Missing the ‘Second Sage of Galesburg’

Bill Knight column for 3-30, 31 or 4-1, 2020

Martin Litvin was a wordsmith, a craftsman working in words like others forge metals, melting, shaping and creating something new out of old material.

Born in Galesburg 92 years ago this week, Litvin’s coals and bellows were typewriter keys and an earnest conviction that the past had value for the present, creating prose products that are practical decorations or tools for readers' homes and hearts and minds.

He died 20 years ago at the age of 71, leaving an impressive and enjoyable body of work, having helped make Illinois a better place, contributing to the arts, letters and life. Litvin was an invaluable resource, like clean water or a decent doctor.

While Litvin's histories and tales are vivid and vital, they exploit what World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle called the “worm's eye view” of things. As others have, Litvin used authorities and official documents, but also letters and frayed clippings; he dug in and dusted off origins of family trees – of “community trees” – where regular people live and love and get by and go on.

“These farmers, they're my people,” Litvin told me decades ago. “The blue-collar people, the clerks, these are the people that I know and love. I never get tired of the people around here.”

Praised by the late news anchor Jim Lehrer as “the Second Sage of Galesburg” (after Carl Sandburg) and Chicago Tribune reviewer Ron Grossman as the modern equivalent of a “medieval troubadour,” Litvin traced his start as a writer to 1943, when the Galesburg High School student began getting published. After studies at the University of Southern California and a stint in the U.S. Army, Litvin began writing for the weekly Galesburg Post and for himself, contributing hundreds of pieces and accumulating dozens of other manuscripts.

At libraries and online sources, there are 17 Litvin books, ranging from biography (George Fitch, “Mother” Bickerdyke) and personal reminiscence (“Good Morning, Miss Freeman”) to historical novels (“Black Angel,” “A Daring Young Man”) and distinctive volumes (the short “Impresario,” the award-winning “Journey”).

Litvin worked “in the tradition of Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay,” commented John Hallwas, retired director of Western Illinois University's Center for Regional Authors. “He has taken grass roots material and transformed it into literature with an impact on the American consciousness.”

From an orthodox Jewish family, Marty said he felt like an outsider as a kid. He left town for college, the U.S. Army and months of travel in the west before moving to New York, where he wrote for a brokerage firm for a decade. In New York in the 1950s, Litvin interviewed former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and New Yorker press critic Joe Liebling, plus other Galesburg transplants such as Sandburg and author and advertising pioneer Earnest Elmo Calkins.

  If his various moves and jobs seemed to be a search of sorts, his 1970s return to Illinois was a homecoming, and he settled on a farm outside Wataga, renewing his roots and poring through countless microfilms and archives and writing with a fresh sense of belonging.

“I'm a product of my region,” he said. “I've stood on a mountainside in Los Angeles, for example, at the American Jewish University of Bel-Air, and the scene is grand beyond belief. But the effect upon me is far different than when I'm at home and walk on a country road beside the endless corn and bean fields flourishing in the black earth.”

Too often overlooked, Litvin was driven to uncover long-forgotten or ignored characters from downstate Illinois: researching, refining and rebuilding people out of paper. Indeed, the material is as abundant as life in its many forms. Philosopher Will Durant once mused, “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things that historians and journalists usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks.”

Litvin recognized that viewpoint, he said.

“The kind of material which affects me the most is that which relates to my deepest, most personal background – right here, in this flat, seemingly undramatic part of the world.”

Readers of his work – his passion – are blessed by his appreciation of Illinois, his perspective, perseverance and productivity.