They were big stories on broad canvases, the kind of tales that had transported me from my only-child world in a middle-class Boston neighborhood to exotic and adventurous places where the vistas were long, the gestures were grand, the women were beautiful, and the men did their best to hide their flaws behind their bravery. Think of a book like Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty or a movie like Lawrence of Arabia and you get the idea.

One of my scripts won a fellowship given by Hall Wallis, the producer of classics like Casablanca. This gave me a measure of confidence, but no one wanted to turn my scripts into movies. Too much history, they said. Too expensive, they said. And my agent, puzzling over what director or producer she could submit to, actually muttered, “Too bad John Ford and George Stevens are dead.”

Then one day, a producer said to me, “The way you write, you ought to write a novel.”

And I thought, sure. I know how to tell a story. I can sustain a plot. I understand narrative velocity. I’ll just do it in prose rather than in that strange mix of imagery, stage direction, and dialogue that forms a screenplay.

That was the arrogance of naïveté, squared then cubed.

But before I even conceived of Pratt or Peter Fallon, I needed a plot hook, a reason to put characters in motion. And I had an idea that that had been germinating in my head since I was a kid. Writing it would take me, at least in my imagination, to the place that any Bostonian living in L.A. would be happy to visit: that ancient city of red brick and monuments.

From the time that my parents first let me ride the subways alone, I had wandered the streets of Boston, felt its rhythms, and explored the places where its history had unfolded. And I often wondered why they named the city’s most beautiful section the Back Bay. Where was the water?

I got the answer in a fourth-grade geography class: landfill.

It was said that Puritans arrived at the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630, fell in love with it, and promptly began changing it. They cut down the hills and dumped them onto the surrounding flats to create new land, culminating in a massive nineteenth-century project that covered a huge marsh, washed twice a day by the tides, in a layer of sand and gravel twenty feet deep. This marsh lay to the west of the city, or behind it, so they called it the Back Bay. And after it was filled, the architects went to work.

In the 1950s, our teacher told us that beneath the basements of those fine, old buildings you could find things that people had thrown into the landfill a hundred years before—trash then, archaeological treasures today. What, I wondered, if there were real buried treasure in that landfill? Twenty years later, when the movie producers didn’t want my screenplays and I was not interested in returning to construction work, I wondered again.

The broad contours of the novel came quickly: it would be a two-century search for a lost Revere tea set that may have sunk into the Back Bay. It would encompass two stories set on converging tracks, one past, the other present… as if I didn’t have enough challenges telling just one. But remember the arrogance of naïveté: if a single plotline was good, two would be twice the fun. It would be another big story on a broad canvas with plenty of big scenes—battles, sinking ships, subway chases—the kind of set pieces that drew me as a screenwriter. But there would be intimate moments, too, because any good story is about characters who reveal themselves through their small gestures and silences as well as their actions. And while human characters like Pratt and Peter Fallon would drive things, the city of Boston itself would be the main protagonist.

Back Bay has now been in print for most of the last thirty-two years, an eternity for a work of popular fiction. And Peter Fallon is still appearing in my novels, getting into trouble, getting out of it, and guiding us book by book through American history.

The enduring popularity of this novel has been attributed to many things: its unusual structure, in which past and present play off of each other with a contrapuntal rhythm that enhances both; its pace, because the conflict advances as quickly as the years fly by; its characters—Pratt and Peter Fallon and the rest—who know what they want and go after it, all else be damned. But I think that the book has lasted because of what it tells us about ourselves.

I’ve often imagined how green and peaceful the Back Bay must have looked on an August afternoon in the eighteenth century, with the westerly breeze stirring the grasses and riffling the water, the redwing blackbirds and swallows flitting about, and some eel fisherman working a spear in a tidal stream. I’ve also imagined how sinister it must have seemed on nights in the nineteenth century, with the wall of landfill advancing from the east, the wet surface of the mud glistening in the moonlight, and the scavengers going about their business. I have even wondered what would happen if those Puritan descendants tried to fill the Back Bay today. Would the Environmental Protection Agency shut them down over destruction of wetlands?

As the Puritans’ City Upon a Hill evolves before us in these pages, as the flats are covered and modern Boston rises, we see how much of our world is a product of the past, how intricately and intimately our lives are tied to our ancestors’ dreams and decisions—some of them wise, some foolish, and some as grandiose as the plan to fill a square mile of marsh, then build a mini-Paris on top of it.

We can thank those ancestors or blame them. But we should always learn from them before we move on.

That’s what Peter Fallon does.