Trinity, barely passing several, including biology, and failing one, algebra, by a very wide margin. None of his courses, he had concluded, would help prepare him for his life’s role. He had already decided what he wanted to do: he was going to be a writer.
He had arrived at that decision several years before. “For some reason I began to read in Alabama and discovered I loved it,” he said. “Then one day, when I was nine or ten, I was walking along the road, kicking stones, and I realized that I wanted to be a writer, an artist. How did it happen? That’s what I ask myself. My relatives were nothin’, dirt-poor farmers. I don’t believe in possession, but something took over inside me, some little demon that made me a writer. How else can it be explained?”
The same question might be asked, of course, about most writers who do not grow up amidst books or in the company of those who love them, and the answer is never satisfactory. Although the Faulks were neither poor, as Truman claimed, nor illiterate, as he implied, it is true that they were not readers. Except for the Bible, there was little to read in the house on Alabama Avenue.
To drop the question there would be misleading, however. Truman’s background was not literary in a conventional sense, but more than he liked to acknowledge, it did provide a literary viewpoint, a way of looking at people as characters in a drama and a way of viewing life itself as a tale to be unfolded. His relatives did not read stories; they told them or listened to their neighbors telling them in the normal course of conversation. Plots, centering on family feuds, were close at hand, and on a hot summer night dozens of tales would be recounted on the front porches of Monroeville. Truman could not find many books in the Faulk house, but he heard the equivalent of hundreds in the soft, dusky hours between dinner and bed.
His father’s side of the family was not bookish either, but in their own way the Persons clan were extremely literary. For years not a week passed without an exchange of letters between Arch’s mother, Mabel, and her three boys, and a further exchange among the sons themselves. Mother and sons felt compelled to lay out their lives on paper, and taken together, their letters, which number in the hundreds, paint a multihued picture of both their family and the South itself during the Depression. Almost all are well written; many bear the imprint of true writers: they are vivid, uninhibited, and pungently phrased, with sudden and surprising flashes of insight. Truman inherited both their compulsion and their talent. He could read before he set foot inside a schoolroom, and when he was still in short pants, no more than five or six years old, he was carrying a tiny dictionary wherever he went, along with a pencil and paper on which he could scribble notes. He later set up a little office in a corner of his room on Alabama Avenue, and there he sat for hours tapping out stories on his own typewriter. By the time he entered Trinity, his choice of career was fixed and unshakable. “He’s the only one I ever knew who at age twelve knew exactly what he wanted to do and discarded everything else,” said his friend Howard. “He did not care about anything but writing.”
There are few surviving examples of his early expeditions into the craft, and those few—sixteen themes, stories, and poems—were saved by one of his English teachers at Trinity, John E. Langford. Twelve were written in the sixth grade and four in the eighth, after he returned from St. John’s. The sixth-grade efforts seem unremarkable for the most part, about what could be expected from a boy of that age, with many obvious grammatical errors and many more misspellings. The four later pieces, those from the eighth grade, are still the work of a boy, but now a boy with talent. Truman is self-consciously reaching for literary effects—a woman does not say something, she ejaculates; a man does not
He had arrived at that decision several years before. “For some reason I began to read in Alabama and discovered I loved it,” he said. “Then one day, when I was nine or ten, I was walking along the road, kicking stones, and I realized that I wanted to be a writer, an artist. How did it happen? That’s what I ask myself. My relatives were nothin’, dirt-poor farmers. I don’t believe in possession, but something took over inside me, some little demon that made me a writer. How else can it be explained?”
The same question might be asked, of course, about most writers who do not grow up amidst books or in the company of those who love them, and the answer is never satisfactory. Although the Faulks were neither poor, as Truman claimed, nor illiterate, as he implied, it is true that they were not readers. Except for the Bible, there was little to read in the house on Alabama Avenue.
To drop the question there would be misleading, however. Truman’s background was not literary in a conventional sense, but more than he liked to acknowledge, it did provide a literary viewpoint, a way of looking at people as characters in a drama and a way of viewing life itself as a tale to be unfolded. His relatives did not read stories; they told them or listened to their neighbors telling them in the normal course of conversation. Plots, centering on family feuds, were close at hand, and on a hot summer night dozens of tales would be recounted on the front porches of Monroeville. Truman could not find many books in the Faulk house, but he heard the equivalent of hundreds in the soft, dusky hours between dinner and bed.
His father’s side of the family was not bookish either, but in their own way the Persons clan were extremely literary. For years not a week passed without an exchange of letters between Arch’s mother, Mabel, and her three boys, and a further exchange among the sons themselves. Mother and sons felt compelled to lay out their lives on paper, and taken together, their letters, which number in the hundreds, paint a multihued picture of both their family and the South itself during the Depression. Almost all are well written; many bear the imprint of true writers: they are vivid, uninhibited, and pungently phrased, with sudden and surprising flashes of insight. Truman inherited both their compulsion and their talent. He could read before he set foot inside a schoolroom, and when he was still in short pants, no more than five or six years old, he was carrying a tiny dictionary wherever he went, along with a pencil and paper on which he could scribble notes. He later set up a little office in a corner of his room on Alabama Avenue, and there he sat for hours tapping out stories on his own typewriter. By the time he entered Trinity, his choice of career was fixed and unshakable. “He’s the only one I ever knew who at age twelve knew exactly what he wanted to do and discarded everything else,” said his friend Howard. “He did not care about anything but writing.”
There are few surviving examples of his early expeditions into the craft, and those few—sixteen themes, stories, and poems—were saved by one of his English teachers at Trinity, John E. Langford. Twelve were written in the sixth grade and four in the eighth, after he returned from St. John’s. The sixth-grade efforts seem unremarkable for the most part, about what could be expected from a boy of that age, with many obvious grammatical errors and many more misspellings. The four later pieces, those from the eighth grade, are still the work of a boy, but now a boy with talent. Truman is self-consciously reaching for literary effects—a woman does not say something, she ejaculates; a man does not
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