“Serendipity rules,” Julia Keller says when asked to explain how a machine gun came to strike her fancy. She might live by those words, but there isn’t anything desultory about her. Curiosity and a sense of possibility are essential parts of Julia, Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune cultural critic, so it’s no wonder she is drawn to the era of invention.
She began her journey to this week’s Magazine, and her forthcoming book, “Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It,” with a Tempo story on automatic nail guns that went awry. Trying to enliven the story with a metaphor, she wondered about the Gatling gun: But should the “g” in “gun” be upper or lower case? In checking this detail, she came upon the remarkable but little-known story of the gun’s inventor, Richard Jordan Gatling.
Julia spent the next year, including time as a visiting professor at Princeton University, unearthing his life story and inhabiting his world. The book, praised in pre-publication reviews for its intelligence and style, hits the stores early next month.
“Gatling and his gun are ideal windows through which to behold the 19th Century,” explains Julia. “It was an amazing time, when this nation was rising to superpower status, an era of steamboats and smallpox, a period when self-taught geniuses such as Gatling led us to creative and economic heights.”
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etaylor@tribune.com
Julia Keller speaks at the Printers Row Book Fair on June 7-8 (printersrowbookfair.org).
