And the writing was dazzling: Anderson managed hundreds of pages in an authentically 18th-century prose style that upstaged even Mark Twain’s impersonations of Olde English in “The Prince and the Pauper.” Moreover, in an era when teenagers have been increasingly drawn to graphic novels, the book itself was interesting as an object: the narrative had to be traced through an archive of maps, newspaper excerpts, pages with words crossed out by a quill pen, diary entries, scientific reports and letters in various hands.Ĭredit. When it appeared in 2006, this first volume of “Octavian Nothing” seemed like a comet out of nowhere - an impressive and profound story of race and revolution in America’s past. Volume 1 ends with his escaping once more, planning to join up with the British. Hearing about a possibility of liberty as colonial hostilities break out, he escapes his keepers (at the wonderfully named “Novanglian College of Lucidity”) and joins American rebels who are about to attack Boston but he is inadvertently betrayed and returned to the college, where he is horribly punished. A skilled violinist and an able translator of Greek and Roman classics, Octavian is a petted prodigy happy with his lot until he slowly divines his status as a science experiment. That book, Volume 1 (“The Pox Party”), tells the story of an experiment by a group of American philosophers upon a black youth named Octavian in order to discover whether Africans are a separate species from white people. The result of those musings was, Anderson joked, “a 900-page two-volume historical epic for teens, written in a kind of unintelligible 18th-century Johnsonian Augustan prose by an obsessive neurotic who rarely leaves his house or even gets dressed.” The first volume of “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing” went on to win extraordinary praise and a National Book Award for juvenile literature. Years later he wondered what it would have been like to be alive on that day when the final outcome of the Revolutionary War was still unclear. Anderson and his parents watched a bicentennial re-enactment of the confrontation between rebels and redcoats at the Old North Bridge.

In 1975, from a canoe floating in the Concord River, the young M.

Octavian nothing traitor to the nation