SOURCE: "Colleen McCullough: The Indefatigable Author Has Embarked on a Five-Volume Series Set in Ancient Rome," in Publishers Weekly, September 14, 1990, pp. 109-10.

In the following essay, Steinberg reports on McCullough's Roman history series and offers insight into the author's motivations for writing it.

To meet with Colleen McCullough one generally must take a 13-hour nonstop flight from Los Angeles to New Zealand, then board another plane to Norfolk Island, in the South Pacific Ocean, a three-by-five-mile bit of land that she calls "a remote speck at the end of the world." Small wonder, then, that PW sought out the author at the recent ABA in Las Vegas. The reason was not contiguity alone: McCullough's name will be much bandied about this fall, as Morrow issues the first of her five-volume series of historical novels set in the waning days of the Roman Republic. The First Man in Rome...