which was awarded the Benjamin Hooks National Book Prize; Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power—which the Wall Street Journal deemed was one of the five best books on American moguls and Booklist placed on its 2010 list of the ten best biographies; The Rose Man of Sing Sing: A True Tale of Life, Murder, and Redemption in the Age of Yellow Journalism—a Washington Post Best Book of the Year; and, Jailhouse Journalism: The Four Estate Behind Bars.Morris applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Tony Hillerman: A Life, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about the book and author at the official James McGrath Morris website.One day, in his advanced creative writing class, the professor asked Hillerman why he stayed clear of first person in the essays he wrote. “I told him,” Hillerman said, “journalists are conditioned to be invisible, to be what Walter Lippmann called ‘the fly on the wall,’ seeing everything and feeling nothing.” Freedman took the answer as an excuse. “He wouldn’t let me write to my strengths, which I wanted to do. He forced me to write first person all those things you hate to do when you’re a journalist,” said Hillerman. “I found the I on the typewriter.”Writers tend to be harsh critics of their own work and on the eve of a book’s publication are often convinced the work—if not the worst book ever written—is filled with flaws that will cause readers to riot. Yes, I exaggerate a bit. But if you’re a writer among those reading this Page 99 entry, you know what I mean. Prepublication days are filled with anxiety and doubt.
Hillerman composed a nostalgic sixteen-page first-person essay. Freedman asked him to read it aloud to the class. “Looking back, and looking back has sometimes been my weakness,” Hillerman began reading to his fellow students, “I think that my coming of age would have been delayed a few minutes had the mockingbird, too, been gone. But that night as I walked up to our empty house, seeing it for the first time in almost three years, I was glad to hear him singing his familiar, erratic song on the ridgepole.”
In a measured pace and with a richness of telling details, Hillerman related his return to the abandoned Sacred Heart family farm as a wounded combat veteran on leave at the end of the war. The reader—or listener in this case—could feel the night air as he hitchhiked after disembarking from the bus in Konawa. Discursive passages recounted his childhood among Benedictine monks, Sisters of Mercy, and Pottawatomie Indian girls, and how he coped with the loss of his father and eventually the farm, as well as the coming of the war.
When he reached the farmhouse, Hillerman told his classmates, “the mockingbird was continuing the same quarrelsome monologue with the night from exactly the same perch on the ridgepole. The whippoorwills were repeating themselves in Mr. Mann’s woods exactly as usual. And the sultry night air was carrying the same thousand summer smells of alfalfa, of oak leaves and of dust.” With a Thomas Wolfe–like conclusion, Hillerman ended the essay by contrasting the reparable decay of the farm with the unalterable changes in him caused by the war. Freedman gave Hillerman an A. The direction Freedman urged his student to follow—the mining of memory, the use of details in creating scenes, and the deliberate employment of ambiguity to allow readers to form their own conclusions—opened a new path for Hillerman.
So, back to my page 99. The self-contained scene give my page 99 a passing grade. A reader could get a sense of the book’s subject and my approach to telling the story by reading only this page. The moment described here is an important turning point in the development of the subject of my biography, Tony Hillerman, as a writer. University of New Mexico professor Morris Freedman recognized his unusual student—40 year-old newspaperman—had enormous talent but needed to break the shackles of news-style writing, Here he convinces his eager student to write in the first person and mine his memories for material. The result is a college paper that offers an early sample of Hillerman’s evocative scene setting that he would use to his advantage years later in his Navajo novels filled with wonderful descriptions, turning the barren landscape into a character.
The Page 99 Test: Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power.
The Page 99 Test: Eye on the Struggle.
The Page 99 Test: The Ambulance Drivers.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
