Background

Kenneth Lewis was born on the 8th of December, 1885 in Kennebunk, Maine, United States; the son of Frank Lewis and Grace (Tibbets) Roberts. Most of his boyhood was spent in suburban Boston. As a boy, he hunted in the woods and fished along the seacoast near his home. He learned to love the history of Maine through the adventures his grandmother told him about his family, who had lived in New England since 1639.

Education

Kenneth Roberts attended Cornell University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1908.

Roberts earned honorary Doctor of Literature degrees from Dartmouth College in 1934, Colby College in 1935, Bowdoin College in 1937, Middlebury College in 1938, and Northwestern University in 1945.

Career

Kenneth Lewis Roberts began his literary career as an editor of the Cornell Widow during his undergraduate years. After that, he briefly worked in the leather business from 1908 to 1909. Then, he joined the Boston Post, where he held the post of a reporter and columnist between 1909 and 1918. Also, from 1915 to 1918, he served there as an editor of its Sunday Post humor page. Besides, he was an editorial staff member for The Life at the same time.

During World War I, Roberts served as a captain in the Intelligence Section of the United States Army's Siberian Expeditionary Force from 1918 to 1919. After the war, George Horace Lorimer, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, hired Roberts to report postwar conditions in Europe. The roving postwar assignment ignited Robert's interest in his English forebears in Maine and his artistic aim to render them in fiction grounded in history. At the Saturday Evening Post, he was a staff correspondent from 1919 to 1928. While being a reporter for the magazine in the early 1920s, Roberts wrote many magazine articles and a book during the period immediately following World War I that urged strong legal restrictions on immigration from eastern and southern Europe and from Mexico, warning of the dangers of immigration from places other than northwestern Europe. In 1921, his first book, Europe's Morning After, came out. Believing that the past is only poorly understood through historical accounts, Roberts published Arundel (1930), a fictional treatment of the Revolutionary War.

Though he spent alternating seasons in Italy after 1928, Roberts remained closely tied to his home state. He wrote two nonfiction books on the state, Trending into Maine (1938) and Don't Say That about Maine! (1948). In 1939, Roberts again indulged his passion for the state by writing the introduction and notes for a cookbook, Good Maine Food, authored by his niece, Marjorie Mosser.

Roberts developed a strong interest in dowsing in later years and founded a company, Water Unlimited, as a paid service for locating reliable groundwater in Maine and elsewhere. Also, he wrote three books on the superstitious subject of water dowsing, which a friend, Henry Gross, introduced him to. His books on the subject included Henry Gross and his Dowsing Rod (1951), The Seventh Sense (1953), and Water Unlimited (1957). Also, he published two books on antique collecting - The Collector's Whatnot (1923) and Antiquamania (1928). Writing under the pseudonym Cornelius Obenchain Van Loot, Roberts collaborated with friend and fellow Maine resident Booth Tarkington and with Hugh McNair Kahler on The Collector's Whatnot. His historical essay, The Battle of Cowpens, was published a year after his death.

Achievements

• Kenneth Lewis Roberts was an outstanding historical novelist, as well as a well-known author of books. He was nationally recognized as a roving correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, writing on conditions in Europe, the Orient, and the United States.
  
  Kenneth received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1957, the year he died, for generating interest in American history. His most popular work by far, Northwest Passage, inspired two film adaptations, Northwest Passage and Mission of Danger.

Works

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  • Oliver Wiswell

    (This wonderfully far-ranging novel is packed with battles...)

    1940
  • Northwest Passage

    (This classic novel follows the career of Major Rogers, wh...)

    1937
  • Rabble in Arms

    (Love, treachery, ambition, and idealism motivate an unfor...)

    1933
  • Captain Caution

    (In this conclusion to the Chronicles of Arundel, the year...)

    1934
  • Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod

    (Through dowsing Henry was able to locate the wells, preci...)

    1951
  • Europe's Morning After 1921
  • Why Europe Leaves Home 1922
  • Sun Hunting: Adventures and Observations among the Native and Migratory Tribes of Florida 1922
  • Concentrated New England: A Sketch of Calvin Coolidge 1924
  • Arundel 1929
  • The Lively Lady 1931
  • For Authors Only and Other Gloomy Essays 1935
  • It Must Be Your Tonsils 1936
  • March to Quebec 1938
  • Trending into Maine 1938
  • The Kenneth Roberts Reader 1945
  • Lydia Bailey 1947
  • Moreau de St.-Mery's American Journey 1793–1798 1947
  • I Wanted to Write 1949
  • The Seventh Sense 1953
  • Boon Island 1955
  • Water Unlimited 1957
  • Battle of Cowpens 1958
  • The Collector's Whatnot 1923
  • Antiquamania 1928

Politics

Kenneth Roberts was an ultraconservative Republican who inveighed in print against the New Deal and against America's liberal immigration policy. It is said that he so hated Franklin Roosevelt that he glued Roosevelt dimes to the clamshells he used as ashtrays.

Views

Kenneth's nonfiction works covered a broad range of subjects, from the states of Florida and Maine to hobbies such as antique collecting and water dowsing.

Quotations: "Misey, in cold truth, is weightless upon those who undergo it than upon the minds of those who see it, for he who is cold and starving is so busy in his efforts to obtain warmth and food that he has little time for self-pity, and endures his unhappy condition better than those who take it upon themselves to suffer for him."

"All of us know history repeats itself, but mighty few of us recognize the repetition until too late."

"I wouldn't care to shoot my own townsmen over a difference of opinion about politics. Keep 'em yourself if you think you need 'em, but I suggest you'll be better off to put 'em away from where you can't get at 'em. The trouble with a pistol is that if you show it, you've got to use it, and once you use it you've committed yourself."

"A community is an informally constituted group, larger than the family, within which there is a distinctive pattern of interaction, whose members share a feeling of common identity which may be no more than a simple recognition of friendship, and which possesses its own subculture, defining how the members of the community should conduct themselves and behave towards one another during their free time."

"I'll never use force to try to make my enemies think the way I think, George - partly because I don't believe in it, and partly because it's useless. You can't destroy ideas by force, and you can't hide 'em by silence."

"Never until the wounded came back from Bunker Hill had I realized the lengths of which a determined minority will go in order to achieve its ends. For the first time, I understood one of the fundamentals of warfare: that armies cannot be raised by nations or parties unless the rage of the people is first kindled by lies and name-calling."

"Valiant! The word mocked me, for I knew myself to be anything but valiant. What I had done, I had done in a fit of insane bitterness, not with cool courage, not with brave quick thinking, not with the presence of mind - but with the absence of it."

"I learned, then, beyond question, that if all the property in the world were distributed, and an equal share given to everyone, the bulk of mankind would soon be destitute, and a few would have everything."

"If I was a private individual, I'd be more careful, but being as I'm a government, I'm privileged to make a God-damned fool of myself in any way I choose, especially by spending a lot more money than I've got or ever will have, and promising to do things that I ain't got a chance of doing."

"Approaching us through a haze of dust that overhung the road was a long column of men - a slovenly column that marched irregularly and out of step so that it had the look of a gigantic centipede whose feet hurt."

"Anything, I eventually learned, is preferable to war but that knowledge is something every man must learn for himself - usually at considerable expense."

"My God, Judge, do men believe whatever lie they hear about an enemy?"

"That's all war is - a consuming fever: a period of delirium and insanity, of misery, disappointment, discomfort, anxiety, despair, waste, weariness, boredom, brutality, death, and yet to every man in every war there comes a day worth living for: a day when a lifetime of excitement is packed into a few short hours."

"War's always the same! Children starve, women suffer, men, lose their fortunes or turn into beasts!"

"You needn't worry about me. I know enough to do what every man ought to do in wartime when he's watched and threatened by bullies. I conceal my feelings, lie whenever necessary, pretend to admire the rascals who've ruined our city and our country cheer dolts, bullies and knaves, and damn all-wise temperate men!"

"If it's really education you want for Nathan,' Buell said, 'have him read the papers, so he'll know what's going on in the world, and why. Teach him to be interested in everything he doesn't understand - interested enough to find out about it from books or people that aren't afraid, to tell the truth."

"Great men tell the truth and are never believed. Lesser men are always believed, but seldom have the brains or the courage, to tell the truth."

"People never believe anything - except scandal - when they first heart it."

"Allen's Landing ain't nothing but a little woodchuck-hole of a place, and if we were forced to borrow boats there, or anything else, we might get into trouble, on account of having no other place to go until our borrowing was completed."

"I wish it had been my heart."

"On every side of us are men who hunt perpetually for their personal northwest passage, too often sacrificing health, strength, and life itself to the search and who shall say they are not happier in their vain but hopeful quest than wiser, duller folks who sit at home, venturing nothing and, with sour laughs, deriding the seekers for that fabled thoroughfare?"

Membership

Kenneth Roberts was a member of the Quill and Dagger Society, National Institute of Arts and Letters, and Phi Beta Kappa.

Personality

Kenneth Roberts was a dynamic man of widely diversified interests and enthusiasms. He was outspoken, opinionated, and irascible. Also, he was a man with a craving to learn new things, to prove and disprove whatever life presented him.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Kenneth Roberts is a big, hearty, vital, opinionated, hasty tempered man. He hates politicians, hypocrisy, corruption, cowardice, and tyranny. He loves food, action, valor, independence, and the very stuff of history itself. All this is plain as a pikestaff in his books." - Orville Prescott, a book reviewer

Connections

Kenneth Lewis Roberts was married to Anna Seiberling Mosser.

Father:

Frank Lewis Roberts

Mother:

Grace Mary Tibbets Roberts

(1858-1948)

Wife:

Anna Seiberling Mosser

(1884-1963)

Friend:

Herbert Faulkner West

Herbert Faulkner West (1898-1974) was an American educator and author of The Mind on the Wing, John Sloan's Last Summer, Herb West's Farewell Address, and Here's to Togetherness.

References

• Kenneth Roberts: The Man and His Works A book by Jack Bales.
  1989
• A Century of American History in Fiction: Kenneth Roberts' Novels A book by Janet Harris.
  1976