roman à clef

roman à clef, novel that has the extraliterary interest of portraying well-known real people more or less thinly disguised as fictional characters.

The tradition goes back to 17th-century France, when fashionable members of the aristocratic literary coteries, such as Mlle de Scudéry, enlivened their historical romances by including in them fictional representations of well-known figures in the court of Louis XIV. In the 20th century, Somerset Maugham’s Moon and Sixpence (1919) is thought to be related to the life of the painter Paul Gauguin, and his Cakes and Ale (1930) is said to contain caricatures of the novelists Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. A more common type of roman à clef are Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928) and Simone de Beauvoir’s Mandarins (1954), in which the disguised characters are immediately recognizable only to a small circle of insiders. Jack Kerouac fictionalized his own experiences in On the Road (1957). Primary Colors (1996) drew widespread attention in the United States as much for its protagonist—based closely on U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton—as for its anonymous author, later revealed to be political journalist Joe Klein.