He won two Pulitzer Prizes. The historian David McCullough once called him “the writer’s writer, the biographer’s biographer” and said of him that “with the exception of Wallace Stegner, no living American has so distinguished himself in both fiction and history.” Pope Pius XII made him a papal knight. America gave him its Edmund Campion Award. The University of Notre Dame honored him with its Laetare Medal. He wrote 17 novels and over 25 works of nonfiction.
So why have you never heard of Paul Horgan?
I know what you’re going to say: “Sure I have, that’s Crocodile Dundee.” Different Paul.
In a New York Times obituary in 1995, Richard Bernstein called Paul Horgan “a writer of remarkable breadth” but also noted that Horgan had never achieved the recognition seemingly due him:
Still, despite much praise and commercial success, Mr. Horgan was commonly excluded from the lists of the foremost American writers of the century. Among the reasons given by critics who felt he belonged in the top rank were that his writing was too traditional and old-fashioned to compete with the likes of Faulkner or Hemingway; that he was seen primarily as a Catholic writer; that his writing, so concentrated on the Southwest, was too regional, and that he spread himself too thin over so many subjects and fields of interest.
Which prompts some questions: Was John Cheever too much of an Episcopalian writer? Philip Roth too Jewish? Does Dennis Lehane focus too much on Boston? And did John Steinbeck “spread himself too thin over so many subjects and fields of interest”? Harrumph. But the fact that the Times had to ask the question—why did this guy fly under the radar—is its own evidence of Horgan’s output and influence.
In 1974, Walker Percy (yes, that Walker Percy) reviewed Horgan’s Approaches to Writing for America, noting that the success Horgan did have was as due to doggedness and careful attention to craft as much as anything. “Perhaps most valuable and pleasing, and funny, is Horgan’s account of his own literary apprenticeship, the writing of five unpublished novels, the tracing out of what he was trying to do in each and how he went wrong,” Percy wrote. “Bad writing is instructive in its own way. A fine writer’s thoughtful analysis of his own trials and errors is valuable indeed.”
Horgan was born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1903, but his family moved to Albuquerque, N.M., in 1915 after his father was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He graduated in 1923 from the New Mexico Military Institute (other famous alums include the hotelier Conrad Hilton, the painter Peter Hurd and Dallas Cowboys legend Roger Staubach; Horgan also met Robert Oppenheimer during Oppie’s visit there in 1922), where he also worked from 1926 to 1942 as a librarian. The school later named its library after him.
After a short time working for a local paper and a one-year stint at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., Horgan worked for a theater company for a few years before returning to N.M.M.I., joining the long list of American novelists who didn’t have much use for college. He published his first novel, The Fault of Angels, in 1933; it was followed by 16 more in the years to follow, including A Distant Trumpet and Things As They Are. Most of his novels and short stories are not as priest-centric as those of J. F. Powers, but their Catholic inflection is equally strong.
His many nonfiction works included Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, which won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for History, and Lamy of Santa Fe, which earned him a second Pulitzer in 1976. The latter was a biography of Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first archbishop of Santa Fe and the inspiration for the character of Bishop Latour in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. (Horgan’s English teacher in his freshman year of high school was Elsie Cather, Willa’s sister.)
During World War II, Horgan served in the Army Information Branch in Washington, D.C., where he was honored with the Legion of Merit. In 1957, Pope Pius XII made him a Knight of Saint Gregory for his contributions to Catholic letters. In 1959, he moved to the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., where he would live and work for the next 36 years. Former Commonweal editor Paul Baumann, who worked for the Center for Advanced Studies while a student, wrote of Horgan in a 2018 reminiscence for Commonweal: “Like his writing, he was genteel, gracious, and formal.”
Horgan also taught briefly at the famous University of Iowa Writers Workshop and at Yale University.
In 1963, Horgan found himself in Rome at the opening of the second session of the Second Vatican Council. He didn’t think much of the music (“several choirs were involved by turns, all equally strident, faithless to pitch, indifferent to rhythm, tempo, and ensemble”), but was still clearly moved by the experience. He wrote the following in a later essay, “Roma Barocca,” quoted by Ralph McInerny when Notre Dame gave Horgan its Laetare Medal:
Before us in the shower of light falling from within the lappets of the baldacchino, the shift and weave, the unfolding of the Pontifical High Mass was beginning as Paul VI, attended by prelates who managed the folds of his huge white and gold cope, censed the altar at all its dimensions; for it stood there as an image of the body of Christ upon which the holy sacrifice itself would once again be enacted.
Horgan wrote for America many times over the years, with his first contribution being a 1956 review of Oliver La Farge’s BehindThe Mountains, about a subject Horgan knew well: New Mexico. (Random fact: La Farge, who won the Pulitzer Prize himself in 1929 for his novel Laughing Boy, was the nephew of civil rights pioneer and longtime America editor John La Farge, S.J.) Horgan’s last article in the magazine came 35 years later, a 1991 tribute to Walker Percy after Percy’s death the year before.
Horgan himself died in Middleton on March 8, 1995, of a heart attack. He was 91 years old. While many of his works had gone out of print, various publishers have brought out new editions of the better-known novels, biographies and histories in the years since his death.
When Horgan was honored by America in 1957 with its Campion Award, given to a “noted Christian person of letters,” he had the following to say in his speech accepting the honor:
And I give my thanks to Him from whom we all receive whatever share may be ours of faith and vision, love of life and desire to celebrate it in acts of creation through the artist’s passion and the craftsman’s discipline. I give my thanks for whatever of these may dwell in me by His favor, and by His favor may move me to my daily task.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Swift Witness,” by Jim Richards. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus this summer while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
- The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
- What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
- Poet, feminist and nun: Sister Madeleva Wolff
- Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
- Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
- Who’s in hell? Hans Urs von Balthasar had thoughts.
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
