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Authors & Books · the literary record
Fort Wayne has never been a literary capital, and this record does not pretend otherwise. What it has is a short shelf of genuine consequence: a classicist raised on a three-block family estate downtown whose Mythology taught the Greek stories to most of the English-speaking world; her sister, who wrote the founding handbooks of industrial medicine; a novel of the meeting of the waters printed by a Fort Wayne job shop in 1905; the most experimental fiction writer ever to come out of the city, who put Fort Wayne in his most famous title; and a state poet laureate who did his work from a Fort Wayne faculty office for thirty-two years. Around those stand the working rosters the library's own bibliographers compiled, a scatter of books set on these streets, and a small, real publishing record of job printers, an underground press, and a university poetry magazine. Each author's tie is printed at its true size — born here, raised here, resident here — and the two famous Hoosier authors most often mis-shelved as Fort Wayne's are set back in their own counties at the end.
Edith Hamilton — the classicist of Clinton and Lewis
1867–1963 · RAISED IN FORT WAYNE
The tie. Edith Hamilton was born in Dresden, Germany, on 12 August 1867, to American parents — Montgomery Hamilton and Gertrude Pond Hamilton — and was brought to Fort Wayne as an infant, to the town her grandfather Allen…
Alice Hamilton — the sister who wrote the handbooks
1869–1970 · RAISED IN FORT WAYNE
In brief. Edith's younger sister Alice, born in New York City on 27 February 1869 and raised on the same Clinton-and-Lewis estate, wrote the books that founded a medical field: Industrial Poisons in the United States (1925) and…
Julia M. Baker Stapleford and Wah-see-ola (1905)
1855–1939 · FORT WAYNE RESIDENT · A FORT WAYNE BOOK, PRINTED IN FORT WAYNE
The book. The first Fort Wayne novel of the ground itself that this record can put on the shelf is a privately printed one. Julia M. Baker Stapleford, who lived most of her life in Fort Wayne, published Wah-see-ola: The Light of…
The rosters of record — and a blind poet
THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY SHELF, AS THE BIBLIOGRAPHERS KEPT IT
How the early roster survives. Fort Wayne's nineteenth-century writers left no shelf of famous books; what they left is a bibliography. The state record, Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816–1916 , worked the whole state county…
Ross Lockridge Jr. — a Fort Wayne childhood, a Bloomington life
1914–1948 · BORN BLOOMINGTON · FORT WAYNE CHILDHOOD, c. 1919–1924
The ruling, first. Ross Lockridge Jr. is often loosely called a Fort Wayne novelist. The record gives a narrower, exact tie, and this entry prints it at its true size. He was born in Bloomington on 25 April 1914. His family …
Ross Lockridge Sr. — the father, in one paragraph
1877–1952 · FORT WAYNE RESIDENT
In brief. The Fort Wayne Lockridge who belongs to this record in full is the father. Ross F. Lockridge, born in Miami County in 1877, came to Fort Wayne and worked from 1914 to 1922 as employment manager and welfare director at…
Michael Martone — the city's experimentalist
BORN FORT WAYNE, 22 AUGUST 1955
The tie. Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne and grew up in Hamilton Park — Edith Hamilton's family's old ground, a fact he has made part of his own mythology. He attended Butler University, graduated from Indiana University…
George Kalamaras — the poet laureate of the Fort Wayne faculty
RESIDENT IN FORT WAYNE FROM 1990
The tie. George Kalamaras came to Fort Wayne in 1990 to teach English at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne and stayed thirty-two years, retiring as professor emeritus at what is now Purdue University Fort Wayne. His…
The library's roster — Fort Wayne's working authors
THE MIDDLE TWENTIETH CENTURY, FROM RITCHIE'S FILE
What the file holds. Below the famous names, Ritchie's bibliography carries the city's working authorship — teachers, editors, and specialists who wrote real books from Fort Wayne addresses. Four stand for the file:
Books set in Fort Wayne
THE FICTION SHELF
The anchors. Fiction actually set in Fort Wayne is a short shelf, and its two anchors are already on this page: Stapleford's Wah-see-ola (1905), set at the meeting of the waters before the city existed, and Martone's Fort Wayne…
Books about Fort Wayne, off the history shelf
MEMOIR AND THE MODERN PICTURE BOOKS
The memoir. The notable modern book about growing up in Fort Wayne is Ashley C. Ford's Somebody's Daughter (2021), a memoir whose childhood chapters are set in this city — the Fort Wayne of her grandmother's house and her…
Publishing in Fort Wayne
JOB PRINTERS, AN UNDERGROUND PRESS, AND A POETRY MAGAZINE
The job-printing era. For most of its history Fort Wayne published the way every American city did: its newspapers doubled as job printers, and its books — the histories on the Sources shelf, Stapleford's novel from the Fort…
Not Fort Wayne — the two names that belong to other counties
COUNTY DISCIPLINE
Gene Stratton-Porter (1863–1924) is northeast Indiana's most famous author, and she is not Fort Wayne's. Born on a farm in Wabash County, she lived and worked at Limberlost Cabin in Geneva, in Adams County, beside the Limberlost…
