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A roman à clef or roman à clé (French for "novel with a key") is a novel describing real-life events behind a façade of fiction. The "key", not present in the text, is the correlation between events and characters in the novel and events and characters in real life.
Reasons why an author might choose the roman à clef format include:
- Satire;
- Writing about controversial topics and/or reporting inside information on scandals without giving rise to charges of libel.
- A roman à clef also gives the author the opportunity to turn the tale the way the author would like it to have gone.
Since its original use in the context of writings, the roman à clef technique is also used in the theatre and in movies, like The Great Dictator depicting Hitler and nazism.
Some notable romans à clef:
- The novels of Jack Kerouac, most famously On the Road.
- Virtually all of the novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1785 - 1866) presuppose a knowledge of English intellectuals and currents of thought of the time.
- Glenarvon (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb which chronicles her affair with Lord Byron (thinly disguised as the title character).
- The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts the participants in the Brook Farm experiment, under the veil of a story about the search for a magic elixir.
- The Lady of Aroostook depicts Emily Dickinson's romantic engagements with several men.
- Röda rummet (Red room) by August Strindberg depicts real intellectuals of the time.
- Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves (1925) by Aldous Huxley are all satires of contemporary events.
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is a disguised account of Hemingway's literary life in Paris and his 1925 trip to Spain with several known personalities.
- Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts acquaintances of the Fitzgeralds in the 1920s.
- Point Counter Point (1928) by Aldous Huxley includes easily detected portraits of Huxley's friends D.H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry.
- Roman à clef is one of the many dimensions of Orlando: A Biography (1928) by Virginia Woolf.
- Citizen Kane (1941), a movie written by Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, was a fictionalized negative portrayal of the life of William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was offended by the movie and blacklisted Welles.
- The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, a play written by by Bertolt Brecht in 1941, describes the rise to power of a ruthless gangster in Chicago and his conquest of the nearby town of Cicero, mirroring the rise and early years in power of Adolf Hitler in Germany.
- Mephisto by Klaus Mann. The actor Gustaf Gründgens was so offended by the main character Henrik Hoffgen, that the novel was banned after a libel case.
- A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975) by Anthony Powell is a sequence of twelve novels satirising English cultural and political life in the middle of the 20th century.
- Primary Colors (1996), about Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, published anonymously but later confirmed to have been written by Joe Klein.
- The Devil Wears Prada (2003) about a woman constantly bullied by her boss while working as an intern at a fashion magazine. Although author Lauren Weisberger worked as an intern at Vogue magazine, she denies that the book's antagonist, Miranda Priestly, is modeled after the magazine's editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
- The Washingtonienne 2005 based on the author Jessica Cutler's sexual affairs as a congressional intern with various men in Washington, D.C.
Other uses
In the season 4 X-Files episode Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, the recurring villain known as the Cigarette Smoking Man moonlights as author Raul Bloodworth and is published in a sleazy rag called Roman A Clef. The name is ironic in the context, as what he has sent to the magazine is indeed a roman à clef account of the secret conspiracies he has been involved in, but the magazine's editors rewrite it until it is unrecognizable.