Much of Waldron's fiction and non-fiction reveals a strong interest in the "underdog" and the marginalized, disenfranchised individual, as well as a belief in the possibility of triumph over (often seemingly great) adversity. Making repeated use of satire and often introducing surprise endings, Waldron consistently questioned what he perceived to be the status quo and championed those who may have been viewed as "outsiders" by people in authority or by members of society's "mainstream." This outlook and approach may be seen vividly in such fiction pieces as "The Beekeeper" (published in Prairie Schooner in 1943) and "Zawicki the Chicken" (Cross Section 1945: A Collection of New American Writing), as well as in such non-fiction portraits as "The Death of Hank Williams" (The Reporter, 1955) and "The Lonely Lady of Union Square" (The New Yorker, 1955).
Despite his literary achievement, he did not see a book published in his lifetime, nor has one appeared since. Nonetheless, his work continues to gain attention and recognition. In 2013, The Kenyon Review published his story, "Do Birds Like Television?" along with six of his drawings featuring birds. The first part of his two-part article, "The Death of Hank Williams" (1955) was included in excerpted form in The Hank Williams Reader issued by Oxford University Press in 2014.
Biography
Waldron was born Gerald Cleveland Waldron in 1916 in Oconto Falls, Wisconsin where he grew up. He was the youngest of his parents Rose Cleveland and Jonathan Witcher Waldron's seven children. His mother was an amateur poet, and his brother Jonathan Gilbert Waldron (1910–1974) was an advertising manager and writer, whose short stories and articles were published in popular periodicals during the 1950s.[1]
Waldron's first literary efforts in the early 1940s resulted in some critical praise. Author Katherine Anne Porter, for example, remarked, in 1943, that Waldron possessed "the spark" and that his work was able to reveal the "deeper stratum of human suffering."[2] He attracted the attention of future literary agent, Donald Congdon in New York, who began representing him in 1943 on behalf of Lurton Blassingame's literary agency, and soon he was considered one of the most promising young writers in the United States. In 1945, he received a literary prize, the "Participation Award," from the publishing firm, Simon & Schuster for the completion of a novel.[3] His resulting novella, "The Low Dark Road" received strong responses of praise as well as criticism from the firm's editors, and ultimately was not published. He did not rise to the same heights of fame as such contemporaries as James Baldwin, J. D. Salinger, and Herman Wouk. Waldron moved to Charlton Street in New York City in 1947 and became part of a literary circle that included Hollis Alpert, Josephine Herbst, S. J. Perelman, and J. D. Salinger. Following the publication in July 1951, of his review of J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye,[4] Salinger wrote his reviewer a warm note of thanks, adding: "I hope one day somebody writes with that much perception and feeling about a book of yours."[5] Waldron continued publishing short stories in Collier's through the early 1950s. He went on to develop his career as a magazine journalist, publishing articles and stories in Holiday, Rolling Stone, Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker. His last piece for a major periodical, a profile of the artist Saul Steinberg, appeared in Publishers Weekly on May 7, 1973.
Despite what writers such as Howard Mitcham,[6] and Richard Gehman, describe as bouts of writer's block, depression, and alcoholism, he wrote and published until his death in 1980, producing masterful works of literary fiction, striking journalism, irreverent travelogues, satirical flights of fancy, lively verse and even lyrics, as well as drawings. In his 1967 Chicago Tribune article, entitled, "Eli Waldron, Where Are You Now?," Gehman remarked that the suddenly difficult to locate Waldron, who had been part of Gehman's own Greenwich Village literary circle in the 1940s and 1950s, was "one of the best, and perhaps least appreciated, writers of my time."[7] Longtime New Yorker editor, William Shawn, echoed these words in a eulogy for Waldron on November 15, 1980, stating, "What [Waldron] wrote gleamed, and gleams brighter with the passage of time."[8] Shawn also stated, quite simply, that Waldron was "an original, an innovator," and "a writer of immense talent who wrote far too little, perhaps because the standards he set for himself were so high that even he could rarely reach them."
Marriage and family
Waldron was married four times. His third marriage to painter Phyllis Floyd in 1960 produced two daughters, Zoe and Eve.
Death
Waldron died in a car crash on Monday, June 9, 1980, on Route 15 in Gordonsville, Virginia, while visiting novelist Christian Gehman, the son of Richard Gehman. He was 64 and had been living in Woodstock, N.Y. since 1974 with his wife Marie Waldron.
Drawings
Fast Nichts February 5, 1975.
Eli Waldron's drawings, dating from the 1950s to 1980, were less known than his literary work, with only one published during his lifetime. Nonetheless, they represent an important part of his oeuvre. In these drawings, words and images coalesce to create a literary form of art. Many are captioned and deal with the themes of love, sex, nature, the individual, politics, power, religion, spirituality, and the cosmos with concision, wit, and humor. Motifs include trees, birds, eyes, faces, and signs. A recurrent feature in the drawings is the profile of a long-nosed man, who could be said to represent the artist, observing.
The body of the works include single drawings, groups of related drawings, collections, such as "Varieties of Religious Experience," (undated), and illustrated books, such as "Presto," 1973, that combine drawings with prose or poetry. Some works, such as the collection "Ipglok," ca. 1973, are "word art", in which words themselves, in unusual spellings and arrangements, are the subject of the work. Most are in a linear style, favored by Saul Steinberg and Picasso, and are executed in Rapidograph or Flair felt tip pens in drawing pads, 12 x 18 in., 8 1/2 x 11 in. or smaller sheets of paper. He also made paintings on 12 x 16 in. canvas panels. Some of Waldron's correspondence includes his drawings.
List of works
Published and unanthologized short stories
"Ah Me, Ah the Bum, Ah Flo, Ah Mr. Saroyan" (Decade of Short Stories, March–April 1940); Crooks, Glenn C.
"It Was Wonderful" (Decade of Short Stories, March–April 1940); Waldron, G. C.
"How I Met a Writer" (Decade of Short Stories, July–August 1940); Crooks, Glenn C.
"Handful of Deuteronomy" (Matrix, Nov.-Dec. [1940 or 1941?]); Waldron, Gerald
"Don't You See, Can't You Tell?" (Prairie Schooner, Winter 1941)
"Do Birds Like Television?" (ca. 1973,The Kenyon Review, Winter 2013)
Anthologized short stories
"Zawicki, The Chicken" (Cross Section 1945: A Collection of New American Writing, ed. Edwin Seaver New York: L.B. Fisher, 1945.)
Related Research Articles
"Hapworth 16, 1924" is an uncollected work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger that appeared in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker.
Roger Angell was an American essayist known for his writing on sports, especially baseball. He was a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was its chief fiction editor for many years. He wrote numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and criticism, and for many years wrote an annual Christmas poem for The New Yorker. Sportswriter Jane Leavy called him "the Babe Ruth of baseball writers."
Holden Caulfield is a fictional character in the works of author J. D. Salinger. He is most famous for his appearance as the lead character and narrator of the 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Since the book's publication, Holden has become an icon for teenage rebellion and angst, and is considered among the most important characters of 20th-century American literature. The name Holden Caulfield was initially used in an unpublished short story written in 1941 and first appeared in print in 1945.
"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is a short story by J. D. Salinger, originally published in the January 31, 1948, issue of The New Yorker. It was anthologized in 1949's 55 Short Stories from the New Yorker, as well as in Salinger's 1953 collection Nine Stories. The story is an enigmatic examination of a young married couple, Muriel and Seymour Glass, on vacation in Florida. It is the first of his stories to feature a member of the fictional Glass family.
Franny and Zooey is a book by American author J. D. Salinger which comprises his short story "Franny" and novella Zooey. The two works were published together as a book in 1961, having originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957 respectively. The book focuses on siblings Franny and Zooey, the two youngest members of the Glass family, which was a frequent focus of Salinger's writings.
William Shawn was an American magazine editor who edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987.
The Kenyon Review is a literary magazine based in Gambier, Ohio, home of Kenyon College. The Review was founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom, critic and professor of English at Kenyon College, who served as its editor until 1959. The Review has published early works by generations of important writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Flannery O'Connor, and others.
Lillian Ross was an American journalist and author, who was a staff writer at The New Yorker for seven decades, beginning in 1945. Her novelistic reporting and writing style, shown in early stories about Ernest Hemingway and John Huston, are widely understood as a primary influence on what would later be called "literary journalism" or "new journalism."
William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was an American editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, children's author, and memoirist. He served as a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. An editor devoted to his writers, Maxwell became a mentor and confidant to many authors.
"Slight Rebellion off Madison" is an uncollected work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger which appeared in the 21 December 1946 issue of The New Yorker.
Katharine Weber is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Yale University, Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop and elsewhere. She held the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College from 2012 to 2019.
"The Hang of It" is a short story by J. D. Salinger, first published in the July 12, 1941 issue of Collier's magazine.
"The Heart of a Broken Story" is a work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger published in the September 1941 issue of Esquire.
"Personal Notes of an Infantryman" is an uncollected work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger which appeared in the December 12, 1942 issue of Collier's.
"Soft-Boiled Sergeant" is an uncollected work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger which appeared in the 15 April 1944 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. The story was illustrated by Graham Kaye..
Robie Mayhew Macauley was an American editor, novelist and critic whose literary career spanned more than 50 years.
Jerome David Salinger was an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine in 1940, before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which published much of his later work.
Whit Burnett was an American writer and educator who founded and edited the literary magazine Story. In the 1940s, Story was an important magazine in that it published the first or early works of many writers who went on to become major authors. Not only did Burnett prove to be a valuable literary birddog for new talent, but Story remained a respectable though low-paying alternative for stories rejected by the large-circulation slick magazines published on glossy paper like Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post or the somewhat more prestigious and literary slick magazines such as The New Yorker. While Story paid poorly compared to the slicks and even the pulps and successor digest-sized magazines of its day, it paid better than most of, and had similar cachet to, the university-based and the other independent "little magazines" of its era.
POBA is a non-profit, online arts community, launched in July, 2014 by The James Kirk Bernard Foundation.
Neither Salinger in his lifetime nor his estate after his death has ever authorized the publication of a volume of Salinger's registered early short fiction which appeared in magazines between 1940 and 1965. Reprints of his early stories have appeared under the auspices of Esquire and The New Yorker, to which Salinger stories had originally been sold.
References
↑ "In Memoriam J.G. 'Gib' Waldron." Memco News. Appleton, Wisc.: Miller Electric Mfg. Co., circa 1974.
↑ Bayley, Isabel, selector and editor. Letters of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1980.
↑ Hutchens, John K. "People Who Read and Write," New York Times, "Book Review," March 17, 1946, p. BR13.
↑ Waldron, Eli. "'The Catcher in the Rye': J. D. Salinger's Novel of a Lonely, Confused Boy of 16 Has Qualities of Lardner and Twain." "Milwaukee Journal," "Books of the Week," July 15, 1951, p.4.
↑ Salinger, Jerry. Letter to Eli Waldron. July 30, 1951. Eli Waldron Papers, New York.
↑ Mitcham, Howard. "Hot Flashbacks and Cool Cookies: Reminiscences of Greenwich Village in the 40s and 50s," Pulpsmith, v. 5 (1985), p.137–146.
↑ Gehman, Richard. "Eli Waldron, Where are You Now?," Chicago Tribune, "Books Today," Sunday, July 2, 1967, p. 3.
↑ Shawn, William. Eulogy for Eli Waldron. Read at St. Marks Church-In-The-Bowery, November 15, 1980.
Sources
Eli Waldron obituary, New York Times, Thursday, June 12, 1980.
Gehman, Richard. "Eli Waldron, Where are You Now?," Chicago Tribune, "Books Today," Sunday, July 2, 1967, p.3.
Hutchens, John K. "People Who Read and Write," New York Times, "Book Review," March 17, 1946, p. BR13.
Shawn, William. Eulogy for Eli Waldron. Read at St. Marks Church-In-The-Bowery, November 15, 1980
Waldron, Eli. Papers. Private collection. New York.
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.
