America Happens Here.

Welcome to MERION MERCIES, the breathtaking historical fiction series that chronicles the American epic — spanning from the era of contesting Swedish and Dutch colonial outposts in Karakung to the dawn of the satellite age in Mohawk Four — and unfolding fully within a surprisingly consequential, bounteous setting:  the Welsh Tract, on the periphery of William Penn’s Greene Countrie Towne, present-day Philadelphia.  At this New World geographic and economic crossroads along the Schuylkill River’s western bank — “a perfect garden,” according to President John Adams in 1800 — generations of idealists, manifest dreamers, and commercial titans will intersect.  Heralded and forgotten, pope and pauper.  Over the centuries, local contributions and everyday heroes will forge a continental character and dramatically impact world affairs.

Grounded in the encompassing, generous historical record, MERION MERCIES reveals the natives, immigrants, and passersby who traverse the land, and influence global destinies:  First Nation tribes, frontier wives, Continental Congressmen, Tory loyalists, Fighting Quakers, indentured servants and slaves, Gilded Age tycoons, suffragists, Nobel laureates, cultural icons, and counter-culture warriors.  Radiant, entwined lives — vividly animated by author Andrew Hubsch — propel the bravura MERION MERCIES narrative, framing anew the emergent nation’s enduring story.

The National Endowment for the Arts qualified Andrew and MERION MERCIES for a FY 2012 Creative Writing Fellowship.