Robert Cantwell

Robert Emmett Cantwell (January 31, 1908 – December 8, 1978), known as Robert Cantwell, was a novelist and critic.

Robert Emmet Cantwell was born on January 31, 1908, in Little Falls (now Vader), Washington.

His parents were Charles James Cantwell, an engineer, and Nina Adelia Hanson.

He had an older sibling James Leroy and younger siblings Frances Dorothy and Charles Harry.

In 1919, the massacre during a strike in nearby Centralia, Washington, deeply disturbed him and left a lasting impression that appeared in his major writings.

He attended the University of Washington (1924−1925) and then spent the next four years working at Harbor Plywood Co., (1925−1929) in Hoquiam, Washington.

In 1929, after selling a short story "Hanging by My Thumbs" to The New American Caravan, he moved (with help from childhood friend Calvin Fixx) to New York City, landed a book contract with Farrar and Rinehart, and began work on his first novel, Laugh and Lie Down (1931).

From 1930 to 1935 (and during the Great Depression), he wrote a second novel, The Land of Plenty (1934).

He published a number of short stories in The Miscellany, American Caravan, Pagany, and The New Republic.

Throughout the 1930s, Cantwell began to meet New York writers and editors such as Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, John Chamberlain, Erskine Caldwell, Matthew Josephson, and Harry Hansen.

Over time, his circle expanded to include James T. Farrell, Meyer Schapiro, John Dos Passos, Newton Arvin, Kenneth Burke, Granville Hicks, Kenneth Fearing, Fred Dupee, Elof Holmlund, and Whittaker Chambers.

In the 1930s, "After he settled in New York, Cantwell was always short of money and therefore generally in a rush to finish a piece and get paid... All the more remarkable, then, that his short stories are of such a generally high aesthetic quality."

Meantime, to support himself while writing, Cantwell took on regular-paying jobs.

His first novel, Laugh and Lie Down (1931) is an early example, twenty years before Jack Kerouac, of the American classic genre the "road novel", and also an important example of the "Depression novel" period genre.

His most notable work, The Land of Plenty, focuses on a lumber mill in a thinly disguised version of his hometown in Washington state.

Cantwell married Mary Elizabeth Chambers, known as Betsy, a teacher, on February 2, 1931: she (no relation to Whittaker Chambers) was a cousin of Lyle Saxon, whom Fixx had been serving as secretary.

They had three children: Joan McNiece (Mrs. George Stolz, Jr.), Betsy Ann (Mrs. Walter Pusey III), and Mary Elizabeth Emmett (Mrs. Lars-Erik Nelson).

From November 1932 until its close in 1935, he worked as literary editor of New Outlook magazine.

He also wrote for the New Masses under pen name "Robert Simmons."

In December 1933, he accepted work already passed over by Whittaker Chambers, namely to co-write a biography of Boston's E. A. Filene, in collaboration with Lincoln Steffens.

At some point between 1933 and 1936, he worked as assistant literary editor at The New Republic under Malcolm Cowley, who was literary editor, according to Mary McCarthy in her 1992 posthumous Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938; McCarthy also remembers him in the mid-1930s as "a Communist, a real member."

On April 23, 1935 and through 1936, Cantwell joined the editorial staff of Time as book reviewer.

The same month, Steffens suffered a heart-attack and died in 1936; Cantwell handed the manuscript to Filene in 1937.

In 1937, he joined Time's sister magazine, Fortune.

In 1938, he returned to Time as associate editor (1938−1945).

In 1939, he helped his friend Chambers get his old job as book reviewer.

In 1940, William Saroyan lists Cantwell among "associate editors" at Time in Saroyan's play, Love's Old Sweet Song.

In 1941, Cantwell suffered a nervous breakdown.

He took off work and received treatment at the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum.

He spent three years researching and writing the biography, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years (1948).

From 1949 to 1954 he worked as the literary editor of Newsweek.

In 1954, he took up freelancing again until 1956 when he began an association with Sports Illustrated.

He worked for the magazine from 1956 until his death in 1978.

He worked on a number of articles, three of which became books: Alexander Wilson: Naturalist and Pioneer (1961), The Real McCoy (1971), and The Hidden Northwest (1972).

Subjects of his articles include chess, ornithology, sports in the movies and literary figures in sports.

He later married Allison Joy, a noted portrait painter, and, briefly, Eva Stolz Gilleran shortly before his death in 1978.

Cantwell was rumored to have been the inspiration for many of the scenes in the Eric Hodgins novel Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

While working together at Fortune, Cantwell had encouraged Hogkins to purchase a property not far from his own house in Sherman, Connecticut, and Cantwell's two daughters at the time had the same names as the two daughters in the novel: Betsy and Joan.

During the Hiss Case, the FBI often lurked around Cantwell's home in Sherman and questioned neighbors.

Cantwell dismissed his radical affiliations of youth obliquely in later life, saying "I had no interest in politics" and no (public) political aspirations.