William J. Mann’s narrative nonfiction history Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood, won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and is being made into a TV series for FX. His most recent, The Wars of the Roosevelts, was also written as narrative nonfiction. Learn how to make history come alive—whether it be your own, in the form of a memoir, or a biography of someone else, or the history of a place or an event. No more dry, inaccessible, academic nonfiction!

William J. Mann is an author and historian whose most recent book, The Wars of the Roosevelts: The Ruthless Rise of America’s Greatest Political Family(HarperCollins) chronicles a heretofore unknown chapter in that fabled family’s past. His Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywoodwon the 2014 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and is being developed as a television series for FX. Mann’s other books include the New York Times Notable Book Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, called “definitive” by the Sunday Times of London. He is an Associate Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University, and divides his time between New York and Provincetown.