One of the real-life members of the Donner Party who doesn’t appear in The Hunger is Jean-Baptiste Trudeau. There was supposedly evidence of cannibalism when he, the last survivor, was finally rescued. Some accounts say he admitted that he’d done it but later recanted. For instance, Lewis Keseberg was accused of resorting to cannibalism while trapped at Truckee Lake. A few of the traits we gave the characters are authentic. We imagined that Elitha Donner could hear the dead, that Tamsen Donner was unhappy in her marriage, and that Charles Stanton and Mary Graves fell in love. They bear little resemblance to the real people who made that terrible journey in 1846. However, this is a work of fiction and so, in order to create a dramatic story that modern readers would find satisfying, we used the idea of these people as a jumping off point to create the characters in the book. How many of the characters in The Hunger are based on real people? Nearly all can be traced back to the actual Donner Party. I urge you not to read these notes until after you’ve finished reading The Hunger. I’m going to try to answer some of the questions you may have, but there are spoilers ahead. Since The Hunger is based on a real event, you may be wondering how true to life the novel really is. If you’re like many readers, historical fiction can raise more questions than it answers.
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