ERIK LARSON is the author of the acclaimed nonfiction bestseller Isaac's Storm, the story of a devastating hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas in 1900. Larson's narrative recreates the storm, its watchers and its victims, and captures the nightmare that can occur when hubris and the terrifying power of nature collide. He is the author of two previous books, Lethal Passage (Crown, 1994) and The Naked Consumer (Henry Holt, 1992). His work has appeared in a number of national magazines, including Harper's, The New Yorker, Time and Atlantic Monthly. In January 2001, his workshop entitled "Animating History" was presented as part of the University of Oregon Literary Nonfiction "Writing About" series.

Q: You've said that you approach research in the way that a detective would. Why did you choose that particular metaphor?

A: I work the way a forensic investigator works, the way an investigator would try to recreate a car crash in a courtroom--bringing in every possible detail to make that moment come alive, from weather to landscape to whatever, rather than using simply one straightforward historical document. I like to bring a lot of different things together. It's really more detective work, at least in my mind, than the traditional historical method of slogging through books in libraries.

Q: What resources do you find especially useful?

A: I'll just point out some of my favorites. Weather is one of the most important things that all too often gets left out of books. It can really color a reader's perception of an event or a place in ways that nothing else can. There are some tremendous resources for getting very specific information about what the weather was in a particular place in a particular time, one of these being the Monthly Weather Review by the U.S. Weather Bureau. It's got everything from about 1880 on. It's a tremendous resource. Another thing that I think gets left out all too often in non-fiction in general, not just historical non-fiction, is a sense of smell. And if you work hard enough, you can figure out what a place smelled like. Sometimes people tell you--newspaper articles, journals, diaries. You can also piece together disparate sources like fire insurance maps that tell you exactly what sorts of industries were in what places at a particular time. Put those together with the weather information that shows you which way the wind was blowing and what the weather conditions were like and you can get a pretty good sense of what kind of ambient smells would have been around.

Q: Do you enjoy the research process?

A: The puzzle aspect of historical research is a whole lot of fun: finding interesting sources that you never knew existed and getting a picture of a long ago time that is compelling. The first step is just getting a sense in your own mind of what that time was like. That's what it's all about in any kind of writing: building, in your own mind first, a very rich sense of a time, and a place, and an event.

Q: What draws you to writing about history?

A: I've always been interested in history. I majored in history in college, although I never intended to be a historian. I also found, afterwards when I was writing feature stories for the Wall Street Journal--and maybe it's the stories I picked or just the way that I think--there was always a historical component to my stories. In many cases, the historical component was one of the richest parts of the piece--the most interesting, the most compelling. And they were often funny. Any good piece of journalism, any good piece of writing, has a strong historical component. I'm convinced of that.

Q: Why?

A: Every story has a context, and context is history--whether you're talking 5 years ago or 50 years ago or100 years ago. If you're writing a profile of a murderer and you're talking about that murderer's childhood, that's history. You can't escape it--and if you do, you blow the story. History is all seamless, it's all real, it's all relevant.

Q: Do you read a lot of history?

A: You know, I don't read that much history, because I don't think there's that much terrific history around. I'm in this business for great writing--not that I necessarily do it, but I love to read it. I read the best written, most moving, most powerful things I can find. When I find that in history, I love it and I read it. Almost anything by David McCullough, all of Barbara Tuchman's old books--The Guns of August, especially--anything by Melissa Fay Greene. Luckily, I think there are many more nonfiction books being written now than there were 10 years ago--I think it's a terrific trend. So I look forward to being lured into some of these books.