Wow - we had his books in my dad's library and my dad mentioned going to visit W.A. Swanberg but I had never seen a photo of him before!
Upon graduation, he found employment as a journalist with such local daily newspapers as the St. Paul Daily News and the Minneapolis Star unsatisfactory, as their staff were shrinking during the Great Depression. Swanberg instead held a succession of low-paying manual labor jobs. After five years he followed a college friend to New York City in September 1935.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._A._Swanberg
Swanberg was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1907, and earned his B.A. at the University of Minnesota in 1930.[5]
So my great-grandmother was his sister - and so his brother-in-law, my great-grandfather, was the supervisor of the carpentry department at University of Minnesota - "head of grounds" as they say.
Wow he even got a NY Times obit! William A. Swanberg Dies at 84; A Pulitzer-Winning Biographer
With grudging and only partial help from his father, who wanted his son to be a cabinet maker like himself, Swanberg earned his degree.
I have a chest in my room that was made by the brother-in-law of W.A. Swanberg's dad, the cabinet maker! They must have been buddies for sure.
1962: Pulitzer Prize for Citizen Hearst (overturned by trustees of Columbia University, who administer the prize, because subject (William Randolph Hearst) failed to meet "eminent example of the biographer's art as specified in the prize definition"[2]
Wild that he won the Pulitzer by the Trustees rejected it!! If only we had the same standards today for the kleptocrats.
1973: Pulitzer Prize for Luce and His Empire
Wild. Interview with W.A. Swanberg about Theodore Dreiser and Technocracy! Fascinating.
This was but one example in a succession of Dreiser’s political engagements chronicled in detail for the first time in my edition of his Political Writings. These included Populism and Progressivism around the turn of the nineteenth century, Greenwich Village radicalism in the 1910s and 1920s, Communism and other left-wing causes, and the Technocracy movement in the 1930s, anti-war agitation, and the internationalist “One World” movement in the aftermath of World War II.
Ironically Swanberg wrote a biography of Pulitzer as well as winning two Pulitzer prizes (but one was taken back by the Columbia University trustees).
Here we have a reprinted and revived come back of an relatively unknown non-fiction book (originally released in 1968) about one of the greatest practical jokers of all time - Gentleman Joe. In the 1880s (one thing I resent is when events that occur in the United States in this era are referred to as "Victorian" - we haven't had a queen here since before 1776) Gentleman Joe unleashed an incredibly complex and relentless prank on Reverend Morgan Dix (the rector of Trinity Parish in NYC) among others.
Fascinating with an extremely sad ending for Gentleman Joe, and a lot of questions left unanswered. Highly recommended.
That Swanberg book looks like fun
OK so W.A. Swanberg was my dad's grandmother's brother's son, and therefore my dad's 2nd cousin.
So W.A. Swanberg was my second cousin once removed
fascinating. https://cooperative-individualism.org/duram-james_norman-thomas-as-presidential-conscience-1990-summer.pdf
- "First blood : the story of Fort Sumter"
- Statement of Responsibility
- W.A. Swanberg
- Publisher
-
- Scribner
- Publication Year
-
- c1957
- Book size
- 24 cm
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