from the same review:
If you know Fitzwater, it should come as no surprise that one of the main characters in the novel is not a person at all, but an entity – The Press. I emailed Fitzwater to ask him about the significance of the Kansas City Star in Esther’s Pillow. He told me: “The Kansas City Star is a character in Esther’s Pillow, especially because its extensive coverage helped change the moral attitudes in Lincoln, Kansas and the nation concerning tar and feathering. Indeed, without the Star’s coverage, this trial might have passed unnoticed, and the community would not have examined its own morality so closely.”
