Ayana Gray is the author of the Beasts of Prey trilogy for teens, as well as I, Medusa, her first novel for adults. Her new YA book, Hawk & Sparrow (Balzer + Bray, out now)—a GMA YA Book Club pick—is a Gilded Age–inspired fantasy. John Stephens is the author of the middle grade fantasy trilogy The Books of Beginning. He’s also a television writer and producer whose credits include Gilmore Girls, The O.C., Gossip Girl, and Gotham. His latest YA novel, The Age of Fury (Knopf, Oct. 20), is a romantic thriller that unfolds in the glittering, shadowy world of the Gilded Age. With the fourth season of The Gilded Age premiering on HBO on November 1, we invited Gray and Stephens to chat about why they gravitated toward that decadent historical backdrop in their stories, and what it says about our current moment.

John Stephens: What inspired you to set your story in the Gilded Age?

Ayana Gray: It’s one of my favorite moments in history. It’s a brief era that gets lost because it’s wedged between the American Civil War and the First World War, but it was a time wherein we made a lot of progress, socially and technologically. I just think it’s a really interesting period.

Stephens: I like how, [setting my story] in the Gilded Age, it feels like my characters are right on the edge of the modern world in which we live, because all those technological advances are just about to hit them in the face—the telephone, the automobile... they’re all right out there. I also found that when I got into the research of it all, it was so reflective of our present time in many ways, because immigration was a huge thing back then, except it was Irish and Eastern Europe immigration. You also had all these robber barons—the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies—making an incredible amount of money in these quasi-kleptomaniac ways that created this income disparity. That also exists today, so it felt like this is a world in which we are still living—except they have better clothes.

Gray: And instead of robber barons, we have tech bros.

Stephens: Exactly.

Gray: Did you do any research into the time period—visual, historical, or literary?

Stephens: A lot of it was just reading novels that were written in the period, like Theodore Dreiser or Edith Wharton. I also read a lot of biographies. I’ve also done two different TV shows in New York, so I spent a lot of time in Manhattan, and one of the wonderful things about location scouting is that you see a lot of places that aren’t open to the public. Years ago, we were doing locations for a Gossip Girl episode, and we went into the National Arts Club, which I’d never been to before. Scorsese used it as the Duke’s manor in The Age of Innocence, and it has this incredible Tiffany window in the ceiling. That image stayed with me. I also watched The Knick on Cinemax. The period detail on that show was excellent.

Gray: I have a habit, when I’m researching an era of history, of making it my whole personality for a while. I read, I listen to podcasts, I follow historical social media accounts.... I really enjoyed two books written by Anderson Cooper about the Vanderbilt and Astor families. Hawk & Sparrow is not set in the real Gilded Age, but I liked reading about the families and power players of the era. So it’s a very multimedia approach for me. The coolest thing I got to do was go on a historical tour of New York City with a Gilded Age historian.

Stephens: How did you approach making it come alive for teens?

Gray: It wasn’t hard for me because, in my opinion, teens growing up in the 2020s are in something of a second Gilded Age. They’re seeing the same disparities and the same rapid technological advancement, so writing a story in the Gilded Age felt, for better or worse, very easy to make relatable. Also, when I write for teens, I lean into emotionality, and the Gilded Age felt like a very emotionally charged time period.

Stephens: Some teen stories never change, you know? There’s a reason you can read Jane Austen, and there are things Elizabeth Bennet is going through that lots of teens today go through. So, I think whether you’re telling a teen story in the Gilded Age or today, those teens are going to be asking the same questions: Who am I? Where do I fit in the world? Will I ever be loved? The timeframe does not matter. Everyone’s going to be experiencing that. And the other thing that I found very fascinating, and what teens respond to, is that kids during the Gilded Age were forced to grow up so much more quickly than teens are today. They were going to work at eight, nine, 10 years old.

Gray: It’s like you said: writing stories that ask, Where do I belong in the world? What’s my purpose? Where’s my community” is always really fun. These are coming-of-age stories.

Stephens: Yeah. And we’re always coming of age in some way.