Matthew Pearl

Matthew Pearl writes historically grounded fiction and narrative nonfiction, often rebuilding events from archival evidence. The Taking of Jemima Boone examines the 1776 capture of thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and sisters Betsy and Fanny Callaway near Boonesboro, Kentucky. Pearl follows the Cherokee-Shawnee party that took them, the clues the girls left along the trail, and the pursuit led by Daniel Boone. Rather than treating the episode as an isolated frontier adventure, he places it amid British and American military ambitions, contested Indigenous homelands, shifting alliances, and cycles of retaliation. The book appeared from HarperCollins in 2021 as Pearl’s first work of narrative nonfiction. He co-founded Truly*Adventurous. That combination of narrative pacing and source-based reconstruction lets the book reconsider a familiar pioneer family while keeping tribal politics and colonial expansion in view.