Jack Matthews (1925-2013)

I learned yesterday that Jack Matthews died last year. I regret that I didn't know about his death until yesterday. I regret more that I never knew him, although I saw him often for several years. John Harold Matthews was born on July 22, 1925, in Columbus, Ohio. His résumé‎ alone makes interesting reading, but you can find that on your own. Mr. Matthews was a novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, essayist, professor of English, and book collector. He was a regular at the local library book sale. Always in good humor, he spoke to everyone he knew and some he didn't. Invariably he wore a sport coat and a bolo tie. Jack Matthews died on Thanksgiving morning, November 28, 2013. I was away and didn't learn of his passing until yesterday when I picked up one of his books at the library. It is called Hanger Stout, Awake!, and it was Jack Matthews' first novel, published in 1967. I have read the first chapter and I am hooked--or maybe I should say I'm hanging on each word.

Jacket design by Robin Sherwood

Original text copyright 2014 Terence E. Hanley

Carl Fallberg (1915-1996)

Cartoonist, writer, and railroad enthusiast Carl Fallberg (1915-1996) and his book Fiddletown & Copperopolis (River Forest, IL: Heimburger House Publishing Co., 1985), collecting his cartoons from Railroad magazine. I know the book-jacket biography of Fallberg is hard to read here, but give it a try.

Text copyright 2031 Terence E. Hanley

Simon Greco (1917-2005)

Simon Greco was born on April 9, 1917, in Italy to an Italian-American father and an Italian mother. Greco arrived in the United States near the end of 1921. The passenger manifest for his ship (propitiously named S.S. Providence) gave his birthplace as "Spesano." I suspect that he came from Spezzano, located in the southern part of the country. The Greco family settled in St. Louis where his father, Giuseppe Greco, worked for a gas company. Greco's mother was named Maria. By the 1940s, Simon Greco had relocated to New York and Connecticut, haven for artists. He was married to Eleen Williams (1920-2008).

You can read the high points of Simon Greco's life in the book jacket biography I have posted here. It's from a  large paperbound book called The Art of Perspective Drawing, published by M. Grumbacher, Inc., in 1968. Grumbacher put out a lot of really fine instruction books in art, but this one is especially good. The highlights of course are Mr. Greco's illustrations. He was an artist hard to categorize, but that makes him that much more interesting. His work is partly realistic, almost in a photographic way. (He painted a number of trompe l'oeil pictures.) He can also be considered a surrealist and a magical realist in a style that was very common at mid-century, especially in advertising and other commercial art. Simon Greco also painted covers for magazines, including men's magazines of the 1950s and '60s.

Simon Greco was an extraordinary artist. His work is mesmerizing. Fortunately for us, he lived a long life. He died on January 20, 2005, in Westborough, Massachusetts, at age eighty-seven.

Text copyright 2013 Terence E. Hanley

F.O. Alexander (1897-1993)

Here is an unusual book called Joe Doakes' Great Quest, written and drawn by F.O. Alexander and published in his retirement. Franklin Osborne Alexander was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 3, 1897. He attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and Northwestern University. During World War I, Alexander served with the Camouflage Engineers in Europe. (I think that outfit was more properly called the American Camouflage Corps.) In so doing he would have followed a path laid down by another artist, Abbott Thayer (1849-1921).

Alexander drew three newspaper comic strips between 1925 and 1939, the most well known of which was the cliffhanger Hairbreadth Harry. In 1941, he signed on with the Philadelphia Bulletin and enjoyed a second career as an editorial cartoonist. F.O. Alexander retired in 1967. The following year, John Knox Press of Richmond, Virginia, published his book Joe Doakes' Great Quest, a cartoon odyssey in which the title character tries to discover his purpose in life. The model is Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, but it looks like a sequential editorial cartoon. I suppose you could make something of a connection between editorial cartooning and literary allegory.

F.O. Alexander died on January 17, 1993, in Philadelphia at age ninety-five. His papers are at Syracuse University.

The cover design of Joe Doakes' Great Quest is by Doyle Robinson. The photo of the author is by William Conn.

Text copyright 2013 by Terence E. Hanley

Terence Barrow & Ray Lanterman

Terence Barrow (ca. 1932-2001) and Ray Lanterman (1916-1994) co-authored two books, Incredible Hawaii (1974) and More Incredible Hawaii (1986). Both men were residents of Hawaii. The Hoosier Lanterman had been present at the attack on Pearl Harbor and lived in Hawaii from the 1940s onward. Barrow, a native New Zealander, came to Hawaii in 1964 and worked there as a museum curator, author, and representative for Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company. Their books are compilations of Hawaiian folklore and history. Lanterman's illustrations are reminiscent of those in the newspaper comic feature Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Terence Barrow died on August 31, 2010, at age seventy-eight. His obituary appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on September 10, 2001, the day before disaster struck. You can read more about Ray Lanterman on my blog, Indiana Illustrators.

Text copyright 2013 Terence E. Hanley

Miriam Gilbert & Sidnee Neale

Glory Be! The Career of a Young Hair Stylist (New York: Hastings House, Publishers, 1967) is a novel for young people written by Miriam Gilbert, aka Mrs. Abe Presburg. The book jacket bio here is the sum total of what I know about her. The illustrator, Sidnee Neale, was born on May 16, 1904, in Baltimore, Maryland. She was a muralist and an illustrator, and she worked in collage and mixed media. Sidnee died in California in October 1977.

Text copyright 2013 Terence E. Hanley

A.E. Hotchner (1917-2020)

We have heard this week about the anniversary of the beginning of a dictatorship. It's better to hear about one's ending. That ending--rather the ending of the dictator himself--is the background of A.E. Hotchner's novel Treasure, from 1970. Treasure is set in Italy twenty years after the war has ended. The protagonist it turns out is something of an autobiographical character. Treasure is a sort of hybrid--part caper novel, part murder mystery, part thriller, and part serious novel. It even approaches weird fiction or pulp fiction in its conclusion. The novel came at the end of a decade when men's magazines were king and near the end of what I have heard called "The Golden Age of Heterosexuality." It fits in with both.

A.E. Hotchner was born on June 28, 1920, in St. Louis, Missouri. He chronicled his youth in an autobiographical novel called King of the Hill (1973). That book was adapted to a very enjoyable movie by Steven Soderbergh in 1993. Mr. Hotchner is still with us and even has a book published this year. He has written plays, biographies, novels, and memoirs. Mr. Hotchner was also friends with Ernest Hemingway (the subject of Papa Hemingway, a book by Hotchner from 1966) and Paul Newman (the subject of Paul and Me: 53 Years of Adventures and Misadventures with My Pal Paul Newman, from 2010). Hotchner's friendship with Paul Newman brings up a very strange coincidence for my posting today. In my research, I came upon this image from 1970:

That's Paul Newman clowning around after having caught a marlin somewhere in the Caribbean. This image evokes nothing so much as that of Mussolini and his lover, Claretta Petacci, strung up by their heels in Milano at the end of war--the background of the book Treasure.

The cover of Treasure is classic 1970s design: a wraparound photo cover missing only the figure of a woman. The designer is uncredited. The photograph of Mr. Hotchner on the inside of the back cover is by Jack Mitchell.

Update (October 19, 2023): The actual birthdate of Aaron Edward Hotchner was June 28, 1917. Mr. Hotchner died on February 15, 2020, at age 102.

Text copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley