Kenneth Roberts (author)

Roberts graduated in 1908 from Cornell University, where he wrote the lyrics for two Cornell fight songs, including Fight for Cornell.[1] He was also a member of the Quill and Dagger society. He was later awarded honorary doctorates from three New England colleges: Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire; Colby College, in Waterville, Maine; and Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vermont.[2]

After graduation, Roberts spent eight years working as a newspaperman for the Boston Post. In 1917, he enlisted in the U.S. army for World War I, but he ended up as a lieutenant in the intelligence section of the American Expeditionary Force Siberia in the Russian Civil War instead of at the front in Europe. The contacts that he made in that role enabled him to become a European correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post after the war, where he became the first American journalist to cover the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler's first attempt to take power. Roberts described working for the Post's legendary editor George Horace Lorimer as follows: "I told him my ideas, which he instantly rejected or accepted ... The price to be paid for a story was never discussed, and Lorimer was always generous."[3]

Booth Tarkington, a neighbor of Roberts in Kennebunkport, Maine, convinced him that he would never find the time to succeed as a novelist while he worked as a journalist, and Tarkington agreed to help by editing Roberts's early novels. Although Roberts continued to sell a few essays to the Post, his next few years were largely dedicated to historical fiction. Ultimately, Tarkington edited all of his historical novels through Oliver Wiswell (1940), and Roberts said in his autobiography that he offered Tarkington co-writing credit on both Northwest Passage and Oliver Wiswell in acknowledgement of Tarkington's extensive revisions to each. Both of those novels and also Rabble in Arms are dedicated to Tarkington, and Tarkington continued to assist Roberts until his death in 1946.

Roberts's historical fiction often focused on rehabilitating unpopular persons and causes in American history. A key character in Arundel and Rabble in Arms is the American officer and eventual traitor Benedict Arnold, with Roberts focusing on Arnold's expedition to Quebec and the Battle of Quebec in the first novel and the Battle of Valcour Island, the Saratoga campaign and the Battles of Saratoga in the second. Meanwhile, the hero of Northwest Passage was Major Robert Rogers and his company, Rogers' Rangers, although Rogers fought for the British during the American Revolutionary War. Oliver Wiswell focuses on a Loyalist officer during the American Revolution and covers the entire war, from famous events such as the Siege of Boston, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the New York and New Jersey campaign through the Battle of Fort Washington, and the Franco-American alliance, to less-remembered events such as the Convention Army, the exodus to Kentucky County, the Siege of Ninety-Six, and the resettlement of the United Empire Loyalists, as well as providing a later look at both a dissolute Rogers and a frustrated Arnold among the British.

George Orwell reviewed The Lively Lady in the New English Weekly in 1936, describing it as "blood-and-thundery stuff ... chiefly interesting as showing that the old-fashioned nineteenth-century type of American bumptiousness ... is still going strong."[4]

As a result of his research into the Arnold expedition, Roberts published a work of nonfiction, March to Quebec: Journals of the Members of Arnold's Expedition, a compilation of journals and letters written by participants in the march. During Roberts's research into Major Rogers, his researcher uncovered transcripts of both of Rogers's courts-martial (once as the accuser and once as the accused), which had been thought lost for over a century, and these were published in the second volume of a special two-volume edition of Northwest Passage. He and his wife Anna translated into English the French writer Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry's account of his journey through America in the 1790s. His last published work was The Battle of Cowpens, a brief history of that battle, issued after his death, in 1958.

One of Lorimer's last acts as editor of the Saturday Evening Post was to serialize Northwest Passage in 1936 and 1937. As a result of the success of the serialization, the book, when published, became the second-best-selling novel in 1937 and fifth best for the year 1938. Oliver Wiswell also spent two years in the top ten (1940 and 1941), and Lydia Bailey reached the top ten in 1947. One of Roberts's closest friends and neighbors, the novelist A. Hamilton Gibbs, later stated that he believed that Roberts probably "wrote himself out" after Oliver Wiswell and certainly had done so after Lydia Bailey.[5]

Key historical novels by Roberts and their topics include the following:

• Arundel (1929), on the American Revolution through the Battle of Quebec
• The Lively Lady (1931), on the War of 1812
• Rabble in Arms (1933), the sequel to Arundel, on the American Revolution through the Battles of Saratoga
• Captain Caution (1934), on the War of 1812
• Northwest Passage (1937), on the French and Indian War and the Jonathan Carver expedition
• Oliver Wiswell (1940), on the American Revolution from a Loyalist's perspective, from the Siege of Boston to the United Empire Loyalists
• Lydia Bailey (1947), on the Haitian Revolution and the First Barbary War
• Boon Island (1955), on a 1710 shipwreck on Boon Island, Maine

In 1957, two months before his death, Roberts received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation "for his historical novels which have long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American history."[2][6] He died, aged 71, in Kennebunkport.

• Europe's Morning After (1921), a collection of Saturday Evening Post essays
• Why Europe Leaves Home (1922), a collection of Saturday Evening Post essays on immigration
• Sun Hunting: Adventures and Observations among the Native and Migratory Tribes of Florida (1922), humorous essays, Florida promotion
• Black Magic (1924), a collection of Saturday Evening Post essays
• Concentrated New England: A Sketch of Calvin Coolidge (1924), an informal biography
• Florida Loafing (1925), humorous essays, Florida promotion
• Florida (1926), Florida promotion
• Arundel (1929), a historical novel
• The Lively Lady (1931), a historical novel (see Dartmoor Prison)
• Rabble in Arms (1933), a historical novel
• Captain Caution (1934), a historical novel
• For Authors Only, and Other Gloomy Essays (1935), humorous essays
• It Must Be Your Tonsils (1936), humorous essays
• Northwest Passage (1937), a historical novel
• March to Quebec (1938), a historical compilation
• Trending into Maine (1938), a travelogue
• Oliver Wiswell (1940), a historical novel
• The Kenneth Roberts Reader (1945), a compilation of his works
• Lydia Bailey (1947), a historical novel
• Moreau de St.-Mery's American Journey 1793–1798 (1947), English translation, with Anna M. Roberts) -- history
• I Wanted to Write (1949), autobiography
• Henry Gross and his Dowsing Rod (1951), on dowsing
• The Seventh Sense (1953), on dowsing
• Boon Island (1955), a historical novel
• Water Unlimited (1957), on dowsing
• The Battle of Cowpens (1958), a historical essay

Arundel, The Lively Lady, Captain Caution and Northwest Passage were published as Armed Services Editions during WWII.

Marie de Sabrevois

Other sources

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Kenneth Lewis Roberts

• "Kenneth Roberts". Dictionary of Literary Biography 9:313–318 (1981).
• Bales, Jack (1989). Kenneth Roberts: The Man and His Works. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press.
• Bales, Jack (1993). Kenneth Roberts. Twayne's United States Authors Series. New York: Twayne Publishers.
• Harris, Janet (1976). A Century of American History in Fiction: Kenneth Roberts' Novels. Gordon Press.
• Whitman, Sylvia (January 1992). "The West of a Down Easterner: Kenneth Roberts and the Saturday Evening Post, 1924–1928". Journal of the West.

• Works by Kenneth Roberts at Faded Page (Canada)
• Kenneth Roberts at Find a Grave
• Kenneth Roberts at IMDb
• Kenneth Lewis Roberts at Library of Congress Authorities, with 85 catalog records
• The Papers of Kenneth Roberts at Dartmouth College Library