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.

The reasons 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.

Notable romans à clef

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• The movie Scarface (both 1932 and 1983 versions) about Al Capone.
• The novels of 17th century French writer Madeleine de Scudéry.
• The novels of Jack Kerouac, most famously On the Road and The Dharma Bums.
• 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.
• The Moon and Sixpence by William Somerset Maugham follows the life of Paul Gauguin, especially his time in Tahiti.
• Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts acquaintances of Gerald and Sara Murphy 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 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 Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a play written 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. Mann's brother-in-law, the actor Gustaf Gründgens, was so offended by the main character Henrik Hoffgen (based on Gründgens himself) 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. It should be noted that, though some characters are influenced by real persons, it can be said that Powell's work is not a roman a clef, as the author himself declared.
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• The Things They Carried (1990) by Tim O'Brien is widely considered a truthful if knowingly distorted account of the author's experiences in Vietnam and subsequent methods of coping
• All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren is loosely based on the rise and fall of Louisiana governor Huey Long.
• Dominick Dunne's novels depict various upheavals in high society, with many thinly-veiled prominent persons among the casts of characters. Among the novels and respective cases alluded to are The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (the shooting of Belair Stud owner William Woodward, Jr. by his wife, Ann Arden Woodward), People Like Us (the downfall of a socially-ambitious junk bond trader, thought to be a conflation of John Gutfreund, Michael Milken, and Ivan Boesky), A Season In Purgatory (the Michael Skakel/Martha Moxley murder case), and An Inconvenient Woman (the Alfred S. Bloomingdale/Vicki Morgan affair and ensuing scandal).
• 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.
• The Body Politic (2000) by Lynne Cheney, in which a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while making love to his mistress. ^*
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad mirrors his own journey up the Congo. The character of Kurtz is most likely a compilation of several different colonial officials
• The protagonists of both Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice are representations of Thomas Mann.
• The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, a book that criticized American foreign policy in southeast Asia during the Vietnam War; the book uses the fictional country of Sarkhan (a fictionalized Vietnam) as the setting and includes several real people, most of whose names have been changed.
• Ravelstein by Saul Bellow is a thinly disguised memoir of friendship between Allan Bloom and Bellow .

Other uses

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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, given that what he has sent to the magazine is indeed a roman à clef account of the secret conspiracies in which he has been involved, but the magazine's editors rewrite it until it is unrecognizable.

References

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• William Amos, The Originals: Who's Really Who in Fiction, (London: Cape, 1985) - ISBN 0722110693
• Brian Busby, Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2003) - ISBN 0676975798

See also

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• Allegory
• Autobiographical novel
• Literary technique

French phrases | Literary genres

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