Among my ancestors, first on my mother's side, then my father's, are a Mohawk Indian chief and the burgermeister of a northern German village. Thayendanegea, aka Joseph Brant, fought valiantly against the Americans in the Revolutionary War. He died in 1807, and a Canadian general hospital in Burlington, Ontario carries his name today. I never learned the burgermeister's name. As a boy growing up in western Pennsylvania my grandparents explained to me that he had been shot to death in 1935, two years before I was born, for publicly speaking out against Adolph Hitler. The chief and the burgermeister inspired me to write what will likely be my last work of fiction, American Pie. I believe the novel to be rooted in truth about its subjects: greed, bigotry, cruelty, friendship, love and compassion, hypocrisy and politics - a grim, satirical, sometimes comic allegory speaking to our troubled world's past, present, and seemingly inevitable future. The story's major theme is expressed in the introductory epigraph, a single sentence from British philosopher Bertrand Russell:
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those not regarded as members of the herd.
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