Ernest Hebert returns to Portsmouth with a novel that explores his—and New Hampshire’s—working-class roots.

Ernest Hebert wrote his ninth novel, “Never Back Down,” with a chip on his shoulder.

The professor of English at Dartmouth College has made a career out of chronicling the lives of the working class and the rural poor in his novels, most notably in his six-book Darby series, which follows the lives of the residents of a fictional New Hampshire town over the course of 30 years. But, in recent years, working folks have gotten short shrift in literary circles, according to Hebert, and “Never Back Down” is a way to tell the stories of the factory workers and orderlies. But the book also explores Hebert’s own roots, Granite State’s ethnically divided past, and how the past pulls on the present and shapes the future.

“Never Back Down” takes its title from the philosophy established by the book’s protagonist, Jack Landry, and his friend, Elphege Beaupre, early in their friendship: “Never back down, never instigate.” The novel opens in 1953 in Hebert’s real-life hometown of Keene. The New Hampshire he conjures is one full of divisions and classifications: working-class versus middle-class; Protestant versus Catholic; French versus Irish versus Polish; rich versus poor. The son of a French-Canadian family, Jack Landry thinks of himself as an outsider and his code of honor serves him well in that role. But as he gets jobs, falls in love, flirts with a professional baseball career, and experiences tragedy, he struggles with his new identity, set apart from yet still tied to his working-class roots.

Though the past informs Hebert’s work, he’s fully engaged with the present. In 2011, he published his science fiction novella “I Love u” as an e-book, and released his 1993 novel “Mad Boys” digitally. “Never Back Down” is available in print and digitally. The Wire recently caught up with Hebert to talk about his work.

How autobiographical is “Never Back Down”? How much of yourself is in the characters Jack and Beaupre?
About 50 percent, something like that. Somewhere along the line, I wanted to write a book about a working man. I worked all the way through college, I worked before college, I started working when I was 15. I never had a middle-class job until I was a reporter, when I was 31... I worked in factories, drove a taxi, worked in a mental hospital in New Orleans, which appears in the book. I developed a real respect for working people. I’ve seen a gradual kind of decline in that working people rarely appear in literary works these days. If they do, they’re side characters. I wrote this book with a chip on my shoulder. I was inspired by a book called “The Life of a Simple Man” by Emile Guillaumin. I thought, “I want to write about the life of a simple man.” This is my life if I hadn’t gone to college. I made a fateful decision when I was age 23 to quit my job working for the phone company at the time to go to college and it changed my life. I had no idea I would be a writer.

In the book, Jack Landry is fixated on a story he hears about a doomed Native American woman and her lover.  When you were growing up, did you think a lot about the past and how it influenced you?
Because I grew up with the French language and had a hard time learning English, I always thought of myself as an outsider. Also, I was branded an outsider. People would say, “You’re French,” but I’d never even been to France. Even though I lived in Keene and was of Keene, I had a sense of being an outsider. I was always looking for my true home. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I had Acadian roots… I came up with this theory, which is maybe not true but you can test in fiction, that some people carry in their DNA a past trauma. If you were traumatized by some terrible event, you can pass that on to your children through your DNA. That’s why Jack has these flashbacks to a previous life to Old Acadia. In 1755, when all the Acadians were kicked out of Nova Scotia, we would call that today ethnic cleansing, and it’s one of the great North American dramas that has been forgotten and I wanted to resurrect it. One of the things my book is, it follows the general plot of the poem “Evangeline,” about lovers who are separated on their wedding day, and Jack and Alouette are separated early on.

You collect driftwood and create art out of the wood you collect; what role do visual arts play for you as a writer?
A huge, huge role. One of my goals for a future book is to take the entire town of Darby and model it and sketch up in Photoshop and create the town as a work of visual art. I wanted to be a painter before I wanted to be a writer. I do a huge amount of drawing. I think my work is pretty visual. I have a tattoo on my hand of a stick with a string around it. I take sticks and hang them on the wall, as a kind of symbol of my identity as a maker of things: I make a novel, I make a poem, I make a piece of furniture, I make a sculptural stick.

You recently released an e-book, and “Never Back Down” is available digitally. The last time The Wire interviewed you, you talked about writing on an Underwood typewriter. How do digital books figure into the future of publishing for you? Can there be a balance between new technology and tradition?
I still use the Underwood at my office at Dartmouth... When the first Kindle came out, I bought one just for the hell of it and discovered, holy shit, I can keep all my books in my pocket. I read in a funny way, I read about 15 to 20 books at a time. I used to have books just lying around everywhere. I’d go from one book to another and couldn’t find them. Now they’re just in one place in my pocket and I’m grateful for that opportunity to just read, read, read. A lot of my friends, they have this resentment for e-books. They’re all pro-book. Well, I’m pro-book, too. Books aren’t going to disappear. They’re too good a delivery system for print to disappear.  They’re going to have to share the stage with e-books, same way they share the stage with magazines and newspapers. It’s actually revitalized reading. Back in the ’90s, intellectuals like myself were worried that reading would disappear, that people would just watch TV and movies. But along came e-mail and now everybody reads and everybody writes every day. I think e-books are great. There are going to be some losers along the way, but generally speaking, I think it’s great for society.

I’ve heard that taking road trips helps you write—that on long car trips, you come up with whole books. Can you tell me about that process?
My main method of writing is I don’t start with a plot or story, I start with characters. I try to create a kind of database in my head of a fictional world based on the protagonist. That’s the first draft. The first draft, I’ve got a huge amount of information about the character, but I don’t know what his story is. I take a lot of notes. I get in my car, I have a voice recorder in my hand or my pocket and a yellow legal notepad with a pencil handy so I can take notes while I’m driving. When you drive, you tend to scheme … that’s what plotting is. The kind of brain waves that driving promotes are the kind of brainwaves you need to plot. I’ll plot the book. If I start driving, by the time I get to New Mexico from New Hampshire, I’ve got a pretty good plot for a book (laughs). So then I turn around and come home.

You’ve called yourself a “New Hampshire writer.” What does that title mean to you? 
It’s really great to be in one place for a long time, to see it grow and change and transubstantiate. I just love it here. I feel a kind of richness in the state. People say, “Ernie, why don’t you go to New York?” I love to visit those places, but I get homesick after four or five days. I don’t want to go anywhere else other than where I am. I’m a homebody. As for making a literary reputation,  I decided I mainly wanted to write about working people and the people I knew, and I stuck with that and I’m really glad I made that decision. I published six Darby books and finished a seventh one I’m trying to sell now. For better or for worse, I think that’s my legacy, writing about the working-class New Hampshire. I don’t think anybody of my generation has done as much for that. That’s what I’m leaving the world. This is my little tiny niche.

Ernest Hebert will read from  Never Back Down” on Friday, Aug. 24 at 7 p.m., at RiverRun Bookstore, 142 Fleet St., Portsmouth.