Literary El Paso

Dale L. Walker

22 Dale L. Walker Dale L. Walker, a freelance writer since 1960, is the author of many historical books, biographies and literary studies, including Legends and Lies: Great Mysteries of the American West; The Boys of ’98: Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders; Bear Flag Rising: The Conquest of California, 1846; Pacific Destiny: The Four-Century Journey to the Oregon Country; Eldorado: The California Gold Rush; The Calamity Papers: Western Myths and Cold Cases; and most recently a biography of Civil War surgeon Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor. His periodical work has appeared in 130 magazines and newspapers and he has written extensively on the life and works of the American author Jack London. Walker has served as director of Texas Western Press of the University of Texas at El Paso, books editor for the El Paso Times, books columnist for the Rocky Mountain News, and is a consulting editor for Forge Books (Macmillan) of New York. He is the recipient of the Owen Wister Award, for lifetime contributions to western history and literature, from Western Writers of America, Inc., and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the Author’s Guild. The Mencken-White Letters They were kindred spirits, Owen Payne White and Henry Louis Mencken. Both were writers, both iconoclasts, both capable of seeing high humor in all sorts of sacrosanct institutions and ideals. Their paths crossed first in the Roaring 20s and their friendship , bound together mostly by correspondence, ended only by the death of White in 1946. A slender file of letters from Mencken to White in the University of Texas at El Paso Library Archives tells something of this friendship. The letters are a gift to the University from Owen White’s widow, Mrs. Hazel H. White of 23 Cutchogue, Long Island, N.Y., and were presented to University Librarian Baxter Polk in 1962 by White’s sister, Mrs. O. S. Osborn of El Paso. The son of a prominent pioneer El Paso physician, Owen White was born in El Paso in 1879. His first step toward a literary career came in 1923 when he published locally Out of the Desert, a history of El Paso. By a fortuitous coincidence, American Mercury editor H. L. Mencken—even then one of America’s most influential critics— took notice of the obscure book and lauded it and its author in his New York based magazine. It was the beginning of a headlong, two-decade writing career that brought White to the attention of the New York Times and Collier’s magazine and which resulted in nine books,* some 140 magazine articles, and countless newspaper pieces. White died on December 7, 1946, in the midst of work on his book Western Trails, the half-finished manuscript of which is in the University of Texas-El Paso archives. H. L. Mencken was born in Baltimore just a year after White and was also the son of a prominent family—of cigar-makers. He began his writing career early, however, and published not only a volume of fugitive verse at a young age but also sound critical works on George Bernard Shaw and Friedrich Nietzsche. Mencken was really a lifelong newspaperman, however, and the bulk of his writing (outside his marvelous and lively philological study, The American Language, and his memorable three-volume autobiography) is made up of transient , pugnacious pieces on the passing scene. As a wit and idol smasher he was an American original and as a magazine editor and critic he encouraged such struggling writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, and an impressive list of others. Meneken died in 1956 after a long illness. The Mencken-to-White letters on file at University of Texas-El Paso can be divided into three rough categories: those of general wry comment by the Sage of Baltimore on sundry topics, those dealing directly with White’s contributions to The American Mercury, and letters of hypochondria. Mencken was a notorious hypochondriac with a massive, if sometimes faulty, knowledge of anatomy, physiology and pathology. Particularly pathology. 24 In one brief note to White, he wrote: “I surely hope the chiropractors fetched all of the polyps. I suppose you know that they are a sign of advancing senility. If a man reached 100 years, so I hear, he would be one solid polyp.” And later: “I...