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THE FICTION SHELF
The anchors. Fiction actually set in Fort Wayne is a short shelf, and its two anchors are already on this page: Stapleford's Wah-see-ola (1905), set at the meeting of the waters before the city existed, and Martone's Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List (1990), set in the city he grew up in. Between and after them, the record thins to single titles. The most widely distributed is a young-adult novel: Lola Douglas's True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet (Razorbill, 2005), in which Morgan Carter, a teen film star fresh out of rehab after a near-fatal overdose, is exiled to hide out in Fort Wayne under an assumed name and attend high school incognito. The setting is the joke and then, in the reviews' telling, the cure — School Library Journal and Kliatt both place the book squarely in Fort Wayne — and the novel was adapted as a Lifetime film in 2008. Douglas's own tie to the city is not part of the verified record; the setting is the entry.
A hometown is not a setting. Kate Alcott's A Touch of Stardust (2015) sends its heroine, Julie Crawford, out of Fort Wayne to 1938 Hollywood, where she goes to work for Carole Lombard — herself a Fort Wayne native, profiled in Famous People. The book is sometimes listed among Fort Wayne novels; its ground is Hollywood, and Fort Wayne is the place its heroine is from. It is entered here to keep the distinction straight.
The self-published shelf. The setting still sells: recent self-published fiction continues to choose the city, among it a historical novel of an Irish immigrant orphan in the Fort Wayne of 1847 (The Gypsy King, AuthorHouse, 2025) and a novel of the city's 1971 school-busing crisis written by a Fort Wayne-raised author (No Boundaries, 2024), each entered from its publisher's or reviewers' descriptions. Neither has entered the reviewed record, and they are named here as a class — proof the ground keeps being claimed — rather than as literature this record can certify.
Sources: Kliatt and School Library Journal reviews of True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet (2005), and the publisher's record (Razorbill/Penguin); LA Weekly on the 2008 Lifetime adaptation; AuthorHouse and IndieReader records for the self-published titles; publisher copy for A Touch of Stardust (2015).