Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,969

This is the grave of Kenneth Roberts.

Born in Kennebunk, Maine in 1885, Roberts grew up there. He did leave for college, attending Cornell University. He was a fancy frat type there and wrote some of the school’s fight songs. He went into journalism as a profession, getting a job for the Boston Post. When the U.S. entered World War I, Roberts happily joined the military and was commissioned as a lieutenant working in intelligence. He was not sent to France though. He got stuck with the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia that attempted to intervene in the Bolshevik Revolution. But he was a good reporter and intelligence man and all of this got him interested in Europe. After the war, Roberts stayed very in touch with European affairs. He was the first American journalist to cover the Beer Hall Putsch and thus alert people to this Adolf Hitler maniac.

Unfortunately, politically, Roberts was horrible. He was a racist who hated immigrants. He used to rant about immigrants when writing for the Saturday Evening Post in the 20s. He would call for immigration restrictions by saying “If America doesn’t keep out the queer alien mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn.” He also called Jews “human parasites.” Well, I guess he admitted they were human or something? Makes me wonder how sympathetic he was to Hitler after all. He also wrote some hack books to promote the Florida land boom of the 20s. Might as well make money on the rubes I guess…though doesn’t seem like something those dirty Jews would do? Maybe Roberts thought about that once, probably not though. He also wrote a campaign biography of Calvin Coolidge in 1924. That must have been compelling.

But Roberts’ heart was not really in journalism. First, he wanted to spend as much time in possible back in Kennebunk. Second, he wanted to write historical fiction. While in Maine, he got to know the writer Booth Tarkington, who told him to cut the journalism. He would never write fiction if he was chasing stories all the time. Probably true. Tarkington was a big enough supporter of Roberts that he volunteered to edit drafts of Roberts’ novels and it’s hard to imagine a bigger time suck for little benefit than reading the early draft of your buddy’s novel (If I ever ask you to read my novel, run away and assume I have lost my mind). In fact, Tarkington wasn’t such a passive editor either, he did this for years.

Meanwhile, what Roberts wanted to write was historical fiction. An aside here on the genre–there are novels based in the past and there is historical fiction and they are kind of two different things in my mind. A novel set in the past makes sense in the mind of the author as the way to tell a story and there are many, many good examples of this. A book like Jose Saramago’s History of the Siege of Lisbon does take the past as its setting, for example, but it hardly became a romantic theme that Saramago wanted to use in general, as so much in the genre of historical fiction, which in my view tends to way oversimplify for the past, often relying on lazy tropes and stereotypes in order to present a simpler world for readers. Of course this is better than the kind of alternative historical fiction writers such as Frances Spufford writes today. I found Cahokia Jazz pretty dumb and had trouble getting through it without throwing it across the room in disgust. Is it possible that I am creating artificial boundaries in my mind that don’t really exist in literature? Perhaps, but I don’t really think so.

And looking at someone such as Roberts is a reason why I see a difference. He just churned out novel after novel about past New England, particularly romantic tales of the American Revolution. Let’s face it too–this kind of writing really works for people who are worried about teh current racial mixture in America. Easier to think about those days when America was white and the dark folks knew their place. See Margaret Mitchell as well. In novels such as Arundel and Rabble in Arms, he wrote a fictionalized version of Benedict Arnold, for example. A book such as Oliver Liswell was a way to take a character to all the greatest hits of the Revolution. George Orwell did once give him a positive review for his 1936 book A Lively Lady, so OK, there’s that. Also, he was genuinely quite possible. His book Northwest Passage was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1936 and 1937 and then became the second best selling novel in America in 1937 and remained in fifth place in 1938. That people liked this sort of thing isn’t super surprising though. A lot of readers do like somewhat simplistic visions of the past, especially when famous Americans are portrayed positively. Other really top selling Roberts novels include Oliver Liswell and Lydia Bailey.

Roberts did do historical research for his novels and actually published a bit of that too. March to Quebec: Journals of the Members of Arnold’s Expedition was a compilation of journal entries he had researched, providing a first person narrative for that march. OK, that’s cool. At the end of his life, he was working on a history of the Battle of Cowpens, which got published posthumously.

Roberts died in 1957. He was 71 years old.

Kenneth Roberts is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other purveyors of historical fiction, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Zane Grey is in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania and Esther Forbes, who wrote Johnny Tremain, is in Westborough, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.