A Teenage Soldier’s Wartime Scrapbook Inspired His Granddaughter’s First Novel

To write historical fiction is to know that the past finds many places to hide. For Heather Clark it was in her grandfather’s scrapbook, stowed away in an attic until after he died.

With a burgundy cover now so faded the gold tooling on the front barely stands out, it speaks to the experiences of a fresh-faced, perpetually grinning 19-year-old Irish American G.I. deployed to Europe in the last stretch of World War II, his trusty camera almost always slung around his neck. He returned ravaged by encounters in a war he refused to speak about for the rest of his long life.

Along with birthday cards and holiday telegrams, Army rosters and food ration certificates, Nazi uniform badges and Gen. Omar Bradley’s sternly worded “Special Orders for German American Relations,” the album includes Herbert J. Clark’s photographs of the place that had drained the smile from his face: Dachau.

His granddaughter is an award-winning literary historian and critic, whose “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath” (2020) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. “The Scrapbook,” however, is fiction, a debut novel inspired by her grandfather’s attic trove, which she had heard about, but hadn’t seen, until after his funeral.

“I wanted to see what happens in the space where biography and fiction collide,” she said.

Clark was seated with the album open in front of her recently, at a long table in the gray clapboard house in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., she shares with her husband, two children and many walls of books.