MONROE - When John Evangelist Walsh was young, he didn't think he had what it takes to write a book.
As it turned out, he did.
In fact, he had what it takes to do what most writers can only dream: He wrote what he wanted, when he wanted. During a writing career that spanned more than 50 years, he wrote more than 25 books on subjects ranging from the Shroud of Turin to literary figures such as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Edgar Allen Poe.
Walsh, 87, died quietly in Monroe March 19 after a short illness. His passing was noted with an obituary in The New York Times, a testament to the literary legacy Walsh leaves behind.
Walsh was a well-known and well-respected figure in the publishing world. He had a number of editorial positions, working for publishing giants such as Prentice Hall and Simon & Schuster. His reputation and deep connections allowed Walsh to pursue his career on his own terms, said his son Timothy Walsh, who is a writer himself and works as the director of the main undergraduate advising service at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"He knew everybody in publishing," Timothy said.
Walsh would accept an editorial position at a publishing house and then quit to work on a book. When the book was finished, he would pick up another editorial position until he found a new book project to undertake.
Walsh's work as the project editor on a team that condensed the Bible for Reader's Digest in 1982 was perhaps the work that brought him the most exposure. Walsh and his team condensed the Revised Standard Version Bible by 40 percent in a project that took seven editors three years to complete.
The Reader's Digest Bible was a "big accomplishment," Timothy said. The project consumed his father, a devout Catholic, and he "took it as a very serious responsibility."
But it's not the Bible project that his father would point to as his grandest accomplishment, Timothy said.
Rather, his father would say his greatest achievement was creating a successful career as a writer on his own terms. "He wanted to be able to pick the projects he wanted."
And that's exactly what Walsh did.
***
Walsh had an endless curiosity, reflected in the varied subject matter of his books. Besides Dickinson, Frost and Poe, he tackled John Keats, Abraham Lincoln and Will Rogers. He wrote about the Wright Brothers, and the legend and the fraud of the Piltdown man, the purported missing link between man and ape. He wrote about Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst and the movie "Citizen Kane." While most of his work was nonfiction, primarily literary biographies, he penned a novel, "The Man Who Buried Jesus," a fictional account of Nicodemus. He won an Edgar Award for a book on Poe and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize.
Walsh's wife Dorothy recalled someone once told her husband he should quit "living book to book. Write a good, sexy novel and you'll never have to worry about money."
Walsh replied: "It takes talent to write a good, sexy book and I don't have that kind of talent."
Instead, Walsh's talent was making complex subjects approachable.
Walsh was a scholar, Dorothy said. "He had a following. He made complicated subjects readable for any person. Anyone could read his books - they didn't have to be a scholar."
***
It was the Army that served as the springboard for Walsh's writing career. He enlisted in the Army in 1946 and served in Italy. While there, he managed to talkhis way into a position as reporter and photographer for the platoon newspaper, Timothy said. He went to Iona College in New Rochelle, New York on the GI Bill, then went to work for a newspaper in upstate New York.
Dorothy said her husband believed the best training to be a writer is to be a passionate reader as a child. He revered authors, she said, and coming from a modest upbringing, he feared any dream of becoming a writer himself was "reaching too far for the stars," she said.
"Then he got over that."
When Dorothy met Walsh, he was an editor at Prentice Hall and had started research on a book on Fort Sumter.
"When he found someone else was writing a book from the same angle, he offered his research to the other guy," Dorothy said. Walsh then began working on a book about the Shroud of Turin. A business partnership financed a research trip, and the book, Walsh's first, was published in 1963. Many considered Walsh's book ground-breaking.
His writing career was off to a solid start.
***
Dorothy said her husband was a very disciplined writer who devoted a great deal of time to his research - exhaustive research.
"He was always reading, studying," she said. "He would get interested in something and become an expert" before embarking on a new project.
"He read all the time. Virtually morning, noon and night," she said.
He was passionate about his writing. So much so that he wrote on a manual typewriter up until 14 years ago when he switched to an electric one. "He didn't want to give up the time to learn the computer," Dorothy said. "It was a distraction for him from his work."
Through the years, he worked in his home office. "He virtually lived in his office," she said, and the couple's four children knew not to disturb their father while he was working.
But he put work aside at dinnertime. The family dinner was always at 6:30 p.m., and often extended for an hour and a half or two hours. Dorothy said Walsh would engage his children in long discussions, discussions that were geared toward children, but grew to cover more complex issues as the children matured.
"There were lively conversations," she recalled. Sometimes, the children would have friends over for dinner and they "were stunned, fascinated."
And Sunday was family time, sometimes spent taking the children to museums with their friends in tow.
"He had a schedule, but he always had time for the children in the evening," Dorothy said.
Walsh's insatiable hunger for knowledge, coupled with his belief that not all research could be found in a book, often translated into grand adventures for the family.
"We got to travel around a lot. One year we went to England for a year," Timothy said. The family spent several summers on North Carolina's Outer Banks, where Kitty Hawk is located, while his father researched a book on the Wright Brothers.
When his father was researching a book on Emily Dickinson, "we spent a lot of time in her home in Amherst." Timothy recalled running around Dickinson's home with his siblings and playing in the poet's bedroom.
"There are a lot of memories. It made growing up really interesting," he said. The children also became "sort of minor experts" on whatever subject their father was researching.
Walsh believed in immersing himself in his subject matter. In later years, his parents returned to England so his father could write a book about Frost's time in England, before the American poet gained fame. They went to the cottage where Frost had lived and Walsh convinced the woman who lived there to move out for six months so he and Dorothy could stay there, Timothy said.
"Sadly, a few years later, the cottage was torn down," Timothy said.
Dorothy, too, has fond memories of the many travels for research - to Italy, France, England.
When the children were young, they traveled on the Queen Mary when they went to England. She recalled how her children, all four born within less than four years, thrived attending a two-room school house in England, where each of the 42 students were taught at his or her own speed, and how her children took weekly riding lessons at the village stables. Then there was the time the family visited a medieval fair, and she mistakenly ordered the children cider, not realizing it was hard cider.
Years later, she and her husband traveled to Spain where they met King Umberto II of Italy, who was living in exile.
"We always had very unusual vacations," she said.
***
It may seem Monroe was an unlikely spot for Walsh, a native New Yorker, to live. But it actually makes perfect sense.
Timothy came to UW-Madison to work on his Ph.D. in the early 1980s. His mother and father enjoyed visiting their son and his son, their first grandchild.
"They fell in love with Wisconsin," Timothy said. In the late 1980s, Walsh retired from Reader's Digest and knew he didn't want to stay in New Jersey, where the couple had raised their family.
A location close to Madison, which offered excellent facilities for Walsh's research, was appealing.
Timothy said his father drove around southern Wisconsin, visiting different communities.
"At some point, he just stumbled onto Monroe. There was just something about Monroe, the Square, the Courthouse, the feel of the town," he said.
His father began looking for a house and, luckily, found one that met with his wife's approval.
***
John Evangelist Walsh lived to write.
A few years ago, the whole clan went to Prince Edward Island for a family vacation. Dorothy recalled her husband took notes when no one was looking and every day made a little newspaper. "He wrote about the day's happenings and the mischief the kids got into.
"He was always the writer, wherever he went," she said.
He was writing right up until he went into the hospital about a week before he died. Walsh was treated for complications from pneumonia and after a few days, he expected to be released. When Timothy visited his father, there was no indication that Walsh wouldn't recover. "We sat and watched the Badger basketball game."
But Walsh wasn't getting better. Timothy said on the final day, his father took a turn for the worse. His father had problems with his heart and kidneys - "he had a quadruple bypass many years ago" - but ultimately, Timothy said he thinks age simply took its toll.
"His body just sort of shut down."
As he approached 90, the eventuality of dying wasn't lost on Walsh.
"He knew he didn't have long. He left lots of notes, basically to me. He had been talking to me about it, but not in any morbid sense," Timothy said.
Rather, Walsh instructed his son what to do with his as-yet unpublished body of work.
Walsh said there were nine completed but unpublished manuscripts; Timothy found 11. Some of the manuscripts his father had started 10 or 20 years ago and then set aside before coming back to them.
Dorothy said this was typical of Walsh's writing process: He would finish a book, then put it away so he could come back and read it "cold." Walsh would "take it out and polish it up" before submitting it for publication. He would often give manuscripts to Timothy to read as well.
Right before he passed away, Walsh was writing a letter of submission - in longhand - for a book on Ralph Waldo Emerson.
One of the unfinished manuscripts is a book on Pearl Harbor that was just started a couple of years ago and has some of Walsh's newest research.
Another of the books is a folk history of Monroe, currently titled "Folks Round Here: A Midwest Chronicle" that Walsh had been working on for the past 15 years and completed recently, Timothy said. It includes numerous stories about the area, from pioneering time to present.
Timothy intends to seek publication for these manuscripts to complete his father's legacy.
"It's what he would have wanted."
As it turned out, he did.
In fact, he had what it takes to do what most writers can only dream: He wrote what he wanted, when he wanted. During a writing career that spanned more than 50 years, he wrote more than 25 books on subjects ranging from the Shroud of Turin to literary figures such as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Edgar Allen Poe.
Walsh, 87, died quietly in Monroe March 19 after a short illness. His passing was noted with an obituary in The New York Times, a testament to the literary legacy Walsh leaves behind.
Walsh was a well-known and well-respected figure in the publishing world. He had a number of editorial positions, working for publishing giants such as Prentice Hall and Simon & Schuster. His reputation and deep connections allowed Walsh to pursue his career on his own terms, said his son Timothy Walsh, who is a writer himself and works as the director of the main undergraduate advising service at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"He knew everybody in publishing," Timothy said.
Walsh would accept an editorial position at a publishing house and then quit to work on a book. When the book was finished, he would pick up another editorial position until he found a new book project to undertake.
Walsh's work as the project editor on a team that condensed the Bible for Reader's Digest in 1982 was perhaps the work that brought him the most exposure. Walsh and his team condensed the Revised Standard Version Bible by 40 percent in a project that took seven editors three years to complete.
The Reader's Digest Bible was a "big accomplishment," Timothy said. The project consumed his father, a devout Catholic, and he "took it as a very serious responsibility."
But it's not the Bible project that his father would point to as his grandest accomplishment, Timothy said.
Rather, his father would say his greatest achievement was creating a successful career as a writer on his own terms. "He wanted to be able to pick the projects he wanted."
And that's exactly what Walsh did.
***
Walsh had an endless curiosity, reflected in the varied subject matter of his books. Besides Dickinson, Frost and Poe, he tackled John Keats, Abraham Lincoln and Will Rogers. He wrote about the Wright Brothers, and the legend and the fraud of the Piltdown man, the purported missing link between man and ape. He wrote about Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst and the movie "Citizen Kane." While most of his work was nonfiction, primarily literary biographies, he penned a novel, "The Man Who Buried Jesus," a fictional account of Nicodemus. He won an Edgar Award for a book on Poe and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize.
Walsh's wife Dorothy recalled someone once told her husband he should quit "living book to book. Write a good, sexy novel and you'll never have to worry about money."
Walsh replied: "It takes talent to write a good, sexy book and I don't have that kind of talent."
Instead, Walsh's talent was making complex subjects approachable.
Walsh was a scholar, Dorothy said. "He had a following. He made complicated subjects readable for any person. Anyone could read his books - they didn't have to be a scholar."
***
It was the Army that served as the springboard for Walsh's writing career. He enlisted in the Army in 1946 and served in Italy. While there, he managed to talkhis way into a position as reporter and photographer for the platoon newspaper, Timothy said. He went to Iona College in New Rochelle, New York on the GI Bill, then went to work for a newspaper in upstate New York.
Dorothy said her husband believed the best training to be a writer is to be a passionate reader as a child. He revered authors, she said, and coming from a modest upbringing, he feared any dream of becoming a writer himself was "reaching too far for the stars," she said.
"Then he got over that."
When Dorothy met Walsh, he was an editor at Prentice Hall and had started research on a book on Fort Sumter.
"When he found someone else was writing a book from the same angle, he offered his research to the other guy," Dorothy said. Walsh then began working on a book about the Shroud of Turin. A business partnership financed a research trip, and the book, Walsh's first, was published in 1963. Many considered Walsh's book ground-breaking.
His writing career was off to a solid start.
***
Dorothy said her husband was a very disciplined writer who devoted a great deal of time to his research - exhaustive research.
"He was always reading, studying," she said. "He would get interested in something and become an expert" before embarking on a new project.
"He read all the time. Virtually morning, noon and night," she said.
He was passionate about his writing. So much so that he wrote on a manual typewriter up until 14 years ago when he switched to an electric one. "He didn't want to give up the time to learn the computer," Dorothy said. "It was a distraction for him from his work."
Through the years, he worked in his home office. "He virtually lived in his office," she said, and the couple's four children knew not to disturb their father while he was working.
But he put work aside at dinnertime. The family dinner was always at 6:30 p.m., and often extended for an hour and a half or two hours. Dorothy said Walsh would engage his children in long discussions, discussions that were geared toward children, but grew to cover more complex issues as the children matured.
"There were lively conversations," she recalled. Sometimes, the children would have friends over for dinner and they "were stunned, fascinated."
And Sunday was family time, sometimes spent taking the children to museums with their friends in tow.
"He had a schedule, but he always had time for the children in the evening," Dorothy said.
Walsh's insatiable hunger for knowledge, coupled with his belief that not all research could be found in a book, often translated into grand adventures for the family.
"We got to travel around a lot. One year we went to England for a year," Timothy said. The family spent several summers on North Carolina's Outer Banks, where Kitty Hawk is located, while his father researched a book on the Wright Brothers.
When his father was researching a book on Emily Dickinson, "we spent a lot of time in her home in Amherst." Timothy recalled running around Dickinson's home with his siblings and playing in the poet's bedroom.
"There are a lot of memories. It made growing up really interesting," he said. The children also became "sort of minor experts" on whatever subject their father was researching.
Walsh believed in immersing himself in his subject matter. In later years, his parents returned to England so his father could write a book about Frost's time in England, before the American poet gained fame. They went to the cottage where Frost had lived and Walsh convinced the woman who lived there to move out for six months so he and Dorothy could stay there, Timothy said.
"Sadly, a few years later, the cottage was torn down," Timothy said.
Dorothy, too, has fond memories of the many travels for research - to Italy, France, England.
When the children were young, they traveled on the Queen Mary when they went to England. She recalled how her children, all four born within less than four years, thrived attending a two-room school house in England, where each of the 42 students were taught at his or her own speed, and how her children took weekly riding lessons at the village stables. Then there was the time the family visited a medieval fair, and she mistakenly ordered the children cider, not realizing it was hard cider.
Years later, she and her husband traveled to Spain where they met King Umberto II of Italy, who was living in exile.
"We always had very unusual vacations," she said.
***
It may seem Monroe was an unlikely spot for Walsh, a native New Yorker, to live. But it actually makes perfect sense.
Timothy came to UW-Madison to work on his Ph.D. in the early 1980s. His mother and father enjoyed visiting their son and his son, their first grandchild.
"They fell in love with Wisconsin," Timothy said. In the late 1980s, Walsh retired from Reader's Digest and knew he didn't want to stay in New Jersey, where the couple had raised their family.
A location close to Madison, which offered excellent facilities for Walsh's research, was appealing.
Timothy said his father drove around southern Wisconsin, visiting different communities.
"At some point, he just stumbled onto Monroe. There was just something about Monroe, the Square, the Courthouse, the feel of the town," he said.
His father began looking for a house and, luckily, found one that met with his wife's approval.
***
John Evangelist Walsh lived to write.
A few years ago, the whole clan went to Prince Edward Island for a family vacation. Dorothy recalled her husband took notes when no one was looking and every day made a little newspaper. "He wrote about the day's happenings and the mischief the kids got into.
"He was always the writer, wherever he went," she said.
He was writing right up until he went into the hospital about a week before he died. Walsh was treated for complications from pneumonia and after a few days, he expected to be released. When Timothy visited his father, there was no indication that Walsh wouldn't recover. "We sat and watched the Badger basketball game."
But Walsh wasn't getting better. Timothy said on the final day, his father took a turn for the worse. His father had problems with his heart and kidneys - "he had a quadruple bypass many years ago" - but ultimately, Timothy said he thinks age simply took its toll.
"His body just sort of shut down."
As he approached 90, the eventuality of dying wasn't lost on Walsh.
"He knew he didn't have long. He left lots of notes, basically to me. He had been talking to me about it, but not in any morbid sense," Timothy said.
Rather, Walsh instructed his son what to do with his as-yet unpublished body of work.
Walsh said there were nine completed but unpublished manuscripts; Timothy found 11. Some of the manuscripts his father had started 10 or 20 years ago and then set aside before coming back to them.
Dorothy said this was typical of Walsh's writing process: He would finish a book, then put it away so he could come back and read it "cold." Walsh would "take it out and polish it up" before submitting it for publication. He would often give manuscripts to Timothy to read as well.
Right before he passed away, Walsh was writing a letter of submission - in longhand - for a book on Ralph Waldo Emerson.
One of the unfinished manuscripts is a book on Pearl Harbor that was just started a couple of years ago and has some of Walsh's newest research.
Another of the books is a folk history of Monroe, currently titled "Folks Round Here: A Midwest Chronicle" that Walsh had been working on for the past 15 years and completed recently, Timothy said. It includes numerous stories about the area, from pioneering time to present.
Timothy intends to seek publication for these manuscripts to complete his father's legacy.
"It's what he would have wanted."