Woody Guthrie

October 15, 2020
Just when you thought you knew Woody Guthrie, the troubadour who lived a singular American life, along comes a revealing and reorienting new portrait. Based on a vast archive of journals, letters, and artworks, this brief biographical essay focuses on the tragedies, traumas, and sometimes startling interior landscapes that shaped Guthrie's life and work in mostly underacknowledged ways. Wrenching early violence and his mother's physical and mental disintegration were only the beginning. Dust Bowl wanderings and music-making gave Guthrie his influential new path. Stadler's scholarly filters concerning the body and politics open the door to new angles on Guthrie's sense of vulnerable lives and racial justice. The bodily theme resonates in Guthrie's fateful encounter with New York's modern dance scene of 1942. Enhancing his leftist cultural context, it led to a creative triumph as well as to his second marriage (of three). But looming over his art and his increasingly erratic behavior was the personal horror of Huntington's disease, the neurological mystery that afflicted his mother. It didn't fully quash his writing, but it led to his death at 55.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

October 23, 2020

Stadler (English, Haverford Coll.; Troubling Minds) delves into the Woody Guthrie archives to uncover the motivations behind the singer-songwriter's beliefs and actions. Rather than relying on the mythic image of Guthrie (1912-67) as a freewheeling, loner hobo who courageously championed the dispossessed, he discovers a vulnerable, somewhat fragile man wracked by shame, trauma, and guilt from his mother's Huntington's disease and who considered intimate relationships as the way to combat cutthroat capitalism. The author describes Guthrie's mother's entry into a mental institution after she set fire to his father, Guthrie's first marriage, his rise as a protest singer in New York City, and his myth-making 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory. Stadler continues with Guthrie's tumultuous marriage to dancer Marjorie Mazia, the numbing death of a daughter, his 1949 conviction of obscenity, an ongoing commitment to antiracism, and a gradual decline from Huntington's disease. Throughout, Stadler casts Guthrie as a bridge between the Communist-dominated old left and new left cultural politics. VERDICT Though sometimes unable to explain the chasm between Guthrie's words and actions, the author offers a well-researched addition to the Guthrie bibliography for general readers that complements Joe Klein's standard biography, Woody Guthrie: A Life.--David P. Szatmary, formerly with Univ. of Washington, Seattle

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