Rough and Rowdy Ways: The Life and Hard Times of Edward Anderson by Patrick Bennett
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Overview: Times were tough in the thirties, and tough guys chronicled the era in newspapers, short stories, and novels, in prose that was terse, hard-boiled, bleak. One such writer was a Texan named Edward Anderson.
Rough and Rowdy Ways is the story of Edward Anderson, primarily in what were, ironically, his golden years — the Great Depression. The laconic loner hopped freights, wrote two proletarian novels of the social underclass, looked for inspiration in a shot glass, and mixed with Hollywood celebrities while employed as a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers.
A former journalist, Patrick Bennett has used the skills of an investigative reporter to pluck Anderson from almost complete obscurity. Before Anderson even began his brief literary career, he had worked on more than two dozen newspapers in Texas and the Southwest. Leaving the news desk of the Houston Post in 1930, twenty-five-year-old Anderson worked his way to Europe on a freighter and returned a year later to write fiction for pulp magazines, working out of his parents’ garage in Abilene, Texas. He then took off for a year of hoboing from coast to coast, riding the rails and eating in soup kitchens. Upon returning, he was ready to write his first novel. Hungry Men, which in 1935 won the Doubleday-6’^o)7 magazine award and was a Literary Guild selection. Anderson had married Anne Bates in 1934, and with a wedding gift of one hundred dollars, they went to New Orleans and did re- search for crime magazine stories. With the Doubleday-tS’/o;^; prize money, they returned to Texas and interviewed Anderson’s cousin, a convicted bank robber, at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. The resulting novel. Thieves Like Us, established Anderson as a novelist in a class with Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, and it was twice made into a movie, the remake directed by Robert Altman.
When the thirties ended, however, the hard-times storytelling that was Anderson’s genius was no longer in fashion, and his family suffered the effects of his rejection slips, unemployment, and alcoholism. After three broken marriages to Anne, Edward became like some of the old hoboes he knew in his youth — traveling, working, drinking, getting fired. Attracted to theoretical aspects of fascism, anti-Semitism, and Swedenborgianism, Anderson became an eccentric unpopular among intellectuals as well as the poor folk whose plights he had sketched so well in prose. He died in Brownsville, Texas, in 1969, leaving the survivors of his first family, a subsequent wife and child, and two wellcrafted novels of a distinctive literary genre and historical era.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs
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