, without the magic dreams and without the childless couple. Dave is on his own!

After I finished writing, I attended a few meetings of the alumni association of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, the real orphanage where my father spent his childhood. At one meeting I met the last superintendent, who was in his nineties and was revered by all the former orphans who’d come. I’d been right about the superintendents. Most were very harsh, but not the last, who told me that he considered his life’s achievement to have been shutting the orphanage down, which happened in 1941.

The facts in the book about New York City in 1926 are all true. I did extensive research and tried to get everything right. I read several books about the period as well as poetry and a novel written at the time. I spent days going through the photo collection at the main branch of the New York Public Library, looked at street plans of the time, visited the Tenement Museum and spoke to the curator, visited the New York Transit Museum and talked to an expert on mass transit during the era. And much more. Best of all, I had two friends with excellent memories who were alive in 1926.

My research was guided by the questions that came up as I wrote. I began the book in a neighborhood called the Lower East Side, so I researched that area. Then, when Dave’s father dies, I needed to know what route the hearse would take to the cemetery—more research. Later on, Dave spends a night at a rent party, an egalitarian affair, meaning that poor folk and rich alike attended. I wondered what kind of cars might have been parked at the curb outside. This led me to reading about classic cars and interviewing a classic car expert. I learned that the dashboards of fancy cars sported altimeters. Airplanes were a recent invention that everybody was excited about, and drivers wanted to know how high in the air they were when their cars reached the top of a hill. I also discovered that some rich people hired small chauffeurs because they wanted to look big in comparison, and the chauffeurs’ seats were lower than the passenger seats for the same reason. Can you imagine?