For over a decade Vollmann has been at work on Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, a grand multinovel project to recreate the history of the North American continent. “I’d like to see these books taught in history classes,” he has said. The Ice-Shirt(1990) recounts the brief colonization of a part of the continent by the Vikings; Fathers and Crows (1992) tells of the relationships among the French Jesuit priests and the Iroquois and Huron Native Americans; and The Rifles (1994), the third novel to be written (actually the sixth in the series), focuses on the exploits of British explorer Sir John Franklin, who died on a naval expedition to the Canadian Arctic. To research The Rifles, Vollmann spent two weeks at an abandoned weather station at the magnetic North Pole, where his sleeping bag didn’t warm him and he began to hallucinate from lack of sleep: “Every night now he wondered if he would live until morning,” he writes.

One of the things that I had to do occasionally while I was collecting information for that prostitute story, “Ladies and Red Lights” from The Rainbow Stories, was sit in a corner and pull down my pants and masturbate. I would pretend to do this while I was asking the prostitutes questions. Because otherwise, they were utterly afraid of me and utterly miserable, thinking I was a cop. [...] But I have no problem like that anymore—what helps me now are the watercolors. I paint nudes of them, and I can chat with them while I paint them. They feel really sorry for me because they look at the watercolors, which are not a hundred percent figurative, and they think that they are really atrocious. So they just imagine that I am a total loser. They open up to me, and I give them money and they give me all kinds of things. It works out pretty well.