Paper pub. date
January 1992
ISBN 9780870713835 (paperback)
5-1/2 x 8-3/4 inches, 313 pages. Bibliography. Index.
Now back in print!

Wildmen, Wobblies & Whistle Punks

Stewart Holbrook's Lowbrow Northwest

Brian Booth and Stewart Holbrook
Summary
Preview

Stewart Holbrook was a high school dropout who emerged from logging camps to become the author of three dozen books, the Pacific Northwest’s foremost storyteller, one of the nation’s most popular historians, and a satirical painter known as “Mr. Otis.”

Today readers are rediscovering Holbrook’s colorful and irreverent accounts of Pacific Northwest history. Wildmen, Wobblies, and Whistle Punks collects twenty-six of Holbrook’s best writings about the region. Combining solid scholarship with humor and a gift for celebrating the offbeat, Holbrook’s stories record a vibrant, often overlooked side of Northwest history. Here are forgotten scandals and murders; stories of forest fires, floods, and other calamities; tales of loggers and life in the logging camps; and profiles of various lowbrow characters—radicals, do-gooders, dreamers, schemers, and zealots.

“[Holbrook] has the supreme virtue of being continuously and riotously readable.” —New York Herald Tribune

“One of the 20 greatest Oregon books ever.” —Portland Magazine


About the author

Brian Booth was a Portland attorney, founder of the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts (now Literary Arts) and editor, with Glen A. Love, of Davis Country.


Read more about this author

Stewart Holbrook was born in Vermont in 1893 and came to the Northwest in 1920. After working as a logger, he moved in 1923 to Portland and spent the rest of his life writing. He was a fast and productive writer, regularly turning out 3,000 to 5,000 words a day. He wrote for the Oregonian newspaper, as well as articles for magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Startling Detective. He also wrote, co-authored, and edited over three dozen books. His first book, Holy Old Mackinaw: A Natural History of the American Lumberjack, was published in 1938, and it made him a national figure.


Read more about this author

An Introduction to Stewart Holbrook

Death and times of a Prophet

Daylight in the Swamp

The Affair at Copperfield

Cargoes of Maidens

Anarchists at Home

The Wildest Man of the West

Fire in the Bush

The Three Sirens of Portland

The Cattle King

The Original Nature Man

The Wobblies Come

The Great Tillamook Fire

Saloon in the Timber

Bunco Kelly, King of the Crimps

Opal the Understanding Heart

The Legend of Jim Hill

Erickson's Elbow Bending for Giants

The Gorse of Bandon

Whistle Punks

Harry Tracy: "King of Western Robbers"

Disaster in June

The Aurora Communists

First Bomb

The Great Homestead Murders

Lumberjacks' Saturday Night

The Last of the Wobblies

Additional Reading

Editor's Note

Acknowledgments

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