Eben Kruge

Eben Kruge: How "A Christmas Carol" Came to be Written is a story about Charles Dickens. And how wonderful it is for those who love Christmas to read and hear stories that inspire the happiest of seasons. And no story is as compelling and packed with apprehension as Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, penned in only six weeks in 1843. But what inspired the "Carol"? What triggered Dickens' imagination to write a story so unlike anything he had written before-a story about Christmas, a story wrought with flashbacks and flash-forwards and infused with the supernatural? In "Eben Kruge," award-winning author, Richard Barlow Adams, delivers a page-turning narrative that weaves fact and fiction for a penetrating look inside the life and psyche of Dickens. In 1842, Dickens and his wife, Catherine, traveled to America at the invitation of Washington Irving.

Thirty years old and already world-famous, Dickens visits nearly two dozen American cities, as far south as Richmond, as far west as St. Louis, and as far north as Canada's Quebec. At the end of the five-month trip, exhausted, overly vetted, less than enamored with the new nation, and for the first time faced with "writer's block," he makes a final stop at the United States Military Academy 50 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River. While at the Academy, Dickens learns of the man, Eben Kruge, a shyster attorney who resides in nearby Cornwall, a man whose "black turned to white" quite literally overnight. Declaring he must meet the man and know his story, Dickens strikes out for Cornwall early the next morning, oblivious to what lies ahead and risking the secret he intends to take to the grave.