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Arts & Entertainment

OPRF Teacher Authors First Novel

Daniel Greenstone will discuss his work of fiction at the Oak Park Public Library on Tuesday.

It started with a voice in Daniel Greenstone’s head.

A character’s voice, that is.

Before the history teacher got his first novel down on paper, Greenstone worked to get inside his character's head.

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Even then, the first draft of what would become A Theory of Great Men took him about a year to finish. He quickly acquired a literary agent who worked with him to revise the manuscript and take it to New York City publishing houses.

After Greenstone, 39, and his agent parted ways, he worked to submit the manuscript on his own, eventually landing a deal with Academy Chicago Publishers. The novel published in May and the author has been held a few readings since then as a mini-book tour.

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The novel focuses on narrator George Cavaliere, a high school history teacher and basketball coach in a suburban Chicago. The character is a self-indulgent, impulsive type, with a knack for misreading cues and a lack of political correctness.

Cavaliere is “a stubborn man who sticks to his belief that life is happening to him when in fact he’s the driving force of his own destruction,” according to Publishers Weekly.

While the narrator works to debunk the “great man” theory of history, which says that human events are shaped by major historical figures, he lacks perspective to see what's happening in his own life.

Rather, Greenstone’s character argues, economics, technological change and demographics have far more to do with shaping individual lives, and much of it is out of the control of any one person.

It’s a theory that Greenstone, a native of Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood who lives in Oak Park with his wife and two children, devotes some definitive thought to on his own.

“We constantly see in education that the children of the successful are successful,” he said, “and the children of the less successful are less successful.”

And after reading his book, he hopes others will mull that theory over for themselves. Or they can ask him more about it during an program at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

The award-winning teacher has been writing consistently throughout his life and is continuing to explore ideas for a new novel, which he said is in the “preliminary stages” right now.

Overall, though, he says it’s nice to be able to share the character he created and the novel he crafted with the world. It’s no longer just in his head.

“It’s been really fun,” Greenstone said. “It’s just been great to have it out there and talk to people about it and get their reaction to it.

“It’s really a dream come true.”

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