Henry and Clara

Henry and Clara is a historical novel by the American writer Thomas Mallon, published in 1994.

The book follows Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, who were raised in the same household as stepbrother and stepsister after their widowed parents married, and who became a couple in a society that found the arrangement worth talking about. Henry was a Union officer and Clara the daughter of a senator, and in April 1865 they were invited to join the President's party at Ford's Theatre, where they were sitting when John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. What happened in the box that night is only the middle of the novel: Mallon follows the two of them through the years on either side of it, and the rest of their lives are shaped by the evening and by what Henry saw and did.

Mallon wrote several novels that place real figures inside the private life of American politics, and this one takes its shape from the couple's own story. The novel's second half is quieter than its middle, and its subject is what a public event does to two private lives standing beside it.