My Son Amos Has a New Book Out, Part 2!

Our son Amos Jasper Wright IV is an urban planner by profession, but he has been writing and publishing fiction for some years. In 2018 his collection of short stories Nobody Knows How It Got This Good was published by Livingston Press. This summer his first novel, Petrochemical Nocturne, has appeared, also published by Livingston. 

When Nobody Knows came out, I naturally wrote a blog post about it. The Kirkus review of the book is here. An interview with him about the book is here. In October 2018 Amos appeared on a panel alongside two other writers with new short story collections at the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge. 

So here we are with Amos' first novel, Petrochemical Nocturne. Kirkus has reviewed this title, and so has Bill Plott for the Alabama Writers Forum. Bradley Sides interviewed Amos for the Alabama Writers Cooperative. Once again Amos will be appearing at the Louisiana Book Festival. 

Both books are available from Bookshop.org, a book vendor where every purchase supports independent bookstores. The link for Petrochemical is here and Nobody Knows is here. 

If you have read or do read either of these books, please go to their GoodReads pages, say a few words, and rate the book. In the first paragraph above the books' titles link to those pages. Of course, if you buy from Amazon or other outlet,  reviews there would be greatly appreciated. And you can always request that your local library purchase one or both titles. 

"A bristling, lurching, and often insightful investigation of the past."  Says Kirkus about Petrochemical

In his review, Bill Plott wrote about the novel, "Although a novel, this is also an extraordinary work of history. Using Cancer Alley as a setting, Wright has penned a book that is essentially about racism – the systemic and pervasive racism of not just the South but also the nation. Perhaps no white historian has told it with quite the passion that Wright brings to the table."

An Alabama Author & A Polar Explorer

On March 5 the shipwreck of the Endurance was located more than 100 years after Captain Ernest Shackleton and his crew abandoned the vessel during their 1915 expedition to the Antarctic. In January of that year the ship became frozen in ice; the crew remained with the Endurance until November when it sank. That event began even more incredible efforts by the crew. A recent account is Alfred Lansing and Nathaniel Philbrick's 2015 book Endurance. Incredibly, all members of the crew survived the ordeal. 

A photograph of Captain Shackleton's cabin on the ship reveals a few shelves of books he took on the expedition to help him pass the downtime. This article reprints the inventory of that personal library. The books include an encyclopedia, various dictionaries, collections of poetry, accounts of other polar expeditions, and wait--what's that? Why, it's a novel by an author with Alabama connections!

Let's investigate.

Over the course of her writing career, Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy published more than 20 novels between 1888 and 1930. One of those was World's-End, published in 1914. A copy of that book, probably with the cover and title page as shown below, ended up on a shelf in Shackleton's cabin. Also below is a contemporary review. You can read the novel online at the Internet Archive. So who was Amelie Louise Rives, later to become Princess Troubetzkoy?

Rives was born August 23, 1863, in Richmond, Virginia. Her parents were Alfred and Sarah; Alfred was an engineer. Amelie was the oldest of three daughters. At some point in the 1870's Alfred accepted a position as chief superintendent & general manager of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad in Mobile. Amelie--and probably her sisters--continued the study of music and drawing under tutors and governesses. She also studied music under Miss Evy, who operated a private school in the city, and drawing at the Mobile Academy of Design.

The Rives family can be found in Mobile in the 1880 U.S. census. Patriarch Alfred L. Rives was fifty years old, a civil engineer and born in France around 1830. His wife Sarah was from Virginia. The children were Amelia, 16; Gertrude, 13; and Daisy, 5. Their home was 87 Government Street, near the current location of the Exploreum Science Center and a couple of blocks from Bienville Square.

Amelia's first publication, the romantic short story "A Brother to Dragons" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1886. Two years later her first novel The Quick or the Dead? created a scandal with its daring--immoral!--content as it quickly sold 300,000 copies. The book featured a new widow attracted to her late husband's cousin. Rives career was off to an impressive start; she published many novels, poems, and plays until 1930 and her final novel, Firedamp. Poetry publication continued into the 1940s. She died June 15, 1945. 

In June 1888 Rives married her first husband, a wealthy New Yorker named John Armstrong Chaloner, who led a fascinating life himself. The marriage was tumultuous and by 1895 the couple divorced. The following year she wed a Russian prince, Pierre Troubetzkoy, an established portrait painter. The two were introduced to each other in England by Oscar Wilde. That union lasted until his death in 1936. The couple lived in her ancestral home Castle Hill in Virginia. You can see the prince's 1904 photograph of his wife here. 

Despite her many publications and fame during her lifetime, Rives has fallen into obscurity since her death. Little has been written about her life or critical evaluation of her work. All of which is a shame. She mixed with some of the best known authors of the day, ranging from Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ellen Glasgow and Mark Twain. Author James Branch Cabell was a cousin. She was an enthusiastic supporter of women's suffrage. Her work was parodied, surely a sign of her acclaim. Newspapers published anecdotes about her. 

Some reviews were positive, but many not. Her novels were long, stuffed with characters and events and included racial stereotypes of the day. Her heroines and heroes felt intensely, but spoke in the overheated dialog characteristic of so much literature at that time. Yet modern topics crept into them. In her 1915 novel Shadows of Flames a wife discovers the hiding place of her morphine-addicted husband--in his cigarettes. 

See Leila Christenbury's essay linked below for many more details of Rives' life and work. A search of the Library of Congress' Chronicling America newspaper database for 1880-1945 will turn up numerous articles about Rives published in her lifetime. 

Further Reading

Louis Auchincloss, A Writer's Capital Houghton Mifflin, 1979. [Includes a chapter on Rives]

Leila Christenbury, "Amélie Louise Rives Chanler Troubetzkoy 1863–1945," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 

Welford Dunaway Taylor.  Amelie Rives (Princess Troubetzkoy Twayne, 1973 [info on Rives' time in Mobile is on p. 21]

Amelie Rives [1863-1945]

Source: The Bookman via Wikimedia Commons

This photo of Shackleton's cabin was taken in early March 1915 by Australian photographer Frank Hurley. 

Source: BBC.com

These two illustrations in World's End were reproduced from paintings by Alonzo Myron Kimball; one is seen on the cover of Collier's below.

Source: Wikipedia

Prior to book publication the novel was serialized in Collier's November 29, 1913-April 11, 1914

Source: FictionMags Index

Findlay Weaver, editor of the Canadian publication Maclean's, discussed the book in the October 1, 1914, issue: 

To get back to the particular book to be considered this month, “World’s End” gets its name from the estate in Virginia where the greater part of the action of the story takes place. The novel can scarcely evade the charge of sentimentalism, yet it has an appealing quality which will endear it to the lovers of romance.

The principal characters of the tale are Phoebe Nelson, a heroine who blooms with all the charm of the South, her cousin Richard Bryce and his uncle Owen Randolph.

Richard is a fascinating young man, an abnormally clever artist with untold faith in himself as such and as a poet as well. But he has a twisted view of life, which, in the influence exerted on the girl with her rich and romantic nature, all but wrecks her prospects of true happiness and would have done so but for quiet strength in body, mind, and emotion of Richard’s uncle, Owen Randolph, who, stirred to the depth of his compassion and love for her, employs the force of his big character to reconstruct her life. Through deeply pathetic circumstances, by Owen’s assistance, she finally wins to triumphant happiness and the telling is lightened along the way by a charming humor and fine descriptive pasages making “World’s End” a most realistic place indeed, with warmly pictured characters, including funny and lovable negro servants.

Richard had peculiar views as to religion and marriage. He considered them “inartistic.” The universe was to him a vast studio. At twenty-six his enthusiasms gave him keener delight than they did to those about him. He did not restrict his attention to painting, for besides that he was, at the time of the opening of the story, engaged in writing a one-act opera in accordance with the Chinese laws of music which he maintained constituted the only real tonic-scale; and was also writing a volume of poems, the latest of his poems being “The Daughter of Ypocras.” Expounding this poem, he said: “Ypocras was a lovely girl who had been changed into a dragon and doomed to retain this fearful shape until some lover, knowing her plight, should be bold enough to kiss her on the mouth. The lover comes and, being often mirrored in the beautiful eyes which are all that remain to her of her woman’s form, is drawn gradually into doting on the rare sinuosities of her dragon-shape, and the play of the light along her scales of gold and violet. So that when at last his kiss transforms her again to woman, his artist heart breaks at the loss of his exquisite dragon, and he sinks dying at the feet of the sweetly normal maiden who has taken her place.” Richard further explained that he had endeavored in the poem to reveal some of the dark yet radiant magic lurking in the mysterious perversities of femininity, as opposed to the common-place attraction of what he called “the daylight charm of the uncomplex woman.”

Such twisted views were characteristic of Richard. For instance, when he came suddenly upon Phoebe in her garden, helpet crow “Jimmy Toots” was perched on her shoulder and as she caught sight of Richard she tried with both hands to tear “Jimmy Toots” from his perch but Richard, seeing “a picture of a young woman in an April garden with a bird of ill-omen on her shoulder,” urged her not to take it down.

“You with that crow are like a poem by Baudelaire” and forthwith “Jimmy Toots” became “M. Baudelaire” to Richard. How could one of his intensely artistic nature possibly employ such an inelegant term as “Jimmy Toots.”

Richard paints her picture in the garden with “M. Baudelaire,” calling the painting “Pandore et le Genie du Coffre.” In the painting he exaggerated a likeness he saw in her to a Botticelli, so that the head seemed a little small for the long nymphean limbs. “But the translation of Jimmy Crow into a bird of sombre presage was wholly a masterpiece.

Far more than any serpent he seemed fitted to whisper of honeyed sins in the ear of this virginal Eve-Pandore.

When Phoebe was permitted to see the painting her first words were, “Are my . . . am I quite as ... as long as that?” Her father, while admitting that the treatment was certainly original, considered that his living Phoebe was far prettier than Richard’s “Pandore.”

The reader can well imagine the effect of an attractive yet wholly self-centred young man in his influence upon the young woman who saw in him the ideal for whom she waited and will realize something of the possibilities which this situation opens to the author in working out the story and it is like getting into God’s clear sunshine when the influence of Owen Randolph eventually gains precedence.

The sinking of the Endurance 1 November 1915

Source: Wikipedia

Two Books & Two Notorious Alabama Authors

Lately I've been going through my book collection in an effort to downsize--no, really! Anyway, I came across these two novels written by Alabama authors who were, shall we say, a bit controversial back in the day. I haven't read either one, but thought I'd put together a piece on the authors.

We can say some things for certain about James Franklin Camper, Jr., but many of his life activities are murky to say the least. He was born in Hueytown in 1942; his parents were Frank and Betty Camper. Their son spent time in Vietnam, claiming participation in the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol [the Army Rangers] with the 4th Infantry Division. Military records indicate a year of truck driving. Then he became absent without leave, later supposedly working as a covert operative for the FBI infiltrating "leftwing" political groups. Camper also claimed to have trained forces in Saudi Arabia and Panama and worked covert operations in El Salvador and Guatemala.  

Camper and his wife settled in Dolomite in 1980, but he was soon running a mercenary school in south Florida. In March 1981 Camper, fellow instructor Robert Lisenby and several students--all armed and wearing camouflage--were arrested some two miles from the Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant. The men were charged with felony trespassing and fined; Camper returned to Alabama after a night in jail. Later that year he would testify against Lisenby about a plot in which the men were hired by one drug gang to kill the leader of a rival gang in Miami.

The mercenary school was relocated to acreage a few miles from Dolomite, and he also opened a gun store in Hueytown. Camper's involvement in strange events continued. Four Sikhs who trained at the school in 1985 were later suspected of involvement in the 1985 bombing of Air India flight 182, which blew up over Ireland and killed 329 people. That same year he apparently tipped off the FBI about a plot to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi New Orleans during the Indian Prime Minister's diplomatic visit to the U.S. 

In March 1986 Camper was arrested for helping two women attempt to plant  bombs and kill employees at a school they operated. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison; associates received lesser terms. While in Leavenworth Camper was burned by scalding water in 1987 after a 60 Minutes story described him as an informant. Camper testified at a public U.S. Senate hearing in which some of his covert work for the FBI was confirmed. 

After serving five and a half years, Camper was released and settled with his wife in Birmingham. For a time he ran a computer store, ABC Computers. 

Wait--there's more! Camper is also an author of some fifteen novels and non-fiction books. One of the novels is the 1989 title below issued by Dell Publishing. The other, Sand Castles, was published in 1979. The novels may be based on their author's real exploits.  

I am indebted to the entries on Camper at BhamWiki and Wikipedia for the information above. More information can be found there. A "Soldiers of Fortune/Mercenary Wars" page that praises the "real thing" of Camper's military and covert careers can be found here. 

Asa Earl Carter [1925-1979] is another notorious figure in state history. For many years his dual identity was hidden, but for some time now the hoax he perpetrated has been well known. 

Carter was born in Oxford, near Anniston. After high school he served in the U.S. Navy, then studied journalism at the University of Colorado. By 1953 he was back in Alabama, broadcasting anti-Semitic and other racist commentary on a Birmingham radio station.

He found a receptive audience in the state and also wrote and published a white supremacist magazine, The Southerner. He even went so far as to join a racist paramilitary revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Although Carter was not involved, members of this group attacked Nat King Cole in Birmingham in 1956 and castrated a black man the following year. 

In the early 1960's Carter began his stint as a speech writer for George Wallace, who often hid and denied the connection. Carter quit the relationship in 1968, and in 1970 ran against Wallace in the Democratic primary for governor. That effort was unsuccessful; Carter was so racist he made Wallace look moderate in Alabama. 

Carter and his wife had moved to Abilene, Texas, by 1973; his transformation to "Forrest" had begun. He published his first novel, The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales, which was later published as Gone to Texas. A sequel, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, appeared in 1976. Two years later his novel Watch Me on the Mountain, explored a similar theme when Geronimo seeks revenge for the killing of his family by U.S. soldiers. 

Also published in 1976 was a coming of age tale, The Education of Little Tree. Carter claimed the story, about an orphaned Cherokee boy, was autobiographical. the book was a modest success at the time of first publication. However, the Clint Eastwood film Outlaw Josey Wales based on Carter's first two novels turned a spotlight on the author. Alabama journalist and author Wayne Greenhaw made the connection between Asa Carter, segregationist, and Forrest Carter, Cherokee memoirist. 

Carter continued to deny it up until his ignominious but somehow fitting end. In June 1979 he fell during a drunken brawl with a son in Abilene, hit his head and died. He is buried in a Methodist church cemetery near Oxford.

Little Tree achieved its greatest success after Carter's death. A paperback edition published in the late 1980's reached the New York Times non-fiction best seller list by 1991. Over a million copies have been sold. In 1991 historian Dan T. Carter, who has written extensively on George Wallace, unmasked the hoax of "Forrest" Carter and his fabricated memoir with fake Cherokee words. During his life Carter had transformed himself into a mustachioed, cowboy hat-wearing, dark complected Cherokee, and even his widow maintained the hoax until she had to acknowledge it after Carter's article. 

When the 25th anniversary publication of Little Tree appeared, the phrase "true story" had been removed from the cover. A film version of the book was released in 1997. More on Asa/Forrest Carter can be found in a February 1992 article by Dana Rubin in the Texas Monthly. The Handbook of Texas even has an entry on him. A look at literary forgeries, including fake memoirs, can be found here.

So who's up next in the Alabama Author Hall of Shame? Perhaps it's Gustav Hasford's turn. 

Frank Camper in 1985

Source: BhamWiki

Mobile and a "Mission of Fear"

I recently read this book which has resided on my shelves for many years and discovered that much of it is set in and around Mobile, Alabama. Let's investigate. 

George Harmon Coxe [1901-1984] was a prolific author of fiction in various genres--detective tales, mysteries, thrillers. He published 63 novels and dozens of stories between 1932 and 1975. Around 1922 he began work for various newspapers and published a few stories in the pulps. He won a Grand Master designation from the Mystery Writers of America in 1964. 

Mission of Fear was published in 1963. The novel is a "stand-alone", i.e. not one of Coxe's series works. Marion and John Hayden are living the happy married life in suburbia when a stranger appears with bad news: Marion's first husband Ted Corbin did not die in a plane crash as reported. That makes Marion a bigamist and liable for return of the rather large life insurance payout.

After a bit of detective work John figures he has located Corbin in Mobile. Hayden's trip to the city and the area occupies pages 96-142. He has a window seat on the flight from Atlanta to Mobile and observes the landscape as the plane descends. "The land beneath the wingtip seem gently rolling now, with cultivated areas interspersed with stands of pine. For the past few minutes they had flown over one river after another, each seemingly flowing southward toward the gulf or bay, but he was hazy about his geography in that area and he could only identify those which were shown on the airline map--the Alabama first, the Tensaw, the Mobile." 

Coxe also describes Hayden's drive from the airport into the city as he passes more and more development, a large shopping center, increasing traffic. He finally reaches his new motel a few blocks beyond Government Street. Other landmarks are mentioned such as Conti Street, and Hayden makes a couple of trips through the Bankhead Tunnel. One area also noted is Bayou La Batre. 

Corbin lives across the Bay in Fairview, apparently a stand-in for Fairhope. Why this name is changed but not others is a mystery. There is a Fairview in Alabama, but it's much further north in Cullman County. A significant portion of the Alabama section of the book is set in "Fairview". It also includes a description of the drive from Mobile to New Orleans when Hayden & Corbin decide to fly out of the Big Easy instead of Mobile. Pascagoula, Ocean Springs, Biloxi, Gulfport, Long Beach and Pass Christian all are mentioned. 

I've found no connection to Alabama in Coxe's biographical information online, but he did work for a newspaper in Florida at one point during his journalism career. Coxe has two other Alabama connections by way of films adapted from his work. The 1936 film Murder with Pictures was based on Coxe's first novel published the previous year. The female lead is Birmingham native Gail Patrick; I've written several blog posts about her life and career. Here's Flash Casey is a 1938 film based on Coxe's story "Return Engagement" first published in the March 1934 issue of the legendary Black Mask magazine. That film starred Boots Mallory, who grew up in Mobile. 

This novel is a fun read; Coxe was a writer who kept the story moving and created interesting characters. This title is the first thing by him I've read; I'll have to seek out more. Author James Reasoner has written an appreciation of Coxe that's available here. 

Alabama Author: Gwen Bristow

Several states can claim Gwen Bristow including South Carolina, Louisiana, Connecticut, Mississippi, California and Alabama. Let's investigate.

She was born in Marion, South Carolina, on September 16, 1903. Her writing efforts seem to have begun with her reporting of junior high school events to a local newspaper. Since her father Louis Jordan Bristow was a Baptist minister, she began college at Anderson Bible College in that South Carolina town. After a year she transferred to Judson College, a very strict Baptist women's college in Marion, Alabama. Despite her dislike of the rules,, Bristow continued her artistic development. She directed and played men's roles in two plays, and in 1923 was voted "Most Original" by her junior class peers. 

Upon graduating the following year, Bristow began working odd jobs so she could study journalism at Columbia University in New York City. She only spent a year in the Big Apple, however. Bristow worked a summer job at the New Orleans Times-Picayune and when the paper offered her a permanent post; she took it. At first she lived with her parents on the grounds of Southern Baptist Hospital, where her father had become Superintendent. 

Bristow spent much of the 1920's covering a range of events for the newspaper, including crimes and the great flood of 1927. She also wrote obituaries of prominent people and interviewed actors visiting the city. She also wrote poetry during this period and in 1926 published a small collection, The Alien and Other Poems. 

While covering a murder trial Bristow met fellow journalist Bruce Manning, and they eloped on January 14, 1929, to avoid objections from her Baptist family to Manning's Catholicism. They moved into an apartment on 627 Ursuline Street in the French Quarter. 

The couple soon collaborated on a novel, The Invisible Host, published by the Mystery League in 1930. From 1930 until 1933 the League published 30 hardcover mysteries that were inexpensive but featured striking Art Deco covers. The early titles--The Invisible Host was sixth in the series--sold for a quarter. I presume that because of the Great Depression the publisher folded after issuing only one title in 1933. 

The plot of the book will be familiar to anyone who's read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None or seen any of the film versions. Eight people known to each other receive anonymous invitations to attend dinner at a New Orleans penthouse. As the unseen host informs them over radio, the place is booby-trapped, and they will all die before morning. Complications ensue. 

The Invisible Host was soon adapted into a Broadway play called The Ninth Guest by prolific playwright Owen Davis. A 1934 film adaptation used the same title as the play. Christie is presumed not to have read or seen these materials before writing her famous novel, which was published in November 1939.

For the next two years Bristow and Manning continued writing together and produced three more books: The Gutenberg Murders (1931), The Mardi Gras Murders (1932) and Two and Two Make Twenty-Two (1932). After these four collaborations their writing careers diverged when they moved to Hollywood in 1934.

Manning published one novel, Party Wire, in 1935, and then began working as a screenwriter, director and producer until 1957. He died in 1965. Bristow also wrote some novels on her own, couldn't find a publisher and destroyed the manuscripts. Then she began writing the first of what became three popular Louisiana plantation novels: Deep Summer (1937), The Handsome Road (1938), and This Side of Glory (1940). These works follow two families over several generations. 

Bristow published several more novels before her death in 1980. She also published two memoirs, Gwen Bristow, A Self-Portrait (1941) and From Pigtails to Wedding Bells (1977). I wonder if she covers any of her time at Judson in either of those books. 

Source: Wikipedia

Book jacket for the 1930 first edition as reproduced at Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC

Author Gwen Bristow, author of "Celia Garth." Shown here with Melvin Shortess at her book signing. This photo was probably taken at the Shortess Book Store in New Orleans in 1955. Melvin H. (1909-1975) & Helen T. (1910-1979) Shortess were proprietors of the Shortess Book Store.

Source: Louisiana Digital Library

This novel was first published in 1959. That probably means the caption above has "1955" in error. 

This novel, which appeared in 1937, was the first volume of Bristow's Plantation Trilogy. This paperback edition was published in 1947. 

This 1950 novel was a bestseller, and a film version, with screenplay by Bruce Manning, was released in 1954.

Source: Fantastic Fiction

Some Further Reading, etc. 

Bristow, Gwen. Papers. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Dean, Lauren. “Gwen Bristow: Best Selling Author 1903-1980,” New Orleans Historical, accessed July 31, 2020, https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/558

Lowry, Julia B. “Carolina’s Gwen Bristow Finds She’s Obliged to Write!” Columbia State Magazine, November 5, 1950, pp. 6–7.

MacNebb, Betty L. “Gwen Bristow: Carolina’s Best Seller.” South Carolina Magazine 12 (July 1949): 8, 10.

Theriot, Billie J. “Gwen Bristow: A Biography with Criticism of Her Plantation Trilogy.” Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1994.

Alabama Author: John Craig Stewart

One thing I like to do on this blog is highlight some of Alabama's lesser known authors. The state has a rich literary history that's not limited to such well known figures as Harper Lee, Fannie Flagg and Rick Bragg. So next up in this post is John Craig Stewart.

Stewart was born in Selma on January 20, 1915 and died in North Carolina in 2003. According to the 1940 U.S. Census he was living in Montgomery and had been there since 1935. His address was given as 615 South Perry Street. Stewart had married Patti Gee Martin in February 1939. On October 16, 1940, he registered for the military draft, and that form gives us more information. Stewart was six feet tall and weighed 160 pounds, with light complexion, blue eyes and brown hair. 

We can find a fairly detailed outline of his subsequent life and career at the Alabama Authors site maintained by the University of Alabama Libraries. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II from 1941 until 1945, leaving the military with the rank of major. By 1950 he had earned bachelor and master degrees from the University of Alabama and joined the faculty there. He and Patti divorced in 1952; Stewart married Lila Harper in 1960.

Stewart taught in Tuscaloosa until 1964, when he relocated to Mobile and the newly established University of South Alabama. He left that school in 1983 and moved to North Carolina, where he died on April 16, 2003. He was buried in that state in Saint Paul's in the Valley Cemetery in Transylvania County. The University of South Alabama's McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library has a collection of his papers and publications. The Alabama Authors entry notes, "The University of South Alabama established the John Craig Stewart Creative Writing Award, given annually to outstanding student writers, in his honor." I have been unable to find out anything more about this award.  


Stewart's publications include both fiction and non-fiction. His first novel Through the First Gate appeared in 1960; a second, Muscogee Twilight in 1965 and a third one, The Last to Know in 1981. He also published short stories and  articles on Alabama history. His one non-fiction book was the 1975 The Governors of Alabama. He also contributed to the textbook for elementary school students, Know Alabama, and to Rivers of Alabama.

More details and comments are below.   

New York; Dodd, Mead, 1960

Northport, Ala.: American Southern Pub. Co., 1965

This back cover offers a bit more information about Stewart. Several magazines that published his short stories are mentioned; I've only found details on one, noted below. We learn that Stewart was living in Spanish Fort, a town of less than 2400 people at the time. Also mentioned is the publisher's plan to issue a collection of his short stories, a volume that apparently never appeared. The Lincoln-Mercury Times 1951 article by Stewart, "University of Alabama", can be found here.

 Gretna, La.; Pelican Pub. Co., 1975

Northport: Colonial Press, 1957

A fifth edition was published in 1981. The first edition appeared in 1955.

Huntsville: Strode Publishers, 1968

Stewart published the novel The Last to Know in 1981, but I have been unable to find a cover image.

Source: Find-A-Grave

The Saturday Evening Post [v228 #13, September 24, 1955] (154pp, 10½" x 13½", cover by George Hughes)
Details supplied by K. Becker from Table of Contents.
• 19 · The Case of the Bouncing Mayor · Harold H. Martin · ar
• 22 · Tugboat Annie Loses a Race [Tugboat Annie] · Norman Reilly Raine · nv
• 24 · Face of America: Under the High Tetons · Grant Heilman · ar
• 26 · The Man Who Married for Money · Robert Standish · ss
• 28 · The Things That Happen on TV! · Seymour Berns · ar
• 30 · Outlaw Dog · John Craig Stewart · ss
• 31 · Big Time Football Blues (Villanova) · Harry T. Paxton & Jim Leaming · ar
• 32 · Trouble in the Suburbs [Part 2 of 3] · Hal Burton · ar
• 34 · Reno Bound · Joseph Carroll · ss
• 36 · He Made the Court Supreme · Virginius Dabney · ar
• 37 · The Kid Nobody Could Handle · Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. · ss
• 38 · The Neighbors Inherited $11,000,000 · Bill Wolf · ar
• 40 · A Killer Came to Town [Part 2 of 2] · Verne Athanas · sl
• 45 · Underworld U.S.A. [Part 4 of 8] · Joseph F. Dinneen · sl
• 46 · They Give Us a Good Name · Joseph F. Repplier · ar
• 
  

The only published short story by Stewart I've tracked down so far is this one in a 1955 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. I notice some fellow named Kurt Vonnegut also had a story in this issue; he sounds familiar....

Source: FictionMags Index