He attended Harvard for one semester, but did not hesitate to drop out when he learned of his acceptance at Cambridge. Challenged for the first time by his studies and enjoying life in England, Anderson applied to Cambridge University before returning home. Not looking forward to starting at the university, he deferred for a year to go overseas and attend Winchester College, a boarding school in England.

The son of Will, an engineer, and Julianna, an Episcopal priest, he grew up in an undeveloped neighborhood in the town of Stow, outside of Boston, and attended St. T.) Anderson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 4, 1968. The end result is an alternative narrative of the American Revolution that strips away mythology in favor of a clear-eyed view of the moral questions present at the founding of the nation. Research degrades from misguided scientific enquiry to rank propaganda.Īs the novel yields its secrets and its horrors, the reader is kept off guard with shifting points of view and innovative narrative techniques. When the fortunes of the College change, the motivation behind the Not only is he a slave, but also the subject of a scientific experiment to determine the intellectual capacities of the African race. Octavian discovers the essential truth of his existence when he opens the door to a forbidden room. He is provided a rigorous classical education amidst mysteriously luxurious circumstances. Along with his mother, he resides with a group of rationalist philosophers and scientists at the Novanglian College of Lucidity. In pre-Revolutionary Boston, the reader is introduced to the Octavian of the title. Nevertheless, Anderson has once again rendered a fictional world that is both familiar and alien. With events unfolding before and during the American Revolution, the time and setting could not be more different from his previous novels. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party (2006) is no different. What unites both books is Anderson's ability to skew his reader's perceptions of the world just enough for them to get a better look at it. Televisions and computers are popular they are so popular, in fact, that everyone is equipped with a direct brain-connection to them at birth. In Feed, he turns his attention to a future that any modern reader would recognize. Anderson imagines a Massachusetts town that is almost completely normal, except for the vampires.

Octavian nothing traitor to the nation