A Study Guide for M.T. Anderson's "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for M.T. Anderson's "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Studentsfor all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781535845694

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The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party

M. T. Anderson

2006

Introduction

The Pox Party, published in 2006, is the first volume of M. T. Anderson's two-volume set of young-adult historical novels under the title The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. The time period in which The Pox Party is set extends from the years leading up to the American Revolutionary War through the early months of the war. It tells the story of Octavian Nothing, the son of an African princess, who is raised by a group of rationalist philosophers at the fictional Novanglian College of Lucidity in Boston. He is dressed in fine clothes, fed well, given an extensive classical education, and becomes an accomplished violinist. Despite these apparent advantages, Octavian is a slave, and he is being held as part of an experiment to determine the intellectual capacities of Africans. Later, after the death of his mother as a result of a pox party, Octavian flees from captivity and joins the Patriots during the American Revolution, but he is recaptured and returned to his owner.

The Pox Party is noteworthy for recreating an eighteenth-century flavor, in large part through its antique style. A sense of the novel's style can be gained from its full title as it appears on the title page: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Taken from Accounts by His Own Hand and Other Sundry Sources, Collected by Mr. M. T. Anderson of Boston. Thus, the pretense is that Anderson is functioning as an editor, assembling letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, a map, slaveauction advertisements, scientific papers, and first-person narratives to produce his story. The novel was published by Candlewick Press in 2006. The second volume, The Kingdom on the Waves, appeared in 2008.

Author Biography

Matthew Tobin Anderson was born on November 4, 1968, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, though later he lived in Stow, Massachusetts. As a very young child, he lived with his family for a period of time in Italy, where his father, Will, an engineer, was working on a radar system at a US army base; his mother, Juliana, was an Episcopal priest. Already as a teenager, he was writing extensively, and during this period he wrote his first novel, The Game of Sunken Places, which was published in revised form much later, in 2004.

Anderson followed a somewhat irregular path in completing his higher education. After attending boarding school for a year in England, he returned to the United States. He enrolled at Harvard, but he dropped out after a year.