Rick Atkinson: The British Are Coming — The Graphic Edition
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Rick Atkinson discusses the visual reimagining of his Revolutionary War narrative with New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos.
Why we picked this
Atkinson spent a decade on his Liberation Trilogy before turning to the Revolution — the graphic edition is worth attending not just for the art but for what the translation process reveals about how he thinks about narrative and historical evidence.
Rick Atkinson’s “The British Are Coming” — the first volume of his Revolution trilogy — was a work of deeply researched military narrative that put readers inside the specific physical and strategic reality of the Revolutionary War’s early years. The graphic edition represents a significant creative translation: taking prose built on primary sources and converting it into a visual form that has to communicate the same complexity through image and condensed text.
That adaptation process is itself an interesting subject. What gets kept, what gets lost, how visual representation changes the relationship between reader and history — these are questions that Atkinson, who has thought carefully about narrative for decades, is well positioned to address. The conversation with Evan Osnos, a New Yorker staff writer known for his own precisely rendered historical and political nonfiction, should reach well beyond the immediate book.
The event takes place at Politics and Prose’s Connecticut Avenue location, free and open to the public, in the late afternoon on a Saturday — the kind of event that rewards arriving without a fixed agenda for the evening.