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Stewart Hall Holbrook papers, 1904-1965

Overview of the Collection

Creator
Holbrook, Stewart Hall, 1893-1964
Title
Stewart Hall Holbrook papers
Dates
1904-1965 (inclusive)
Quantity
35.24 cubic feet (60 boxes) plus 7 reels of microfilm, 1 vertical file, and 1 oversize folder
Collection Number
0701, 0961, 1272
Summary
Correspondence, writings, diary, research material, speeches, notes, publications, ephemera, clippings, maps, film, and audiotape of an American author of popular history and painter
Repository
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
Special Collections
University of Washington Libraries
Box 352900
Seattle, WA
98195-2900
Telephone: 2065431929
Fax: 2065431931
speccoll@uw.edu
Access Restrictions

Open to all users.

Some material stored offsite; advance notice required for use.

Request at UW

Languages
English
Sponsor
Funding for encoding this finding aid was partially provided through a grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Biographical Note

Stewart Hall Holbrook emerged from logging camps to become, in the words of Lewis Gannett, “the only ex-lumberjack who has lectured at Harvard University on American history.” Holbrook, the “Lumberjack Boswell,” was born in Vermont on August 12, 1893. His father bounced around North America, taking the young Stewart with him, until dying suddenly in Manitoba. Now a teenager, Stewart found himself deposited alone on the Canadian plains. He survived with various jobs, including reporting for a Winnipeg newspaper and performing in a traveling dramatic stock company, before serving in France as an artillery sergeant during the First World War. After the war, he bought a round-trip ticket to British Columbia, curious to see the big trees he had heard about. He took employment in a logging camp, and was so enamored with the work and the region that he cashed in his return ticket. He spent the next three years as a clerk in isolated logging camps, while writing articles and drawing popular cartoons for the British Columbia Lumberman at night. His desire to pursue his writing career propelled him to Portland in 1923, lured by “the finest public library in the West.”

He spent the rest of the decade dividing his time between writing stories and freelance articles and the editing work that provided a semblance of a steady income. This precarious career crashed with the Great Depression. “The mss market,” he lamented, “is as bad off as the so-called stock market.” Despite the lean years, he persevered, and was enjoying renewed success by the mid-1930s. He completed his first book during this time, but at least the first three publishers he solicited thought the manuscript warranted only a rejection slip. Finally, the Macmillian Company decided to publish it in 1938. Holy Old Mackinaw: A Natural History of the American Lumberjack spent five months on national best-seller lists. Fortified by the prospect of additional successes, he moved to Boston and began cranking out a steady and swift stream of additional books on a wide variety of historical subjects, establishing himself as one of the country’s most popular historians. He returned to the Pacific Northwest in the early 1940s to head the newly-created Keep Washington Green organization. The nonprofit corporation, grounded in the private forest industry and actively endorsed by the U.S. Forest Service and state government, popularized the problem of forest fire much as Smokey Bear would begin to do a few years later. Out of his work for the Keep Washington Green movement, Holbrook wrote Burning an Empire, the first, and for decades the only, history of wildlands fire.

Holbrook purposely set himself apart from academic history and the “timidity and woodenness usual to professors.” He disliked the use of footnotes and presented his work as an alternative to what he saw as the arid and colorless output of “stuffed-shirt historians.” He also wanted to resurrect important individuals neglected by academic history, a goal most explicitly followed in his 1946 Lost Men of American History. If his deliberate attempt to write “low-brow” history sprang from his inclinations, it also had a very practical dimension. Unlike most academic historians, Holbrook enjoyed neither a college paycheck nor fellowships; his income depended upon writing books that would sell in sufficient quantities. Yet, despite his zeal to write popular history, he never abandoned the desire to infuse his work with high literary quality. He never did resolve the tension between the often competing demands of the market and the muse.

He moved back to Portland in the mid-1940s, this time permanently, and continued his prolific production. He also undertook a second career, as the popular oil painter “Mr. Otis.” Through Mr. Otis, Holbrook poked fun at the pretensions of modern art, while individual pieces such as “Someone has been here before us Meriwether” and “I was with Custer said the old man” allowed him to deflate myths surrounding the Little Big Horn and the “overly sentimental cult of the pioneer.” In keeping with his mischievous personality, he never publicly admitted being Mr. Otis, whom he heralded as the founder of the “Primitive-Moderne School” of art. (The final "e" in moderne was indispensable, according to Holbrook. “It makes the word foreign hence fashionable.”)

In the early 1960s, Holbrook suffered a series of incapacitating strokes which essentially curtailed his literary and artistic production. He died from complications of a heart attack in September 1964.

Holbrook published some of his crime stories under pseudonyms. These include: Marcus M. Clark, Chris K. Stanton, Stanley Underwood, Ethan O. Allen and Lee Howard. He also used the pseudonyms, Stewart Hall or Dutch in theater work.

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Content Description

Correspondence, literary manuscripts and other writings, diary, research material, speeches, notes, publications, ephemera, clippings, maps, film, and audiotape; 1904-1965.

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Use of the Collection

Restrictions on Use

Restrictions might exist on reproduction, quotation, or publication. Contact Special Collections for details.

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Administrative Information

Arrangement

Arranged in 3 accessions:

  • Accession No. 0701-001, Stewart Hall Holbrook papers, 1904-1965
  • Accession No. 0916-001, Stewart Hall Holbrook correspondence with Lewis Gannet, 1943-1955
  • Accession No. 1272-001, Stewart Hall Holbrook sound recording, diploma, and scrapbooks, circa 1959

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Detailed Description of the Collection

 


2007 (Last modified: 4/16/2018)

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