Book Reviews

Illinois' literary heritage

JOHN E. HALLWAS, Ph.D., prolific and versatile medieval scholar at Western Illinois University, authority on downstate literature and regional history, has increased his literary output for 1984 to four books.

His Selected Writings of Robert G. Ingersoll will be of general interest as the only collection by the great 19th century orator and agnostic now in print. It includes a few previously unpublished short items.

His co-editorship of Teaching the Middle Ages attests to his status as a medievalist, as does his teaching of a course in Middle English literature at WIU.

His leadership in regional studies of the Illinois Military Tract, the triangle between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, has produced two books, and volume three of the Tales From Between Two Rivers series is to appear this year. Written by senior citizens, it is co-edited by Victor Hacken, Jerilee Cain and Hallwas.

Columns from the Macomb Sunday Journal of recent years will appear in McDonough County Heritage. Like last year's Western Illinois Heritage it deals with local history, personalities, culture and folklore. Both attempt to bring greater historical awareness to the area and demonstrate Hallwas' concept of proper writing of local history.

This one-man band in the long-neglected field of Illinois literature began studies at WIU in 1963, completing bachelor's and master's degrees in English. Doctoral studies at the University of Florida were interrupted after two years, before completion of the dissertation, by the call back to WIU as specialist in Chaucerian England. After publishing articles on Middle English poetry he produced two books on Illinois poets Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters. There followed essays on numbers of other downstate writers. Several from the frontier period had never before received scholarly attention. Hallwas has published more articles on downstate authors than any other scholar.

His wide-ranging interests led to his appointment as director of regional collections for the university library, emphasizing addition of books, articles, photographs, letters, memoirs and other material on the culture of Illinois, a sizable area of undefined boundaries. He works with archivist Gordana Rezab.

He works half time editing Western Illinois Regional Studies, an interdisciplinary journal he co-founded. Previously he founded and edited Essays in Literature, a professional journal. A challenging and popular teacher (the youngest winner of the university's Faculty Lecturer Award, its top honor, and recipient of the Alumni Achievement Award), he is also an essayist, historical researcher, lecturer, encourager of adult education, amateur playwright and general handyman in stirring up interest in his causes. He organized the Western Illinois Regional Studies Association, which holds a yearly seminar on a college campus in the area.

Hallwas established himself as a literary scholar with The Poems of H.: The Lost Poet of Lincoln's Springfield (Peoria: Ellis Press, 1982). He discovered 70 poems signed "H" in the Sangamo Journal of 1831-1840. In his introduction Hallwas calls the otherwise unidentified H. the most valuable midwestern poet of his time and superior to James Hall, then the best known literary figure in the West. Further research showed that the same man, writing as "JH," published 23 less impressive poems in the Literary Digest of London between 1813 and 1823. Except that H. was a writer in both the British and American traditions, all Hallwas knows is that he was a well-educated bachelor, raised in Cornwall, once resident in or near London, and that he was a taverner in Springfield. His other poetry and details of his Springfield residence are unknown.

As part of a WIU monograph series Hallwas last year published Thomas Gregg: Early Illinois Journalist and Writer, an account of a talented man's unsuccessful newspaper career in Mississippi River towns. His columns that were the basis for Western Illinois Heritage have been replaced by a "Visions and Values" commentary that has an Illinois focus and appears weekly in several downstate papers.

For the future, Hallwas has the talent and energy to write a badly needed, definitive book on downstate Illinois literature. And he hasn't yet written on the "Mormon War" of 1844-1845 from the viewpoint of Hancock County residents. Both Western Illinois Heritage and Thomas Gregg contain bits of information not found in standard histories.

Robert P. Howard, retired state capital correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, is author of Illinois: A History of the Prairie State.

32/May 1984/Illinois Issues