THE RIGHT BOOKS

I owe my discovery of The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters to my friend Jim Tate, who for 18 months goaded and prodded me longdistance into buying and reading the novel; just as his father had goaded and prodded him—for 25 years—into doing the same thing. For unarticulated reasons, I feel convinced that the author of the book, Mr. Joseph Stanley Pennell—a native of Junction City, Kansas, dead these 23 years—would somehow have approved of the circumstances of this transmission.

The History of Rome Hanks was first published by Scribner’s in 1944, and it became an instant literary and commercial success. Maxwell Perkins, who midwifed it, said: “An editor does not come across such talent more than five or six times in his life. … I really do not believe I ever saw a war piece that excelled it, not forgetting Tolstoy.” Well, Tolstoy is laying it on a bit thick: but then, the manuscript must have appealed, instantly and powerfully, to Perkins’s particular tastes, as a striking amalgam of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!—at least as regards its protagonist, Lee Harrington, who recalls to mind both Eugene Gant and Quentin Compson.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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I owe my discovery of The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters to my friend Jim Tate, who for 18 months goaded and prodded me longdistance into buying and reading the novel; just as his father had goaded and prodded him—for 25 years—into doing the same thing. For unarticulated reasons, I feel convinced that the author of the book, Mr. Joseph Stanley Pennell—a native of Junction City, Kansas, dead these 23 years—would somehow have approved of the circumstances of this transmission.

The History of Rome Hanks was first published by Scribner’s in 1944, and it became an instant literary and commercial success. Maxwell Perkins, who midwifed it, said: “An editor does not come across such talent more than five or six times in his life. … I really do not believe I ever saw a war piece that excelled it, not forgetting Tolstoy.” Well, Tolstoy is laying it on a bit thick: but then, the manuscript must have appealed, instantly and powerfully, to Perkins’s particular tastes, as a striking amalgam of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!—at least as regards its protagonist, Lee Harrington, who recalls to mind both Eugene Gant and Quentin Compson.