Ellis was most prolific diarist in U.S. history

Bill Knight column for 2-20, 21 or 22, 2020 

When Edward Robb Ellis died in 1998, the 87-year-old Kewanee native had flourished with the printed word, yet decades ago recognized and regretted changes in media.

Ellis had written countless newspaper articles, a few books, and one 40,000-page journal – 20 million words condensed into the 1995 title, “A Diary of The Century.”

Born this week in 1911, Ellis’ achievements, life and even world view should be fondly recalled.

“The world is a madhouse ruled by madmen,” he once said, adding, “Madness is spreading through the world and the Typhoid Mary is television.”

Ellis began writing his diary in 1927, when he was 16 and bet two buddies that he could keep a journal longer than they could. One did it for a few weeks; the other a few months; Ellis kept at it until a few days before he died.

But Ellis wasn't obsessive; he wanted to write. In fact, 10 days after starting his diary, he told a teacher that he wanted to be a reporter and then an author.

He got started writing feature stories for the Kewanee Star-Courier, and in 1931 interviewed renowned poet Vachel Lindsay. After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1934, Ellis was hired by the Associated Press, then the New Orleans Item newspaper. After two years he left to join the Oklahoma City Times, where he interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt and covered the Dust Bowl.

“Fired in a third wave of retrenchment,” Ellis wrote, recalling the economic effects of the Great Depression on newsrooms, he returned to Illinois and was hired by the Peoria Journal-Transcript for $32.50 a week. It was the late ’30s, and for more than three years he wrote features about celebrities passing through downstate Illinois including tenor Allan Jones, historian Will Durant, and the Archduke of Austria, plus regular people. His weekly pay increased to $45.

(“One young reporter is paid only $25 a week,” his dairy notes. “The janitor gets $27.50.”)

In 1942, Ellis began working for United Press International in Chicago, then edited a Navy newspaper in Okinawa during World War II, and after the war was named Chicago's best feature writer by the Chicago Newspaper Guild labor union.

He joined the New York World-Telegram in 1947, writing about world leaders, celebrities and Nobel Prize winners until 1962, when he wrote a 640-page local history titled “The Epic of New York City.”

It was in that and another, “A Nation in Torment: A History of the Great Depression,” and in his journalism, in his diary – that Ellis lived, it seems.

Newspaperman Pete Hamill in his introduction to “A Diary of The Century,” writes, “The diarist has one essential goal: to freeze time. With each entry, he or she says that on this day, a day that will never again occur in the history of the world, I lived.”

Indeed, Ellis remains alive in his writings, either published or in the dozens of his journals kept by Letts of London, Ltd. When Letts approached Ellis about buying his life's work -- appraised at more than $1 million – Ellis offered them a deal: $80,000 a year for the rest of his life.

“I'm a 77-year-old man with emphysema who smoked heavily until five years ago and only stopped drinking nine years ago,” he said in 1988. “How long can an alcoholic, bookaholic workaholic live?”

If Ellis lived now, finishing stories in quieter, less-crowded newsrooms, he’d probably for the personal contact and collegiality of his era than the atmosphere that exists here and there in papers owned by private-equity and hedge-fund operators. In fact, in 1993, Ellis’ diary reads:

“Last night I dreamed a sad dream. It seemed that, at my present age of 81, I had joined the staff of a newspaper rich in the latest technology, such as computers and the like. Everything was mechanized, everyone dehumanized. … I was trying to find the city editor so that he might give me an assignment and thus enable me to earn my pay, but my wanderings failed to reveal him anywhere. I felt old-fashioned. I also felt annoyed, saying to myself that if they would just let me go out into the city by myself, I could find and report an interesting story.

“In reality, I could do this very thing. Well, the dream told the truth, because I would feel out of place in a modern city room.”