Meet Lynn
Lynn Cullen is the bestselling author of historical novels The Sisters of Summit Avenue, Twain’s End, Mrs. Poe, Reign of Madness, and I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter. To read about Lynn’s introduction to writing historical fiction, click here.
Her novel, Mrs. Poe, was named a Book of the Week by People Magazine, a Target Book Club Pick, an NPR 2013 Great Read, an Indie Next List selection. It was also a book of the month at Costco, an Oprah Book of the Week, and Atlanta magazine named it one of the Best Books of 2013.
Twain’s End was a People Magazine Book of the Week, a Townsend Prize finalist, an Indie Next selection, and named a Book All Georgians Should Read by the Georgia Center for the Book. Lynn’s novels have been translated into seventeen languages and she has appeared on PBS’s American Masters.
Lynn grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the fifth girl in a family of seven children. She learned to love history combined with traveling while visiting historic sites across the U.S. on annual family camping trips. She attended Indiana University in Bloomington and Fort Wayne, and took writing classes with Tom McHaney at Georgia State.
She wrote children’s books as her three daughters were growing up, while working in a pediatric office, and later, on the editorial staff of a psychoanalytic journal at Emory University. While her camping expeditions across the States have become fact-finding missions across Europe, she still loves digging into the past. However, she does not miss sleeping in musty sleeping bags. Or eating canned fruit cocktail.
She now lives in Atlanta with her husband, their dog, and two unscrupulous cats.
About the Book
In 1940s and ’50s America, polio is as dreaded as the atomic bomb. No one’s life is untouched by this disease that kills or paralyzes its victims, particularly children. Outbreaks of the virus across the country regularly put American cities in lockdown. Some of the world’s best minds are engaged in the race to find a vaccine. The man who succeeds will be a god.
But Dorothy Horstmann is not focused on beating her colleagues to the vaccine. She just wants the world to have a cure. Applying the same determination that lifted her from a humble background as the daughter of immigrants, to becoming a doctor –often the only woman in the room–she hunts down the monster where it lurks: in the blood.
This discovery of hers, and an error by a competitor, catapults her closest colleague to a lead in the race. When his chance to win comes on a worldwide scale, she is asked to sink or validate his vaccine—and to decide what is forgivable, and how much should be sacrificed, in pursuit of the cure.
