Author Description

This new novel, SOUL ON THE RUN, is what author Marc Dulman calls a reconceiving of a life lived in exile seven centuries ago. Dante Alighieri, a middle-aged poet and mid-level town councilman, a father of three boys and a baby girl, returns home to Florence from a political (church and state) conference in Venice only to find his wife frantically packing his satchels. An edict of exile, issued no less from the Pope, reaches Florence before the subject's return, discovered much to his surprise and to her distress. So begins his sudden life as an outcast in 1302 when he flees the city gates. The novel imaginatively follows Dante's sojourns from a hell to a sense of salvation nineteen years later, still an exile, at his death in 1321. Early on in his life of expulsion, he travels to Paris where the novel depicts the beginning of his writing of The Divine Comedy as being inspired by students' suggestions and continuing as the antidote that gets him through his years of banishment. Very little is actually known about Dante s life, but much is speculated on. SOUL ON THE RUN is not a history; rather, it should be read as a life in the realm of fiction.