Author Uses Archives to Write Book

As the last season of AMC’s hit show “Mad Men” comes to an end, the show’s lead historical researcher, Allison Mann, has been using the Academy library’s archives to research a script she is writing about an all-boys prep school in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

After “Mad Men” wrapped filming last summer, Mann, who attended a boarding school in Connecticut, looked up the New England boarding schools with the best archives. According to Mann, Exeter’s archives are “really well organized.”

She contacted the library’s head archivist, Edouard Desrochers, and visited the school’s archives this fall, reading diaries, letters and anything else that would help her get a grasp on the daily lives of students at the time.

“[It] was sort of like a Holy Grail thing that when I was going to all these different boarding schools that was something I was hoping I could find but wasn’t sure that I would find, and Exeter actually had that, which was amazing,” Mann said.

“The cool part about archives is that it applies to absolutely everybody, even people who hated the school.”

Mann has utilized the archives to get insight into the issues the boys at Exeter were going through and thinking about at the time, as well as the language the boys used. Mann said she collected some common phrases using the materials she found, and though she hasn’t used many of them, they have helped to dispel some stereotypes she may have held about the time period.

“We all have our own strange bias versions of what these past decades were like, but without having been there, without having contact, like actual primary sources, it’s really difficult to have a sense of what it was like, and I’ll never have a real sense of what it was like; doing this, I can’t end up getting it right—I’m just trying to do the best I can to get it right.” she said.

After Mann finished a first draft of her research, she contacted Desrochers. Mann said that sometimes stopping to fix every inaccuracy as she goes along disrupts her writing process and creative flow, so she is in the process now of going back and making sure everything she wrote in her first draft is historically accurate.

Mann asked Desrochers about small details of daily life at prep school, such as when chapel was held, when students returned from winter break, if the school supplied sheets for the boys and information on student advisors.

Mann’s process for writing her personal script mirrors the process used to write scripts and research for episodes of “Mad Men.” She created timelines that included interesting events in politics and culture to inspire the writers of the show.

At the beginning of every season the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, would pitch the season’s stories. As the stories were being written, Mann looked up facts crucial to make each storyline work. After the scripts were created she would revise them to make sure all of the factual information was accurate. Mann looked through “every single draft of every single script that ever came out,” for accuracy in language, anachronism and research of specifics.

Desrochers said that Mann is not the first person to use the archives in this way, though the archives are usually used for things like genealogy.

Author and alumnus Roland Merullo, who wrote “In Revere in Those Days” based on a boy like himself who attended Exeter, reached out to Desrochers when writing about the school for reference of small details of Exeter’s architecture, such as the color of the Academy Building’s front door. Desrocher said author and alumni John Irving contacted him as well for photographs of students wrestling in the mid 1900’s for a book he was writing based at a school like Exeter.

“I love finding ways to use the archives not just to have all this old stuff downstairs. That’s always been my favorite thing. And the cool part about archives is that it applies to absolutely everybody, even people who hated the school...there are some really interesting things in the archives, so when there is an opportunity to pull this stuff out and let someone use it, it’s awesome, and [Mann] is just an example of that.” Desrochers said.