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Two Rooms: The Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood
(U. of Nebraska Press: Lincoln & London, 1998)
With my trilogy behind me, I wanted to take another tack. My wish to write about America’s “unfinished business” was as strong as ever, but I did not want to undertake yet another book in which I’d be a middle-class white man writing about the problems of hard-pressed African Americans. After
All the Lonely People I was wary of creating a “niche” in which grants and honors would come my way for writing about the problems of others. Also, after the grueling experience of immersing myself in the brutal world of Single Room Occupancy hotels, I needed a change.
I turned to biography—the life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852-1944)—because, like me, he enjoyed a life of relative privilege, yet his heart was with the forces of social change. Wood’s was a big and colorful life which spanned nearly a century of American social history. Wood seemed to have his hand in everything: from a childhood glimpse of president-elect Lincoln, to the last of the Indian campaigns in the 1870s, to bohemian New York, to the early years of Portland, Oregon; to campaigning for woman’s suffrage, to defending the radical IWW and the right of Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger to speak in public forums. As a writer and lawyer he challenged the crackdown on “Reds” after WWI. It was during these years that her wrote the pieces that make up
Heavenly Discourses, an unlikely bestseller in which the evangelical leaders of Wood’s time, along with conservative defenders of public morality,
arrive in heaven and discover that God is a free-thinker, that Jesus is unashamed of sex, and that agnostics like Mark Twain, Rabelais, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Margaret Fuller are eagerly awaiting their arrival in order to discuss the human condition with them. Wood was a “fellow traveler” in the 1920s and 1930s, yet he spoke out in vehement opposition to the Stalinist purges. And in his old age, in failing health, he challenged the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII.
Writing Wood’s life consumed several years of rigorous research and writing. It was truly “an education.” I found both Wood and my crash course in American history absorbing—and I loved the challenge of shaping a narrative that encompassed the extraordinary range of his life.
Two Rooms attracted considerable attention in the Pacific Northwest, where Wood spent much of his adult life. In Portland, where Wood is something of a folk hero, The Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission invited me to speak as part of a two-week celebration of Wood’s contributions to Portland’s cultural life.
The Western Writers Association of America chose my book as a finalist for their Best Western Nonfiction award.
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