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Springfield,
Missouri—March 27, 2012—D. Leigh Henson,
professor emeritus of English at Missouri State
University, is pleased to announce that he recently
accepted the invitation of the Society of Midland
Authors to join its ranks. Membership is by
invitation only from the Society's Board of
Directors. According to the Chicago History
Journal, "Chicago has a deep-rooted heritage of
literary organizations, and the Society of Midland
Authors is one of the most prestigious."
The Society was
founded in 1915 to promote "a closer association
among writers of the Middle West and the stimulation
of creative literary effort." The Society intended
to show the Eastern establishment that the Midwest
was creating a distinct and worthy culture. Among
the founders and early members were Hamlin Garland,
Harriet Monroe, Jane Addams, Vachel Lindsay, Edna
Ferber, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg. The
Society encourages its members to join state
organizations affiliated with the Center for the
Book in the Library of Congress, and Henson is a
member of the Illinois Center for the Book authors
program. He is especially interested in the
literature of place.
A native of Lincoln
and a 1960 graduate of Lincoln Community High
School, Henson attended Lincoln College his freshman
year. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in
English from Illinois State University in the 1960s.
In 1982 he earned one of the first Ph.Ds in that
institution's innovative English studies program. He
taught English at Pekin Community High School for
thirty years and in 1990 was a cofounder of
Technical Publication Associates, Inc., of Morton.
Then he taught technical communication in the
English Department of Missouri State University for
fourteen years.
Henson is the author
of several publications relating to his hometown. In
2011 he published a book titled The Town Abraham
Lincoln Warned: The Living Namesake Heritage of
Lincoln, Illinois. The book is a critical
examination of how the town has explored and
exploited its historic connections to Mr. Lincoln to
create civic pride and strengthen its economy
through tourism. Some of these community activities
are success stories, but others reveal controversy,
irony, and missed opportunity. The book features
recommendations for expanding the local Lincoln
heritage that could be accomplished by Lincoln
College and Lincoln Christian University. For nearly
ten years Henson has continually developed an online
community history of Lincoln as a public service. In
2004 this project received the "Best Web Site of the
Year" award from the Illinois State Historical
Society.
Henson's writing also
includes articles in peer-reviewed history journals
about Mr. Lincoln's political speeches in his first
namesake town and about William Maxwell's numerous
autobiographical novels and short stories set in
Lincoln. Maxwell, also a native Lincolnite, was a
fiction editor at The New Yorker for forty
years. For his novel So Long, See You Tomorrow,
Maxwell received the American Book Award and the
Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. Other articles by Henson have been
published in peer-reviewed journals relating to the
theory, practice, and teaching of technical
communication and the teaching of critical thinking,
literature, and writing.
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Henson was an honorary member of the
Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission of Lincoln, Illinois, and
for the 2008 Lincoln Bicentennial Celebration there he wrote the
script for a re-enactment of an 1858 political rally and speech by
Mr. Lincoln the day after the last Lincoln-Douglas debate. Hundreds
of citizens, including children and young adults, participated in
the re-enactment. Henson is currently researching the rhetorical
development of Mr. Lincoln before his presidency.
R. Craig Sautter, a recent past
president of the Society of Midland Authors and professor at DePaul
University, nominated Dr. Henson for membership in the Society. Mr. Sautter
is the author or coauthor of ten books, including The Wicked
City: Chicago from Kenna to Capone (1998), which he coauthored
with the late Curt Johnson of Highland Park. Mr. Johnson was the
founder of December Press and December: A Magazine of the Arts
and Opinion. December Magazine published some of the
early work of Norbert Blei (also an ISU English Department alum),
Jerry Bumpus, Jay Robert Nash, Joyce Carol Oates, and Raymond
Carver.
December Magazine's film critic
was the late Robert Wilson, another native of Lincoln, Illinois.
Wilson and Maxwell exchanged letters about Maxwell's writing and
about Lincoln society and culture. Henson discovered these letters
by Maxwell in the possession of Wilson's only offspring, the New
York City author-producer Sue Young Wilson. Henson corresponded with
Johnson about Wilson's time in Lincoln, which he left as a young
adult but returned to later in order to write and teach at Lincoln
College. Wilson's Young in Illinois is a collection of
autobiographical stories and essays telling about his "Lincoln to
Chicago to Lincoln" experiences. One of the pages in Henson's
Lincoln Web site is devoted to Wilson's biography, Young in
Illinois, and Wilson's friendship with Johnson.
The URL for the Web site of the
Society of Midland Authors is
http://www.midlandauthors.com/.
The URL for Henson's Lincoln Web site is
http://findinglincolnillinois.com,
which includes links to his curriculum vitae, his book's Web page,
and his social media sites at Facebook and LinkedIn.
[Text copied from file received from D. Leigh
Henson] |
