Wildmen, Wobblies & Whistle Punks
Brian Booth and Stewart Holbrook
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.
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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.
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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
The OSU Press mourns the loss of attorney, author, and cultural activist Brian Booth, who died of cancer at his home in Portland on March 7.