David Huddle, A Versatile Author with Deep Roots in the New River Valley

Now in his early seventies, David Huddle is a tall, eloquent man, a distinguished professor, and an accomplished author. He has published nineteen books of poetry, stories, and essays. Remarkably, more than two-hundred of his works have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies, in addition to publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, and The American Scholar.

David Huddle grew up enjoying the stories his grandfather told in a family that loved books and often read aloud. When the Library of Virginia presented him their award for fiction in 2012, he told the audience, “Among my earliest memories is my mother reading aloud to my brothers and me—Mother Goose, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows. So I experienced books, words, sentences, and the sound of the human reading voice as the presence of love.” Huddle was raised in Ivanhoe, Virginia, a small town located on the New River in Wythe County. His father, Charles Richard Huddle, Jr. (1911–1986) was a manager for the town’s largest employer, National Carbide Corporation, which made carbide for the lamps that area miners used. His mother, Mary Frances Akers (1919–1999) married his father, who grew up practically next door, when she was fifteen and he was twenty. They had three sons: Charles Huddle, III (1939–2005), followed by David in 1942 and Bill in 1944. In his essay, “A Writer’s Credo” in the 1993 edition of the Iron Mountain Review, Huddle wrote, “From both sides of my family I have inherited patience, powers of concentration, and the inclination to work hard and to try to overcome discouragement.”

David Huddle’s early work ethic was honed beginning at the tender age of eleven when he became the Roanoke Times newspaper carrier for Ivanhoe. The experience of walking throughout the town every afternoon, like attending public school in Ivanhoe, provided direct contact with a wide array of people to a youngster who had grown up in a well established family. When he was twelve, his father gave David his old Conn alto saxophone. He later said that playing the sax, “let me find out for myself how work and concentration were the keys to the dream of becoming an artist.” When school consolidation required David to take the school bus into the county seat in 1955, he had to give up his paper route because he had to catch the bus too early to deliver Ivanhoe’s papers. Later Huddle wrote, “About a thousand hours of my adolescence were spent with my butt parked in a school bus seat—and I’m here to tell you that it was positively and negatively character forming.” From the eighth grade to his senior year, Mrs. Arraga Young was his English teacher. She gave him “the nuts and bolts understanding of the American language that has empowered [his] writing life.” Throughout his high school years, Huddle held down a job at Leggett’s, Wytheville’s largest department store, and played his saxophone in a six-person dance band.

After graduating from high school, Huddle attended the University of Virginia, following his older brother there, and continued to play the sax in small bands at fraternity parties and other functions. He was an English major, and in 1963 he took a class in the short story. His work in that class won him some praise, and he has mused that perhaps it instilled the idea in him that he could be a writer and wouldn’t need a college education for that. This possibly made it easier, he believes, “to choose the disastrous path of flunking out” of the University of Virginia in January 1964. He kept his job as an orderly at the University of Virginia hospital until July of that year when he joined the U.S. Army.

The Army trained Huddle in “intelligence” and sent him first to Germany and then to Vietnam. Years later, he related, “One of the things that I received training in was report writing and essentially typing a lot . . . Every page had to be error-free. If there...