American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition (Author’s Preferred Text)

An Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition

I don’t know what it’s like to read this book. I only know what it was like to live the writing of it.

I moved to America in 1992. Something started, in the back of my head. There were unrelated ideas that I knew were important and yet seemed unconnected: two men meeting on a plane; the car on the ice; the significance of coin tricks; and more than anything, America: this strange, huge place where I now found myself living that I knew I didn’t understand. But I wanted to understand it. More than that, I wanted to describe it.

And then, during a stopover in Iceland I stared at a tourist diorama of the travels of Leif Erickson, and it all came together. I wrote a letter to my agent and my editor that explained what the book would be. I wrote “American Gods” at the top of the letter, certain I could come up with a better title.

A couple of weeks later, my editor sent me a mock-up of the book cover. It showed a road, and a lightning strike, and, at the top, it said, “American Gods.” It seemed to be the cover of the book I had planned to write.

I found it both off-putting and exhilarating to have the cover before the book. I put it up on the wall and looked at it, intimidated, all thoughts of ever finding another title gone forever. This was the book cover. This was the book.

Now I just had to write it.

I wrote the first chapter on a train journey from Chicago to San Diego. And I kept traveling, and I kept writing. I drove from Minneapolis to Florida by back roads, following routes I thought Shadow would take in the book. I wrote, and sometimes, when I was stuck, I hit the road. I ate pasties in the Upper Peninsula and hush puppies in Cairo. I did my best not to write about any place I had not been.

I wrote my book in many places—houses in Florida, and in a cabin on a Wisconsin lake, and in a hotel room in Las Vegas.

I would follow Shadow on his journey, and when I did not know what happened to Shadow I would write a Coming to America story, and by the time I got to the end of that I would know what Shadow was doing, and so would return to him. I wanted to write two thousand words a day, and if I wrote a thousand words a day I was happy.

I remember when it was all done in first draft telling Gene Wolfe, who is the wisest writer I know and has written more excellent novels than any man I’ve met, that I thought I had now learned how to write a novel. Gene looked at me, and smiled kindly. “You never learn how to write a novel,” he told me. “You only learn to write the novel you’re on.”

He was right. I’d learned to write the novel I was writing, and nothing more. Still, it was a fine, strange novel to have learned how to write. I was always aware of how very far short it fell of the beautiful, golden, gleaming, perfect book I had in my head, but even so, it made me happy.

I grew a beard and I did not cut my hair while I was writing this book, and many people thought I was a trifle odd (although not the Swedes, who approved and told me that a king of theirs had done something very similar, only not with a novel). I shaved the beard off at the end of the first draft, and disposed of the unfeasibly long hair shortly after that.

The second draft was mostly a process of excavation and clarification. Moments that needed to grow grew and moments that needed to be shorter were trimmed.

I wanted it to be a number of things. I wanted to write a book that was big and odd and meandering, and I did and it was. I wanted to write a book that included all the parts of America that obsessed and delighted me, which tended to be the bits that never showed up in the films and television shows.

I finished it, eventually, and I handed it in, taking a certain amount of comfort in the old saying that a novel can best be defined as a long piece of prose with something wrong with it, and I was fairly sure that I’d written one of those.

My editor was concerned that the book I had given to her was slightly too big and too meandering (she didn’t mind it being too odd), and she wanted me to trim it, and I did. I suspect her instincts may have been right, for the book was certainly successful—it sold many copies, and it was fortunate enough to receive a number of awards, including the Nebula and the Hugo (for, primarily, SF), the Bram Stoker (for horror), and the Locus (for fantasy), demonstrating that it may have been a fairly odd novel and that even if it was popular nobody was quite certain which box it belonged in.

But that would be in the future: first the book needed to be published. The publishing process fascinated me and I chronicled it on the web, on a blog I started for that reason (but which has continued to this day). When it was published I went on a book-signing tour, across the U.S., then to the U.K., then to Canada, and finally home. The first book signing I did was in June 2001, at the Borders Books in the World Trade Center. A couple of days after I returned home, on September 11, 2001, neither that bookstore nor the World Trade Center existed.

The reception the book was given surprised me.

I was used to telling stories that people liked, or that they didn’t read. I’d never written anything divisive before. But with this book, people either loved it, or they hated it. The ones who hated it, even if they liked my other books, really hated it. Some people complained that the book was not American enough; others that it was too American; that Shadow was unsympathetic; that I had failed to understand that the true religion of America was sports; and so on. All, undoubtedly, valid criticisms. But in the end, mostly, it found its people. I think it’s fair to say that more people loved it, and continue to love it.

One day, I hope, I will go back to that story. Shadow is ten years older now, after all. So is America. And the Gods are waiting.

NEIL GAIMAN

September 2010