Walker Winslow

Walker Winslow
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Born	(1905-02-02)February 2, 1905 Idaho, U.S.
Died	1969 (aged 63–64)
Pen name	Harold Maine
Occupation	Novelist Poet
Citizenship	United States

Walker Winslow (February 2, 1905 – 1969) was an American poet and novelist, one of whose novels was published under the pseudonym Harold Maine. Winslow was something of a larger than life character: "Walker's forte was people" wrote Henry Miller in his 1957 book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. Miller also described is friend's writing talent:

The man who could write like a breeze was Walker Winslow. Walker had written several books, under various names, before coming to Big Sur. He had also written heaps of poems. But it was not until he began his autobiographical novel, If a Man Be Mad, that he found his true vein.

Life and work

Walker Winslow was born in Idaho. He left home in his teenage years and joined the army, and was already drinking heavily by the age of 18.

In the mid 1930s Winslow was writing poetry, working on a novel, and living in Honolulu, with his wife Kathryn, who was also writing and publishing poetry. In Hawaii Winslow worked in the publicity departments of the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce and also in the sugar industry.

In 1938 Winslow was living in Portland, Oregon, and working on 'Mining Life in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest' for the Federal Writers' Project. By 1939 he had been transferred to Denver, Colorado with the help of his new wife Helen's former father-in-law, the artist Boardman Robinson. Helen had been an actress and a dancer in New York, and knew figures from that city's literary scene, such as Sinclair Lewis and Thomas Wolfe, and herself was working on the draft of a novel. In Denver, Walker and Helen became friends of Weldon Kees and his wife Ann, after they rented an apartment near the Kees. Weldon Kees had been impressed by the fact that Winslow had had eight poems appear in an illustrated full page of Esquire. Winslow was a heavy drinker, and his antics were often described in Ann Kees' letters to the Kees' friend Norris Getty. In one drinking binge which started on a Saturday, was fuelled by copious drinks at a dinner with the Kees on Sunday, and culminated a few days later at the house of the poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril, who at that time was a publicity man for Great Western Sugar; Winslow ended up punching the sugar company's president. Following this he was committed to the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo.

In 1941 Man in Paradise, subtitled 'A Novel of Hawaii as it is today,' was published by Smith & Durrell, New York

In the mid 1940s Winslow was in California, and spent time at Big Sur where he was close to Henry Miller. In 1945 he helped Miller publish in alter Retour New York in pamphlet form. Miller describes how one morning Winslow woke him early to come and witness a strange phenomenon of what looked like twin stars gyrating near the horizon, and Miller goes on to talk about how there were subsequently many reports of 'flying saucers' in the area. Winslow's former wife Kathryn Winslow, had met Miller at Big Sur in 1944, and four years later with her new husband William Mecham was to open a sort of bookstore devoted to selling his work, called “M, the studio for Henry Miller” in the area of Chicago’s old Jackson Park art colony. Her biography of Miller, Henry Miller: Full of Life was published in 1986. In his time at Big Sur, Winslow was working on a new book. Henry Miller described Winslow's approach to work: "And then there was Walker Winslow, who was then writing If a Man Be Mad, which turned out to be a best seller. Walker wrote at top speed, and seemingly without interruption, in a tiny shack by the roadside which Emil White had built to house the steady stream of stragglers who were forever busting in on him for a day, a week, a month or a year."

In 1947, using the pseudonym Harold Maine, If a Man Be Mad was published by Doubleday (publisher), and was subsequently brought out by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, in 1952 and translated into French by Élisabeth Guertic (as Quand un homme est fou), being published in 1954 by Corrêa. In a newspaper review of the book, a clipping of which Winslow kept, and which is annotated with the name Albert Deutsch, presumably the reviewer, the book was described as "absorbing". The review says: "Written by an unusually sensitive artist, the book in many ways is more gripping and certainly more informative than the best-selling The Lost Weekend (novel). Maine saw the insides of several mental hospitals as both patient and ward attendant; his revelations are well worth reading."

Winslow was going by the name Harold Maine in the late 1940s and Edna Manley (b.1908), whom he married following her divorce from the writer Ludwig Lewisohn, addressed letters to him under that name while he was working at the Winter Veteran's Hospital in Topeka, Kansas in the middle of 1948. Winslow/Maine had initially been invited by Karl Menninger to present a lecture to the hospital staff on the subject of Ward Management. Menninger noted advance notification of the appearance of Harold Maine's article 'We Can Save the Mentally Sick?' in The Saturday Evening Post. At the time of his initial involvement with the Topeka Hospital Winslow was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Edna was writing to him from Rochester, New York. By late 1949 Walker was living in Pleasanton, California and Edna, continuing a pattern of the couple living separately, in Pacific Grove, California.

In 1956 Winslow wrote a book about the Menninger clinic where he had worked as a lay therapist. The book is chiefly a biography of Charles Frederick Menninger, but also brings the rest of his family into a skilfully constructed narrative.

Around 1961 he was acting as the director of Beacon House, Monterey, California, which was a community rehabilitation center for alcoholics. He died in 1969 in California.

Sources and bibliography

• Arthur Hoyle, The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur, (Skyhorse Publishing Inc, 2016)
• Robert E. Knoll (ed.), Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation, (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
• Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, (New York: New Directions, 1957)
• James Reidel, Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees, (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2003)

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