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Kenneth Lewis Roberts (1885-1957 ) |
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American author who wrote about the American Revolutionary era. Kenneth Roberts' most famous novel is Northwest Passage (1937).
Set during during the French and Indian War, it told about legendary
Major Rogers, whose career seen from a point of view of a struggling
artist. Roberts' narrative skills and larger-than-life characters made
his works
popular not only in the U.S. but in Western and Central Europe too.
Most of his life, Roberts lived in Maine, and drew on his
home state and his ancestors for his historical fiction. His books on
his belief in dowsing damaged his reputation and credentials as a
serious historian and writer. "It has been my lot to have some contact with a man who was remarkable and strange; and by chance I encountered him at periods important in the early history of my country. Given the proper guidance, he might have been a greater prince than Jenghiz Khan. To me, at times, he seemed almost a god: at other times possessed by demons. Yet I think that at best he benefited his country more substantially than have warriors, statesmen and authors of greater renown; and at his worst, I suspect he fell no lower than any one of us might fall, provided we had possessed his vision and energy to begin with, and then had undergone the same exertions, the same temptations, the same ingratitudes and disappointments he endured." (From Northwest Passage) Kenneth Roberts was born in Kennebunk, Maine, the son of Frank
Lewis
Roberts (1860-1911), a Boston traveling salesman, and Grace Tibbets Roberts (1858-1948). After graduating in 1908 from
Cornell University, Roberts worked as a journalist for the Boston Post.
In
1911, he married the former Anna Seiberling Mosser, of the Boston
suburb Roxbury. She died in 1930; they did not have any children. During the end of World War I, Roberts served in the Intelligence
Section of the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, commanded by Major General William S. Graves.
However, instead of seeing some action in the Russian Civil War, he was
assigned to the post of chief military censor in Vladivostok. Robert's stay was brief;
he felt unsuited to this kind of duty and returned home from in January
1919. Between Thanksgiving and January he wrote, "most of the
participants in the Siberian Expeditionary Force seemed semi insane
with cold, idleness and the depression that accompanies these two
curses." To avoid boredom, Roberts wrote as much as he could. After the war, Roberts worked as a staff correspondent for George Horace Lorimer's Saturday Evening Post in Europe and America. By 1923, Roberts was back in Europe, and wrote for the newspaper a laudatory series on Italian fascism, and reported on a politician named Adolf Hitler, who was setting out to rescue Germany from Jews. In 1927, Roberts decided to renovate an old farmhouse in Porto Santo Stefano, Italy, to have "a retreat so far removed from bright lights that I would be able to complete a series of novels within my norman span of year." Roberts spent there seven winters. An opponent of President Franklin Roosevelt, Roberts fumed over the welfare state
and a road called the
Roosevelt Highway (Route No. 9): "It is a road of waffles. There are
stretches that lead the traveler to think the road was build in memory
of waffles long since dead; of waffles yet unborn; of frankfurter
sausages. As soon as one enters the Unites States he is in the Frank
and Waffle Belt. Hot waffles. Hot franks. Franks with skins and franks
without skins." (From For Authors Only and Other Gloomy Essays, 1935) Roberts
gave up journalism in 1928 to become a full-time author. He began writing
historical novels as a reaction to
historians, who were "united in ignoring details, or in failing to dig
up the details which they should have possessed, or in pointing out the
misinterpretations and downright lies of which diarists, journalists
and so on were responsible. . . . " Intense in his opinions, Roberts repeatedly clashed with academic historians' conjectures. Roberts heroes were strong leaders who
dominate through their strength of personality. His first novel, Arundel
(1930), was an account of Benedict Arnold's ill-fated expedition to Quebec during the
American Revolution. Its sequel, Rabble
in Arms
(1933) followed Arnold and his Northern Army from 1776 through 1777.
Roberts' great-great-grandfather had marched with Arnold through the
Maine and Canadian wilderness. The early novels did not sell particularly well. In I Wanted to Write (1949) he bewailed that Chic Sale's The Specialist, about building outdoor privies, had led the best-seller list for forty consecutive weeks, while he can't find Arundel on any list of bestsellers. Northwest Passage was the story of Robert Rogers, his struggles in the French and Indian war, and his later attempts to find a Northwest Passage. The book was reprinted 15 times in the first year of issue. For his disappointment, Northwest Passage, the public's favorite, did not win the Pulitzer Prize; it went to John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley.
King Vidor's film version of the book, starring Spencer Tracy as
Major Rogers and Robert Young as Langdon Towne, covered only the first
half of the book.Vidor's film re-affirmed the novel's preference for a
strong leader and suspicion toward the majority-rule principle. Roberts
received in 1957 a special Pulitzer price for his contribution to an
interest in American history. Roberts's novels were exhaustively researched and enjoyable read. However, forgetting good judgment, which he had showed in his historical work, Roberts became a fiece advocate of dowsing. His three books of the subject were Henry Gross and his Dowsing Rod (1951), which sold 16,426 copies the first year, The Seventh Sense (1953), and Water Unlimited (1957). With Henry Gross, a game warden, Roberts traveled around the world, trying to find underground water veins, oil, minerals and other natural resources with the help of a dowsing rod. Roberts had first met Gross in 1947, when he asked him to find a new well for him. Roberts was impressed by the mysterious powers of Gross, who amazingly could work far away from the actual field sites. In his books, Roberts recounted many of his friend's experiments in long-distance dowsing. Gross managed to locate three fresh water sources in Bermuda while sitting in Kennebunkport – 800 miles away. Once he dowsed a map of Africa and found a huge vein beneath the Sahara Desert. Gross also used the rod to locate people and lost objets. His stick, usually made of fresh-cut maple, could discern rye whiskey and other kind of liquors from each other. Roberts wrote that "when the potentialities of the rod are more clearly understood and utilized, it may rank with electricity and atomic power." On
his Kennebunkport farm, Roberts maintained, raised and sold migration
birds. To prove that wood ducks can't be raised in an incubator
in singular seasoning he spent $2,000. Roberts died on July 21, 1957,
in Kennebunk. Roberts'
literary mentor was his neighbor Booth Tarkington, whom he dedicated Northwest Passage, Oliver Wiswell (1940), a tale of the American Revolution from the perspective of a colonial Loyalist soldier and historian, and Rabble in Arms. Other notable novels include The Lively Lady (1931), dealing with the War of 1812, Captain Caution (1934), a chronicle of Arundel, Lydia Bailey (1947), a picaresque romance, and Boon Island (1956), based on the shipwreck of a British ship in 1710 on the tiny Boon Island off the coast of Maine. Moreau de St.-Méry's American Journey 1793-1798, which he edited and translated with his wife Anna M. Roberts, came out in 1947. Roberts'
diaries are sealed until 2006. For further reading: A Century of American History in Fiction: Kenneth Roberts' Novels by Janet Harris (1976); Kenneth Roberts: The Man and His Works by Jack Bales (1989); Kenneth Roberts by Jack Bales (1993); 'Roberts, Kenneth (Lewis)' by Frank R. Levstick, in Twentieth-Century Romance & Historical Writers, edited by Lesley Henderson and Aruna Vasudevan (1994); 'Roberts, Kenneth [Lewis]' by Jack Bales, in Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999) - See also: James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) was set during the French and Indian War and based loosely on Robert Rogers. Selected bibliography:
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