SoulFire77's blog

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent In the spring of 1936, I drove down to Pacific Grove, California, to interview a writer named John Steinbeck, who had published a novel called Tortilla Flat the year before and was beginning to be discussed in the kind of rooms where writers are discussed before they are read. I had written ahead. He had agreed, with the reluctance of a man who would rather be doing almost anything else, to give...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent In December 1913, I was in El Paso covering the border for a wire service. The Mexican Revolution was in its third year. Pancho Villa had taken Ciudad Juárez. The streets of El Paso were full of journalists, arms dealers, refugees, and men whose occupations fell somewhere between all three. It was the kind of assignment where the story changed every hour and the correspondents drank every night,...

A short note before the link. The thing about a Skip James record — about any record made by someone who is no longer here — is that it carries a small impossibility. Skip has been gone since October 1969. The records he made remain, and they sound, when you put them on, like a man in the room with you. This is a comfortable haunting. Most people who collect old blues records are familiar with it. This is the territory the story is in. Five...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I have written about many dead writers. This is the only one I helped carry. I was in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, covering the state elections for a wire service that no longer exists. It was raining — not hard, but steadily, the kind of rain that turns a dirt street into a problem. I was making my way to Gunner's Hall on East Lombard Street, which was serving as the Fourth Ward polling place...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I should tell you before I begin that I cannot prove any of this happened. The only other witness was a woman named Dora Diamant, who told the story to others after the man in question was dead, and whose account has never been independently confirmed. The letters — if they existed — have never been found. The girl has never been identified. I am aware of how this sounds coming from a...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I was sent to Palm Beach County in September 1928 to cover a hurricane. Not the hurricane itself — by the time I arrived, three days after landfall, the storm was gone and what it had left behind was not weather but consequence. The dike on the south side of Lake Okeechobee had given way on the night of the 17th. The water rose twelve feet in an hour. Over two thousand people drowned, most of them...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent In the spring of 1944, I was in Los Angeles on an assignment I have mercifully forgotten and found myself, as one does in that city, drinking alone in a restaurant I could not afford. The restaurant was Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, which was and remains the place where screenwriters go to feel sorry for themselves in a dignified setting. I was at the bar. It was a Tuesday. The...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I was sent to Eldon, Missouri, in November 1953, to cover a bonfire. The Parent-Teacher Council of Eldon had voted, by a margin I was told was comfortable, to collect and publicly burn a selection of comic books, paperback novels, and other materials deemed — the word used in the press release was "injurious" — to the moral development of children. This was not unusual. Dozens of towns across the...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I have, over the course of my career, failed to obtain interviews with some of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Hemingway refused to acknowledge I existed. Christie pretended to be someone else. But William Faulkner is the only author who ever lost my mail. I first wrote to Faulkner in the spring of 1923 at the University of Mississippi post office in Oxford, where he served as...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent My editor sent me to Harrogate to find Agatha Christie. This was December 1926, and the woman had been missing for ten days. Her Morris Cowley had been found abandoned at Newlands Corner in Surrey — headlights on, fur coat on the seat, no driver. Over a thousand police officers were searching. Fifteen thousand volunteers were combing the countryside. The Home Secretary was demanding daily updates...