Fighting the Night: My Father in World War II
- Paul Hendrickson
- Department of English, School of Arts & Sciences
- Independent Creative Production Grant
Paul Hendrickson's father, First Lieutenant Joe Paul Hendrickson, Iwo Jima, spring 1945.
Paul Hendrickson will set out to produce a work of literary-cum-journalistic nonfiction. In essence, his books are cultural histories and biographies of their own quasi-unconventional form. They are trying to be explorations of what it means to be an American. Hendrickson describes himself as “an old shoe leather and ink-stained reporter from daily journalism (mostly The Washington Post) who found his way out of the narrow window and width of newspaper columns into long-form book writing.” As for his process, Paul says: “I cannot ever seem to write the books I write without a deep dive into archives, reporting sites, without many interviews with many different types of people. I have to be obsessively grounded in the facts, and then somehow hope that the writing comes along behind.”
This newest project is about a son trying to come to terms with a difficult and distant but also, in a real sense, “heroic” father, a lifelong aviator. It is intended not as a strict memoir but a kind of reported memoir of his father’s time in World War II, when he flew P-61 Black Widow night fighters off of Iwo Jima: a period of history lying just beyond Paul’s own conscious memory. While primarily a work about his Kentucky-born and rural-raised father, it is also about some of his father’s old squadron mates, and it also loops in the poet James Dickey and the cowboy star Gene Autry and the iconic director Clint Eastwood–to say just three cameos and larger walk-ons. It is furthermore a story about Paul’s mother, who fought the war on the home front and took care of two little babies. Support from the Sachs Program will enable Paul to conduct research for this book: in his words, “to go to all the places where the story hides.”