Hendrickson: Philly's literary culture's more hidden than in other cities
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Paul Hendrickson
After 30 years as a journalist, including 24 of them at The Washington Post, Paul Hendrickson was ready to leave a profession that "belonged to younger feet." He says he sat down at his IBM Selectric and wrote five letters to universities. One of them, Penn, soon called him.
"I was sitting at my desk a week later working on a story, pulling my hair out to find out what the lede was, when the director of Penn's English department called and said, 'We were amused by your letter and thought we'd take a chance and meet you.'" He taught his first course at Penn 10 months later, and in 2000 he became full time on Penn's creative-writing faculty.
After several years of continuing to work at The Post and commuting to Philadelphia, Hendrickson finally moved with his family to Havertown in 2002. Comparing this city to others he's known, Hendrickson says, "The literary culture of Philadelphia is more hidden in my mind than it was in Washington and certainly than it is in other places: New York, San Francisco, maybe even Chicago." He attributes this to the presence of fewer independent bookstores and places for writers to congregate.
Even so, he senses an energy here that he enjoys tapping into. "Any way I can get in touch with the electric current of writing and literacy that comes through Philadelphia, man, I will grab it! Even if it's just a coffee shop where I feel somehow other people are doing some writing work, maybe somewhere around Rittenhouse Square."
His current writing project, also with his long-time publisher Knopf and his editor of 35 years, Jonathan Segal, focuses on architect Frank Lloyd Wright. "It's not a bio per se; it's not a cradle-to-grave conventional bio. It's a portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright." He hopes to publish it to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Wright's death in 2019.
But it's a big project, and he hasn't yet given his steadfast editor anything to read yet. "These things take FOREVER!" Hendrickson says. "I mean, they just go on and they go on and they go on..."
The deft storyteller earlier published Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003 for general non-fiction. His most recent book, Hemingway's Boat, published in 2011, was a reconsideration of the author's life during his peak writing years, from 1934-1961.
