Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1975
Abstract
"I never go anywhere for material,” Stewart Edward White once told an interviewer. "If I did, I should not get it. ... I go places merely because for one reason or another, they attract me. Then, if it happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that I have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything convincing unless he has lived the life; not with his critical faculty alert but wholeheartedly and because, for the time being, it is his life” (Overton, When Winter Comes to Main Street, p. 64).
White, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, was an advocate of Roosevelt’s doctrine of the strenuous life which stressed hard work and physical exercise as the means to strength of character. He was also one of a school of writers such as Owen Wister and Jack London who believed that the writer must be a man of action. Certainly, White’s life testifies to this belief in the strenuous life, for he followed wherever his taste for adventure led him—Michigan, Arizona, South Dakota, California, Alaska, and Africa. He found something to write about in each adventure; and in a career of over sixty-four years, he wrote almost a book a year. His published works include twenty-four volumes of nonfiction and thirty-four of fiction. Almost all are either directly autobiographical or have strong autobiographical elements, a characteristic which gives them authenticity and which serves as a unifying element for the wide diversity of White’s literary accomplishments.
Recommended Citation
Alter, Judy. Stewart Edward White. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1975. Digital. Western Writers Series, 18.