Undefeated, he went home, sat down, and wrote Lenoir (1998), an elegant historical novel about the black man who posed for Rubens’s Four Studies of the Head of a Negro. The book was Greenhall’s favorite, and his ability to flawlessly evoke the voice of an abducted African slave stranded in seventeenth-century Amsterdam is nothing short of astonishing. But a patronizing review in the New York Times broke his heart and he never wrote again. He passed away in 2014.
