Melissa asked Sara Gruen:

Did you base any of your characters in "Water for Elephants" on specific people in your life or maybe people in history?

Sara Gruen Rosie is a mixture of various circus elephants: two specifically (see the Author’s Note), and others by a more distant connection.

When I began researching “Water for Elephants,” I had no idea that an elephant would be its star. A chance encounter with a vintage circus photograph set the whole thing in motion, and as I began to read about old-time circuses, I realized that the most interesting, funny, touching, and heartbreaking anecdotes involved elephants. I decided to incorporate as many as I could into my story, and Rosie was born.

Circus history in general is so ripe with fascinating anecdotes (such as red-lighting, the pickled hippo, the origins of pink lemonade, etc.) that I included many of them, so while many of the things that happened to characters in my book happened to real people, none of the characters is based on anyone real.

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