The Autobiography of William Allen White
by William Allen White
Summary
This is William Allen White's own account of his life, finished shortly before his death in 1944 and published posthumously two years later, and it tells the story the way White himself chose to tell it: a small town Kansas newspaperman who bought the Emporia Gazette in 1895 for three thousand dollars and turned it, and himself, into a genuinely national voice in American politics and letters. White narrates his own rise from a Kansas City Star editorial writer into the author of What's the Matter with Kansas, the 1896 editorial attacking William Jennings Bryan and Populism that Republicans distributed by the hundreds of thousands during William McKinley's campaign and that made White famous almost overnight.
The autobiography follows White through decades at the center of Progressive era politics, his founding of the Kansas Republican League to fight railroad power in 1912, his enthusiastic support for Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign that same year, and a lifelong friendship with Roosevelt close enough that the former president stayed at White's own home during his American travels. White recounts his own 1922 arrest during a railroad strike and the free speech editorial, To an Anxious Friend, that grew out of it and won him his first Pulitzer, this one for editorial writing rather than biography, and he tells these stories with the same plainspoken, anecdotal warmth that had made his newspaper columns famous across the country for half a century.
Reading the book means spending time with a genuinely likable narrator, self aware about his own small town origins and proud rather than embarrassed by them, more interested in telling good stories about the public figures he had known than in settling scores or building an argument. It suits a reader who wants a firsthand feel for how Midwestern Progressive politics actually operated from inside a single newspaper office, told by a man whose own reputation for decency was, by the account of nearly everyone who knew him, entirely earned.
Historical Context & Significance
White died in January 1944 while still working on his memoir, and the Macmillan Company published the finished manuscript posthumously in 1946, which won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, White's second Pulitzer after his 1923 win for editorial writing made him one of the very few people to win the prize in two different categories.
White had spent nearly half a century as one of the most quoted small town editors in the country, syndicated well beyond Kansas and consulted by presidents from one Roosevelt through the next, and his autobiography arrived as something close to a valedictory statement from a man widely regarded, in his own lifetime and after, as American journalism's most trusted plainspoken voice. It remains a primary firsthand account of Kansas Progressive politics from someone who helped shape it rather than merely covered it.