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Chapter 4 Professor Emeritus, 1958–1967 Though Harry Kroll had always dedicated himself to writing during his summer breaks from teaching, the change in status from being a full-time teacher to an emeritus professor left Harry without a defined responsibility or employment for the first time that he could remember. He was sixty-seven and retirement looked like a good time to restart his career in literature—an exciting and rewarding prospect without the pressure of regular teaching. The campus had been elevated from a two-year junior college to a degree-granting unit of the University of Tennessee in 1951. New construction that had followed programmatic expansion eased the cramped office and classroom accommodations. Both the new English departmental and campus administrators agreed that Harry was welcome to maintain his office in the old HallMoody building, which sat as it always had, directly across Lovelace Street from his house. Maintaining and working in his office of twenty-three years provided Harry with familiar surroundings. It also maintained his distance from Nettie’s circle of daily life. During his first retirement summer, Harry taught a private writing class in Martin for nineteen motivated students. Most were newspaper staff members from the surrounding towns, and a few college-bound students. He was delighted with the quality of work they produced and for a time he began thinking that it was possible to reawaken the spirit of literary excitement which had characterized his classes three decades earlier at Lincoln Memorial University.1 The experience was rewarding enough that he seriously considered reestablishing his writing workshop. Unfortunately the class proved to be a flash in the pan, the only group of interested writers he was able to gather in the small town of Martin. That few weeks of concentrated effort and direction represented the effective end of his long career as a writing teacher and college professor. On the other hand, being retired but having an office left Harry plenty of time for what he liked best to do. Between his classes and some new personal writing, during 174 Professor Emeritus, 1958–1967 the first calendar year of retirement Kroll concentrated on placing the manuscripts he had on hand. “The Mystery of Mabrey’s Mill,” “The Golden Years,” and “For Cloi with Love,” all went out repeatedly. He even pulled out the manuscript of “Men of Empire,” gave it a new name, and sent it out again. All of them came back with rejections. Though he had no way of knowing, ultimately only two of the dozen book-length fiction manuscripts he would complete after retirement would ever be published: one was his last juvenile novel and the other a decidedly steamy trade paperback. He and thousands of other writers, including contemporary Tennessean and Pulitzer Prize winner T. S. Stribling, were creatures of an earlier generation. The American popular fiction market by the late 1950s was half of what it had been a decade earlier, and a thin shell of what it had been when Harry was an energetic young writer in the 1920s. “We’re positive that, contrary to many critics, the novel is not dead, but only dormant ,” a contact at Bobbs-Merrill wrote encouragingly in what was their last rejection of a Kroll manuscript, the same year that he retired from teaching. “Nevertheless our business office instructs us to pare down our fiction lists to the barest minimum for the next few seasons.”2 In August 1958 the latest in a long round of rejections included a suggestion that he submit the piece to another press that had both a commercial arm and a subsidy business.3 The entire concept of committing his work to a vanity press was anathema to Kroll. He trusted deeply in the marketplace’s ability to winnow poor writing and reward good stuff with purchases. But the simple fact remained that his work wasn’t selling. If he were to exist any longer in the writers’ marketplace, his style, his topic, or his approach, or something, would have to change. Perhaps being retired would provide him the time to figure out what. A postscript inked at the bottom of a letter to son Robert shortly after his retirement in 1958 provides a clue about his post-retirement plans. “Haven’t sold a book yet but I’m trying. Going to start on the Reelfoot night riders for a paperback.”4 Harry had plunged into Tennessee local history for his first post-retirement writing project...

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