Decker Press

Last updated

The Press of James A. Decker was a poetry publishing house once located in the tiny hamlet of Prairie City, Illinois. Created in 1937 by James A. Decker, the press carried the full name of its founder until 1948 when the imprint was shortened to simply the Decker Press. [1] The Decker Press received national attention in the 1940s, when it published work by famous authors such as Edgar Lee Masters, August Derleth, Hubert Creekmore, William Everson (Brother Antoninus), David Ignatow, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth and Louis Zukofsky. [2] The small press was noted as one of the most prolific publishers of poetry in the country at the time, but the business was plagued by financial issues until the press came to a sudden end in 1950 with a murder-suicide case. [1] [3] [4]

Contents

The Decker family

James A. Decker, the founder of the Decker Press, was born in 1917 in Prairie City, Illinois, to Ulah and Arthur Decker. [2] His younger sister Dorothy was born in 1921. [1] His father Arthur worked in a drugstore owned by Ulah's father, Eldon James. [3] James Decker graduated from Prairie City High School in 1934 and then attended Park College in Missouri from 1934 to 1935 before returning to Prairie City. [3]

History of the Press

James Decker returned to Prairie City with the goal of combining his passion for poetry and his interest in publishing. Decker obtained a small hand press, which he set up in the back room of his grandfather's drug store. [3] In 1937, he began printing volumes of poetry, with the help of his sister Dorothy. Dorothy continued to work as an employee of the press throughout its operation, including while James served in the military from 1943 to 1945. [1]

The press began gaining attention after James Decker obtained permission to print two of Edgar Lee Masters’ collections: Illinois Poems, published in 1941, and Along the Illinois, published in 1942. [1] [3] The press began to attract other poets from across the country, but Decker struggled with the funding to finance the work. By 1947, the press was facing financial difficulties, and Decker sold it to a local businessman and lumber dealer, Harry M. Denman. [2]  A few months later, Denman sold the press to Ervin Tax, a writer from Chicago whose work was scheduled to be published by the Decker Press. [4] Impatient with the delays, Tax traveled to Prairie City to see the press for himself and soon became involved in the financial and administrative oversight. In 1948 Tax purchased the press, changing the name to simply The Decker Press. [1]

Despite Tax's efforts, the financial difficulties of the press continued, and interpersonal relationships began to unravel. As ownership of the press changed hands, James and Dorothy Decker had continued to work as employees, but in 1949 Tax announced that James Decker had been dismissed after mishandling funds. [1] Rather than challenging these accusations of embezzlement, Decker left Prairie City, moving his family to Kansas City. [2] Dorothy remained behind, but her relationship with Tax deteriorated. [3] In May 1950, after driving to pick up Tax who was returning from a trip out of town, Dorothy shot him in the head before killing herself. [1] Their bodies were discovered in the car on the side of the road just outside Prairie City on May 11, 1950. [5]

Selected authors

Legacy

The Archives and Special Collections Unit at Western Illinois University Libraries is the single-largest holder of materials from the Press of James A. Decker. Archives staff has compiled a complete bibliography of Decker Press books with a listing of which books are currently held there. Other materials include articles, photographs, correspondence, newspaper clippings, historical records, and unpublished typescripts about the Decker Press and James Decker. [7]


Related Research Articles

Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen was an American poet and novelist. He experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing, and jazz music into his works, which have been compared with those of William Blake and Walt Whitman. Patchen's biographer wrote that he "developed in his fabulous fables, love poems, and picture poems a deep yet modern mythology that conveys a sense of compassionate wonder amidst the world's violence." Along with his friend and peer Kenneth Rexroth, he was a central influence on the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation.

Prairie City, Illinois Village in Illinois, United States

Prairie City is a village in McDonough County, Illinois, United States. The population was 379 at the 2010 census.

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness, An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.

Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine. Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese.

Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.

The objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, among others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The basic tenets of objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. While the name of the group is similar to Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated.

Lorine Faith Niedecker was an American poet. Niedecker's poetry is known for its spareness, its focus on the natural landscapes of Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest, its philosophical materialism, its mise-en-page experimentation, and its surrealism. She is regarded as a major figure in the history of American regional poetry, the Objectivist poetic movement, and the mid-20th-century American poetic avant-garde.

William "Bill" Everson, also known as Brother Antoninus, was an American poet of the San Francisco Renaissance and a literary critic, teacher and small press printer.

David Ignatow was an American poet and editor.

<i>Working Classics</i>

Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life is a landmark literary anthology of American working-class poetry written during the second half of the 20th century.

City Lights Pocket Poets Series

The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955.

Bernard Harden "Bern" Porter was an American artist, writer, publisher, performer, and physicist. He was a representative of the avant-garde art movements Mail Art and Found Poetry.

American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders is a 1993 poetry anthology edited by Eliot Weinberger. First published by Marsilio Publishers, it joined two other collections which appeared at that time: From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990 and Postmodern American Poetry, a 1994 poetry anthology edited by Paul Hoover. These three anthologies were perhaps seeking to be for their time what Donald Allen's anthology, The New American Poetry, was for the 1960s.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

The Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, was established by the will of Mary P. Sears, and named after the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The prize is given to a living American poet selected with reference to genius and need, and is currently worth (2014) between $6,000 and $9,000. The selection is made by a jury of three poets: one each appointed by the presidents of Radcliffe and Berkeley, and the third by the Board of Governors of the Society.

Links to nations or nationalities point to articles with information on that nation's poetry or literature. For example, United Kingdom links to English poetry and Indian links to Indian poetry.

Richard Lowell Blevins is a poet writing in the tradition of Ezra Pound, H.D., and Robert Duncan, an editor of the Charles Olson-Robert Creeley correspondence, and an award-winning teacher. He was born in Wadsworth, Ohio, in 1950. His undergraduate career was halved by the May 4, 1970, Kent State shootings. He was declared a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. At Kent State, he studied poetry and the imagination with Duncan and literature of the American West with Edward Dorn. But he has often said that Cleveland book dealer James Lowell was his most formative early influence. He holds degrees from Kent State University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Pittsburgh (Ph.D., English literature, 1985; dissertation on the western novels of Will Henry. He has taught literature and poetry writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg since 1978, also serving as Humanities Chair for nine years. He is a winner of a Chancellor’s Award, in 1999, the university’s highest recognition for teaching. He previously taught at the University of Akron and Kent State.

Circle Magazine was published from 1944 to 1948 by George Leite, initially with poet Bern Porter. Produced at Leite's Berkeley, California, bookstore daliel's, it featured poetry, prose, criticism and art from many of those whose creative works and their successors would later come to be called the San Francisco Renaissance. In addition to the magazine, Circle Editions published contemporary authors such as Albert Cossery and Henry Miller.

Tom Boggs was an American poet, editor, and novelist who emerged as a Greenwich Village Bohemian during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

The Why? Group published several anarchist magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. Why? An Anarchist Bulletin and its successor, Resistance, ran between 1942 and 1952. Members of the group included Paul Goodman, Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Rexroth, and Kenneth Patchen. Another magazine, Retort, ran between 1942 and 1947 and was related to the group.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Ballowe, James. "Little Press on the Prairie". Chicago Reader. Retrieved 2020-12-29.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "The Decker Press - Article by John Hallwas". www.connectotel.com. Retrieved 2020-10-29.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Hallwas, John (August 2019). "An Array of Forgotten Voices: The Decker Press". Illinois Heritage magazine. 22: 10–12.
  4. 1 2 Wharton, Will (1950). "Correspondence". Poetry. 77 (1): 58–58. ISSN   0032-2032.
  5. ↑ "Couple Found Slain in Car; Woman Blamed". Chicago Daily Tribune. 11 May 1950.
  6. ↑ "Archives - Decker Press Bibliography - Western Illinois University". www.wiu.edu. Retrieved 2021-02-04.
  7. ↑ "Archives - Decker Press Collection - Western Illinois University". www.wiu.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-29.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.