Alumni Author Feature: John Neeleman
John Neeleman, class of 1982
by Robert Carson, Tanner Humanities Center
John Neeleman is an attorney specializing in commercial litigation for Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton in Seattle. He also does pro bono work representing indigent death-row inmates in Louisiana and Texas, and he writes historical fiction in his spare time. A 1982 graduate of the University of Utah with an English major and economics minor, he earned his law degree from Georgetown in 1986.
Beyond this brief résumé lies a deeper story about the humanities' impact on his personal and professional identities. Neeleman's journey demonstrates how humanities education enriches both professional and intellectual life. This fall, Neeleman sat down with the Tanner Humanities Center’s Robert Carson to discuss his latest book, Children of Saturn, literary imagination, and how the concept of having an intellectual life is itself central to the humanities education Neeleman received at Utah.
The Literary Imagination
Neeleman began his university studies as a pre-med student and later explored accounting
before settling on English as his major. Two professors proved particularly influential:
Franklin Fisher in creative writing and literature courses, who later attended Neeleman's
wedding, and Henry Staten, who taught Neeleman the importance of examining text for
multiple valid meanings outside the author’s intent. Though Neeleman admired Professor
Staten so much that he wrote a short story for Fisher’s class with an admirable character
modeled on Professor Staten, Staton gave him a B—his only non-A in English.
Neelman relates a story about his first class with Professor Staten, which made a lasting impact. Staten asked students a deceptively simple question: "Why do we study literature?" After hearing formal, stilted responses, he offered a simple answer: for enjoyment. Neeleman came to understand this purpose as enjoying the search for meaning in life; this enjoyment is separate from practical benefits like profit or moral improvement. Rather, the enjoyment of literature in this sense shaped Neeleman's view of art as a meaning-making tool which complements science rather than opposes it.
He recalls that in college, religion was rarely if ever discussed outright at the U, noting that there was no anti-religious sentiment on campus or in English classes. Nevertheless, studying English led Neeleman, who comes from a religious family, to a crisis of faith.
In particular, realist fiction from the 19th and 20th centuries was for Neeleman a vehicle for inhabiting other people’s minds, and thereby realizing the contingency of everyone’s beliefs and experiences. That contingency unsettled his acceptance of received doctrine and led to a probing critique of his own religious background; this critique came not from simple antagonism or hostility, but instead from the destabilizing effects of literary imagination itself. Neeleman distinguishes this outlook from some other critical attitudes towards religion which exalt science and empiricism as disproof of scripture, which he finds "low-hanging fruit which misses the point."
On the uses of the English major
For Neeleman, studying literature and creative writing as an undergraduate has both
intrinsic and practical value. Certainly, reading and analyzing difficult texts, which
is central to the English major, is a valuable skill in the practice of law, in which
the quality of one's writing often determines success or failure.
Yet beyond practical benefits, literature’s own unique properties give it special salience to Neeleman’s professional achievements. Literature demonstrates the importance of narrative and character in any understanding of human affairs through presenting life from other viewpoints—such as a Jew or a non-Jew whose conscience is abraded in antisemitic Paris in Marcel Proust's modernist epic, In Search of Lost Time, or life under Jim Crow in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children.
The value of literary imagination goes beyond the reader’s own ethics. Understanding case law, for example, requires mentally moving in and out of different situations and the testing knowledge gained through imagination. Also compelling is the Supreme Court's requirement that death penalty defense lawyers must present humanizing evidence about their clients—from childhood trauma and deprivation, to potential rehabilitation. This Sixth Amendment requirement reflects a humanist ethos inherited from both literary and religious narratives.
Neeleman’s writing
Drawing inspiration from writers like Hilary Mantel, whose trilogy chronicles Thomas
Cromwell's rise to power and subsequent fall in the reign of Henry VIII, Neeleman
has established himself as a writer of historical fiction in two novels.
Neeleman’s 2015 work of historical fiction, titled Logos: A Novel of Christianity’s Origin, imagines the real, anonymous author of the original Gospel text as the character Jacob, a Greco-Roman Jewish priest. (This premise for the novel is based on historical scholarship suggesting that an earlier, lost text preceded the canonical Gospels.) Roman-Jewish conflict transforms Jacob from a violent revolutionary into a contemplative dissenter, and a journey to Rome reveals to him a new form of resistance through ideas rather than warfare. Through this imagined narrative, Logos explores early Christianity’s revolutionary ideals. Neeleman’s debut won the 2016 Utah Book Award for fiction, sponsored by Utah Humanities.
His 2024 novel, Children of Saturn, chronicles the French Revolution through the interconnected stories of three historical figures: radical journalist Camille Desmoulins, political activist Thomas Paine, and politician Joseph Fouché. The narrative follows these men as they navigate the increasingly complex political landscape of revolutionary France; the title refers to the mythical figure of Saturn devouring his own children—a tacit comparison to the violence of Revolutionary France consuming its leaders and founding ideals. In Children of Saturn, fictional conversations between Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and the lesser-known American founder Gouverneur Morris reveal that there are no easy answers in the lived experience of political beliefs. These dialogues capture the dynamic and difficult interplay of philosophical ideals, political aims, and personal temperament.
Of particular interest to Neeleman is the figure of Thomas Paine, whom he sees as distinct from other founding figures. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, who faces presentist criticism for his role in slavery, Paine stood as a contemporary voice against slavery within the moral context of his own time. Neeleman imagines Paine as someone who would have embraced the social progress and liberation movements of the 20th century, even as he remains today an outsider in the American Founding Fathers pantheon. Paine’s critique of religion in The Age of Reason, Neeleman argues, offers more nuance and sophistication than modern New Atheism. Both Don Quixote and the hero Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot inspired Neeleman’s characterization of him.
Both Logos and Children of Saturn are informed by meticulous historical research balanced with conjecture. For example, some conversations in Children of Saturn are based on surviving correspondence among characters, while others are inferred or wholly imagined. Neeleman’s next novel, in progress, will follow a protagonist who shares some elements of his own background. Combining historical and contemporary debates, the character confronts our age’s ideological fracturing and the rebirth of fascism in Europe and the United States.
From English major to attorney to novelist, Neeleman's work has centered on understanding how humans make meaning through narrative. The literary imagination he developed as an undergraduate—the ability to inhabit other minds and examine beliefs critically—shapes both his legal practice and his historical fiction. His trajectory from religious crisis to creative exploration exemplifies how humanities education transcends professional training to enrich intellectual life itself.