Home Country (book)

Last updated
Cover of the first edition (1947) HomeCountry.jpg
Cover of the first edition (1947)

Home Country is a collection of articles written by the columnist Ernie Pyle for Scripps-Howard newspapers between 1935 and 1940. It was compiled and published in 1947 by William Sloan Associates, Inc., after the author's death in 1945.

Background

Pyle, tired of his desk editing job, badgered the Scripps-Howard syndicate for a road job. Based on some other articles that he wrote during a lengthy road trip, he was assigned to be a roving reporter.

He drove through the United States in his car and wrote columns about the people he met and the places he visited. The column became a huge success and was eventually being featured in more than 200 newspapers.

He eventually wrote columns from places as distant as the northern reaches of Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, and South America. Pyle described life in conditions as disparate as the tropics of South America and the 1930s Great Plains Dust Bowl.

He wrote about prominent people, such as Walt Disney around 1935, and unknown everyday people, such as the woman who was on her way to commit suicide and ended up becoming a trapper in Alaska.

Sources

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernie Pyle</span> American war correspondent and writer

Ernest Taylor Pyle was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and war correspondent who is best known for his stories about ordinary American soldiers during World War II. Pyle is also notable for the columns he wrote as a roving human-interest reporter from 1935 through 1941 for the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate that earned him wide acclaim for his simple accounts of ordinary people across North America. When the United States entered World War II, he lent the same distinctive, folksy style of his human-interest stories to his wartime reports from the European theater (1942–44) and Pacific theater (1945). Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his newspaper accounts of "dogface" infantry soldiers from a first-person perspective. He was killed by enemy fire on Iejima during the Battle of Okinawa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernie Pike</span> Comics character

Ernie Pike is a comics series written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and originally drawn by Hugo Pratt, starring a World War II and Korean War reporter. It was first published in the magazine "Hora Cero" in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1957. The reporter, loosely based on the real reporter Ernie Pyle, acts as a narrator of stories, without being directly involved in them. Such stories do not narrate real battles or exploits of noteworthy military people, being instead tragic stories of unknown soldiers, made up by the author. Oesterheld worked again with the character during the time of the Vietnam War, and Ricardo Barreiro used it for a brief story about the Falklands War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Kuralt</span> American journalist (1934–1997)

Charles Bishop Kuralt was an American television, newspaper and radio journalist and author. He is most widely known for his long career with CBS, first for his "On the Road" segments on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and later as the first anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning, a position he held for fifteen years. In 1996, Kuralt was inducted into Television Hall of Fame of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Rheta Grimsley Johnson is a reporter and columnist for King Features Syndicate of New York. Johnson travels the country in search of stories, frequently reporting from her native South, with datelines from Washington, D.C., to Iuka, Mississippi.

<i>The Commercial Appeal</i> Daily newspaper of Memphis, Tennessee

The Commercial Appeal is a daily newspaper of Memphis, Tennessee, and its surrounding metropolitan area. It is owned by the Gannett Company; its former owner, the E. W. Scripps Company, also owned the former afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, which it folded in 1983. The 2016 purchase by Gannett of Journal Media Group effectively gave it control of the two major papers in western and central Tennessee, uniting the Commercial Appeal with Nashville's The Tennessean.

<i>The Cincinnati Post</i> Defunct afternoon daily newspaper in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States

The Cincinnati Post was an afternoon daily newspaper published in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. In Northern Kentucky, it was bundled inside a local edition called The Kentucky Post.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Howard Pyle</span> American illustrator and author (1853–1911)

Howard Pyle was an American illustrator, painter, and author, primarily of books for young people. He was a native of Wilmington, Delaware, and he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy.

<i>The Story of G.I. Joe</i> 1945 film by William A. Wellman

The Story of G.I. Joe, also credited in prints as Ernie Pyle's Story of G.I. Joe, is a 1945 American war film directed by William A. Wellman and starring Burgess Meredith and Robert Mitchum. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Mitchum's only career Oscar nomination.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E. W. Scripps Company</span> American media company

The E. W. Scripps Company, also known as Scripps Howard, is an American broadcasting company founded in 1878 as a chain of daily newspapers by Edward Willis "E. W." Scripps and his sister, Ellen Browning Scripps. It was also formerly a media conglomerate. The company is headquartered at the Scripps Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Its corporate motto is "Give light and the people will find their own way", which is symbolized by the media empire's longtime lighthouse logo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Ruark</span> American novelist

Robert Ruark was an American author, syndicated columnist, and big game hunter.

The Scripps Howard Awards, formerly the National Journalism Awards, are $10,000 awards in American journalism given by the Scripps Howard Foundation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ernie Pyle House/Library</span> Historic house in New Mexico, United States

The Ernie Pyle House/Library is a historic house at 900 Girard Boulevard, SE in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Built in 1940, it was the home of famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle from then until his untimely death in 1945 during World War II. It now serves as a branch of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Library, containing Pyle memorabilia and a monument to Pyle. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

Iris Woolcock was an artist, photographer, and writer. She traveled with husband Charles Morrow Wilson, a freelance writer, and made photographs and drawings illustrating his books and articles. Woolcock wrote her own book about driving to Alaska in 1947; it was published after her death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence</span> Former American journalism award

The Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence was awarded from 1929 to 1947.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerry Bledsoe</span> American author and journalist

Jerry Bledsoe is an American author and journalist known for several true crime titles based on murders in his native state of North Carolina.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry T. Waskow</span>

Captain Henry Thomas Waskow was a United States Army officer, with the rank of captain, memorialized in Ernie Pyle's dispatch "The Death of Captain Waskow," which in turn was faithfully portrayed in the movie The Story of G.I. Joe. The column also publicized the documentary film The Battle of San Pietro, by John Huston, depicting the action in which Waskow died.

James Grifing Lucas was a war correspondent for Scripps-Howard Newspapers who won a 1954 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting "for his notable front-line human interest reporting of the Korean War, the cease-fire and the prisoner-of-war exchanges, climaxing 26 months of distinguished service as a war correspondent." He also reported on the Vietnam War and wrote a book about his experiences, Dateline: Vietnam.

Dennis Roddy is an American journalist who was special assistant to former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, and a former columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ed Koterba</span> American journalist

Edward Victor Koterba was an American journalist known for his nationally syndicated columns "A Bit of Washington" and "Assignment Washington" as well as his investigative journalism for The Washington Post.

Henry Junior Taylor was an American author, economist, radio broadcaster and former United States Ambassador to Switzerland (1957–1961).