Hudson Strode: Starring as Himself

the pla have it's in nineteen seventeen social critic h l mencken described the south as an artistic intellectual and cultural desert called the region a gargantuan paradise of the forthright or you will not find a single southern prose writer who can actually right well but within a few years this ambitious young man raised in a small alabama town would become a noted author and influential teacher a popular lecturer and would be knighted by the king of sweden he would seek and enjoy the friendship with some of the great personalities of his time and he would create in his native state what the times of london called one of the true brilliantly effective writing programs in america hutson strode would find not a single rose writer what hundreds and guide them through the creative process

all the while creating himself hutson strode perhaps the world's most successful teacher of writing he also became a friend of h l mencken us from maine everybody knew what since ronald he had no hesitation about letting everyone know how good he was and you ensure was a thing of those whirlpools and i began with america the same effect way that i think it was like to paddle the talent he's everyone the head the thing like long before you found them up with alabama to do nothing with it henson strode starring as himself was made possible by a grant from the

alabama humanities foundation a state program of the national endowment for the humanities additional funding was provided by the gulf states paper corporations in the summer of nineteen sixteen pets and strode faced a difficult decision well after teaching at syracuse university to receive an attractive offer from the air but he had also been offered a position at his alma mater university of alabama teaching shakespeare us and strode decided to come home born in illinois and at ninety two was part of the march will sell them on what his widowed mother after she remarried a precocious child even as a youngster he was wearing the bow ties that would become his signature i was fascinated with the people and places beyond his small river town on the red constantly and ignoring his room with magazines photographs of new york and london state starts with shakespearean actors displayed most prominently he dreamed of attending vanderbilt in oxford

with two weeks before he graduated from high school the money for his education was lost in a local bank failure strode went instead to the university of alabama where tuition was free and he could support himself by selling subscriptions to good housekeeping and cosmopolitan margin socially and scholastic center his name of life experience than an extended on the ticket that hall and i did not that integrate myself but i have gotten the greatest fake names got america for graduate work strode shows columbia university over harvard and yale because he wanted to be close to the new york stage skillfully exercising connections and good luck the public parts with a leading shakespearean troupe featuring his boyhood idol

actor johnston forbes roberts always stage struck strode nonetheless resist the temptation to try for a career in the theater he was a brilliant job including his home and he knew that he would have more success as a teacher returning to his alma mater in nineteen sixty and struggled to risk or a daughter of a prominent birmingham family they would marry eight years later i can imagine if they had never met they would have been successful meanwhile he threw himself into his new role as professor giving dramatic readings lecturing the civic groups directly amateur theatrical and teaching a full force will but strokes only academic show with his unconventional method of teaching a conventional class like his mentor losin strode wasn't a lecture he was an actor it didn't think this could be for the medically

not the melee effect will mean nothing of scholarship students who think shakespeare got a live and a laugh and that is why i read them all being in and strode to shakespeare class is no one of the most vivid memories of mine of my whole educational career he could interpret go male and female characters make it seem that he was just as good at being cleopatra he was being over a lot and i still remember his gestures his marvelous gestures over that out of the grain exchange made no no but that at the moment the iron curtain and in straw and swept out as

soon as the same was over without interview and there were hardly any rise in the room and i mean that was really a tremendous performance can imagine anyone else doing that well i can imagine cell activity strobel is one of the hardest working and most popular teachers on campus but his energies were not limitless in nineteen twenty nine exhaustion let the vision problems and a nervous breakdown health failing position for tuberculosis strode to rest all stood still to bermuda and were enchanted with the gardens and see it into english society and the quiet always dreamed of being a fiction writer even he did not claim that it was distinguished in any way and he quit rarely publishing fiction himself which in some ways is a

strange thing for a man who built his reputation as a teacher and writer and almost his stock answer was well i own cattle by all over will know the city could examine good it is a bit of historical an editor and editor rejected it and wrote in a note saying that he didn't think that cuts in the lead in his characters and off and he suggested that he might want to turn to nonfiction writing he found is is that gay and the travel books and did very well with them in nineteen thirty two straight returned to the classroom he had gone to bermuda or broken man but came back healthy and with a newly published book that launched his career as a travel writer the story a bermuda was the first of his nine trial all books the times of london praised it enthusiastically it went through

eight editions and stayed in print for twenty years he followed it with the pageant of cuba and self my thunderbird the tour of south america by pan american airways new route or travel books at that time often read like diaries or encyclopedia countries in south life under strain created norberg an american businessman touring south america and the information is woven into conversations in scene after a dramatic c h ch your brain was caught in a spell of magic killed in the ivory tower of this flying observatory or time and distance for telescope gradually the green of the earth hail until there was only one strenuous threat of flickering color like fireflies luminosity at daybreak if nations traveled he said to himself they would not they could not fight each other if they visited one

another with a desire to comprehend that would find too much to like and to admire not to be friends and he wrote a nonfiction very much like most people i think fiction he's the same techniques self play thunderbird his most popular work was published by no less than bennett cerf at random house the royalties enabled bistros to build the secluded home they had waited for some patients there they would live as they fought country gentle folk show and through his own success as a writer strode was able to establish connections in the new york publishing world connections he would later use on behalf of writing students after twenty years of teaching his career was taking a dramatic turn in his autobiography eleventh house remembered it this way in nineteen thirty six a shy girl named harriet hassle born on a farm on the watermelon road in north port across the black or your river from tuscaloosa urged me to permit students in my writing class to do a novel i said i did not that novel writing

for the top issue so eager that i was willing to give it a try rachel's children praised in the new york times would be the first to close to one hundred novels published by his students and the list still grows and one of the events is violating sanguine that they abandon their lives to follow all of aleppo with you as a young student and i was terrified of them has this great man and it was quite heavy you know that he was interested in you know and this is kind of wonderful when he chose you raise class in a game special yes it was limited to fourteen and it was right after the war heats sailors that have the desire i think he liked to get a cross section i had fallen fifty well what about it made you feel very

very special for having been chosen distant distant all and i think the reason for his success was that he had this amazing faculty for being able to pick a person who could write we were all aware by the time he got there and he would stride it down the saddle room and sit down and look around an instant who's going to read because that was the way he talks you hadn't a slander and ancient head to read what you were working on and there you were in the spotlight you read us is terrified i want you were reading you were the sole center of the universe as rosewood as each person in the class if he had something to offer an inch row himself would offer criticism and he would not tolerate any ones being too harsh or or anti if you're gonna quote

serves the person next to you and they would get a shot at you you need to temper it totally concentrated on you this they could tell when things are good he said he felt something that was a science and there's a character and is a good thing on the back of his neck if it's good or not just a sixth sense they did have this wonderful erie could hear that they're very well once in a while he would interrupt you and say no no no that that dialogue doesn't work you know so that the message is well it was just it said ha ha read that again when you do that for about i would say you know what require you know you think you're actually eating you know you can take an eventful life or you can do to up the last and raise them what is that but what is clear is that his

critics would be very precise very specific i do this through the earth don't think about doing this incident i never heard him say a cruel and campaign when they're singing i i as he told the mad dog bother writing if you can't sell it he always demonstrated with his writing students his belief in dale and his belief in the work of what they were doing ms to form for me and we've made you feel better than you were perhaps a better than you thought you were outside of that where i do have one rule rick perry he had connections with a publishing houses if you were in his class and you wrote something that was worthy to be considered he would help you send it off to random house our corporate sort

are someone that he knew in the publishing house and that he would help you get published of the first fourteen students who publish novels ten of them came from within one hundred miles of tuscaloosa but strode fame went well beyond the state line newsweek reported that an astounding twenty percent of the novels written in that class were published time magazine called a class a success story and catalogued the students' achievement he wanted it to one of his students to sell their books how often they become famous and thereby they nodded for himself but you know for creating the wildly successful his fame spread beyond our own tuscaloosa and beyond alabama into the flap in animation in fact his reputation was growing internationally one a stroll its former

students working now for the new york times saw an article about the class in the london times i couldn't believe that iran says the only three places in the united states where a creative writing is how well you know one of those three places was the universe devout no one hurts and stroke and i was so excited that in a lonely position that and then i'd jump into this is my this is now professor here with all the acclaim hudson strode was becoming a celebrity distance of myron it also had detractors and some of his colleagues said he was more pr man and professor the only real explanation i think that i would have been a primary which is just the most assuredly strode at the alabama was a very large fish in what was then by anybody's measure and even smaller pond than it is now there were i guess a handful who were envious and i don't blame them

i was envious to i mean the man the man by his own admission took a certain amount of talent and did everything he could win and there was this arrogance that's true but it was such an ingenuous ms willis that you couldn't help being either amuse are eleven one of straw's peculiar talents was his ability to cultivate relationships with celebrities ever since childhood strode had been fascinated with the rich and famous the only thing he enjoyed more than meeting someone famous was telling about it hudson was what do they say today is a name dropper and he didn't realize that other people aren't as interested in these videos he was republicans correspondent with hundreds of celebrities and many of

the guests at his home a nobel prize winner super tuesday visited for two weeks carl sandburg spoke for the writing is sally ran an answer one of the eisenhower lady astor introduced him to the practice of christian science he became acquainted with john f kennedy and strode said when invited to speak at the university well the spokesman insisted upon ernest hemingway wrote the advantages of writing in a laboratory and there were other eugene o'neill thompson thornton wilder old is he never got the name of an important person whom he had met you know the people that he had you know he he had legos and everything he was i don't think it was that much of a following he has been called a poseur and i'll fall apart that instead of them in a minimum it outside of myself

but i don't think that the ones amount of pedestrians strolled students benefited enormously from these acquaintances in exchange for serving as bartender or show further studies would have the opportunity to meet writers agents publishers and world figures aside after and a special guest of the day was worn out that as an actor i gather they'll him as an early on furniture serve health and try to set them listen and rent that out that was just a great who i'm really being used to show but we thought it was a great outdated and made people i purposely in their skin cowell and so forth amongst roads most prized friends with key gustav of sweden they met and strode more or less an ambush for the king outside the gates of his mouth and when the gates opened out of the car why nineteen forties through the travel writer who turned his attention to your

family roof family is sweet objective of all an unusually open date every night and go already made an american hero and then make information they get moving pictures it's eight there is something in the air that made the enjoyment of all the citizens have not as i could on the streets and i have the impression that right as spry and books we need more

listeners a few weeks ago i went to plenty of the administration advised to make money in one night at the in nineteen sixty one of them on his butt so if the requested strollers travel books brought him financial security considerable fame and of all things a knighthood he thought though that is most enduring and significant work would be his three volume biography of jefferson davis in my old age i turned to me and looks out into the world of the old mexico

sweden finland and one foreign country like in that now home the davis biography made the new york times' bestseller list but over the thirty years it took to write strode the southerner became perhaps too determined to rescue the reputation of the failed leader of the confederacy i'm a great new show that because august road was wrong directions to our papers of the one chain before it interview shana one of gong show that you could pull from what unit in the fall with but jody barkley of danish have much of value it is that though he could not about the slide of criticism of davis he was even more sensitive criticism and davis himself was that was allison grimes with them the demise of the book written three of the gray lot of that in i would never thought of that i know that that's and strode

could've taken his act anywhere yet her claim that would've given him in practically any university and you chose to remain at home in alabama the placement you could describe as a cultural better place that strolled head held low so i think there's no reason oh i know perhaps road was reluctant to leave because he so loved as a showcase for the objects of art yet it was the perfect place for him repeated criticism from his famous to make sure that she would make these loans sandwiches in gaza looking i was hungry and i needed to

bring the tray of cucumber sandwiches and when i look at the volatile template because their home and a beautiful the eu of all what africa one of the ability of the valley and he said reading the idea strain would write another travel book ultimate in the far east and a volume of memoirs the eleventh house he died in nineteen seventy six a celebrated writer of world traveller a friend of what is the best and strongest relationships always with students i think you you like him because he talked to you and he soon the conversation would have you talking about your cell you knew that being in his presence and there was a man there the whole world wars azores and he just said would say listen you can share a part of the war with him

you had to really when you were told and award and we strolled this this is among the best savory cherish it think about it work at it and then the rest of your life you would pull back on it but he would come into a run and he would cycle will that rome because he had that ability to mike everybody in that room for your stuff but the stroller or violence will fall whether he was a great teacher and i think that's about as her calling to get his vote in the ball of many books by stuart put those together you got a marvelous verbal monument right there yeah i never never write a piece without regular lunch strolled what would he think you're choosing just the right word but they refused to have an element of known only one end and that is very unusual for used to is the interesting man

things won't martin i mean and then he was insistent get up in the morning and this great actor who knows that was this sense of a kind of a kind of performance art long before that as soon as they came my eyes good night and why today i'm you ms

burke is back if you have a question or comment about this program please write to strode university of alabama box eight seven zero one five zero tuscaloosa alabama three five four eight seven or you may call one eight hundred two three nine five to three three hudson strode starring as himself was made possible by a grant from the alabama humanities foundation a state program of the national endowment for the humanities additional funding was provided by the gulf states paper corporations the pope