Guggenheim to Help Yagoda Tackle O. Henry
Ben Yagoda is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Photo: Eric Ruth
When Ben Yagoda got the email from the Guggenheim Foundation last spring, he wasn’t sure what it meant. He had applied for a fellowship, and this email seemed to suggest he might have gotten it. But the wording was unclear.
“I really couldn’t figure it out,” Yagoda says.
So he called a friend. Fellow Swarthmore resident and NYU professor Martha Hodes won a Guggenheim in 2018, in U.S. History. Had she, perhaps, received a similarly ambiguous email?
Yes, she had.
In other words, the news was good. Yagoda had been chosen.
In a small-town coincidence, one of Yagoda’s regular tennis partners, Swarthmore College political science professor Rick Valelly, also won a Guggenheim this year. His award will support an ongoing project on the history of LGBTQ political rights in America.
In fact, Swarthmore has been home to at least eight Guggenheim winners over the years. University of Pennsylvania English professor Jed Esty, who lives on Yagoda’s block, won one for Literary Criticism in 2019.
The distinguished fellowships have been awarded since 1926 in the humanities, sciences, and arts. In 2020, 175 people, out of an applicant pool of about 3,000, were granted fellowships.
Yagoda values clear writing deeply, and all the time, not just when a prestigious fellowship with a generous stipend is at stake. The Swarthmore writer has penned whole books on literary style, grammar, and usage. For many years, he contributed to a blog about language and writing, Lingua Franca. In his final piece for that blog before it closed, he wrote:
“Having to write a Lingua Franca post every week has concentrated my mind wonderfully. It’s forced me to turn random observations and notions ... into 700-1,000-word pieces, with what were meant to be cogent arguments, backed up with solid research and reasoning, and expressed in a reasonably precise and elegant manner.”
Yagoda has written 12 books. His first, published in 1993, was a biography of actor, cowboy, newspaper columnist, and humorist Will Rogers. His most recent, “The B Side,” narrates the rebirth of the Great American Song in the twentieth century. The Guggenheim Fellowship, in the field of biography, will support him in writing a book about the writer O. Henry and the city of New York.
It makes sense that a writer focused on language would be drawn to O. Henry. While Yagoda concedes that “The Gift of the Magi” — likely O. Henry’s most famous story — is sentimental, he calls many others “much more ironic and witty and self-conscious.” A lot of them are stories about writing stories, which Yagoda describes as “that meta thing I like.”
The idea for the new book grew out of Yagoda’s current project: an edition of O. Henry’s stories for the Library of America, a series he describes as “a high-quality, uniform edition of American authors on famously acid free paper.” His job as editor is to research different versions of the works, assemble a definitive edition, and provide explanatory notes on references to things like popular songs, literary works, fads of the day, and vaudeville performers — a list that doubles as a road map of Yagoda’s interests.
“His stories always have a kicker,” Yagoda says. “Sometimes it was a surprise or a twist.”
O. Henry’s reputation as a writer peaked around the time of his death, Yagoda says. Shortly afterward, literary taste changed. Acclaimed writers of the 1920s, like Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Mansfield, placed more importance on mood and atmospherics than on traditional plot.
These days, stories like “The Ransom of Red Chief” are usually read in middle school, if they are read at all. But Yagoda thinks this might just be the moment for an O. Henry comeback.
A Journalist and (Maybe) a Crook
Born William Sidney Porter, O. Henry led a varied life. As a young man, the native North Carolinian moved west for his health. In Texas, he worked at a ranch, a newspaper, a land office, and eventually a bank, from which he was convicted of embezzling money.
O. Henry fans are divided, Yagoda says, between those who think he did it, and those who think he confessed to protect someone else.
Whether he committed the crime or not, O. Henry served three years in an Ohio jail. He had trained as a pharmacist in North Carolina, and he became the prison pharmacist. This “gave him his own room and a lot of free time,” Yagoda says. “He started writing these stories.” Jail became his writer’s retreat. He published about a dozen stories there.
After he got out, in 1902, the fledgling writer moved to New York City, where he lived until his death eight years later. In that time, he wrote some 250 stories.
“Probably about half of his stories are set in New York,” Yagoda says. “They were in many ways journalistic. They had these characters from all walks of life and many of the different settings of New York: Coney Island, department stores, Madison Square Park, and Wall Street.”
At first Yagoda thought of writing a biography. Then he realized his real interest was less in the man himself than in the intersection of the writer, his literary sensibility, the city, and the time: “Something having to do with looking at New York and the period through the prism of O. Henry’s stories.”
Life as a Hack
Yagoda started his professional life as a journalist. After growing up in New Rochelle, outside New York City, he went to Yale University, where he majored in English and worked for a Yale magazine. After graduation, he wrote for The New Leader, a small political and cultural magazine with a storied history. Then he went freelance, supplementing his income by working as a fact checker (“good for the journalistic skills”). Later, Yagoda worked for New Jersey Monthly, Philadelphia Magazine, and as movie critic for the Philadelphia Daily News. Ultimately, he contributed to “magazines that start with every letter of the alphabet except K, Q, X, and Z,” his website records.
In a 2005 essay for Slate.com about retiring from freelancing, Yagoda outlines the indignities of what he affectionately calls “life as a hack”: butchered copy, chuckleheaded editors, rights-grabbing contracts, isolation, lost manuscripts, whacks to the ego, changed quotes, the absence of security or benefits, and — unkindest of all — the kill fee.”
The compensations? “Freedom, no commute, funny war stories, the periodic ego boost of appearing in print, and the chance to eat caviar with Uma Thurman.” In the early ’90s, Yagoda interviewed the actor over lunch at the Russian Tea Room and even got invited back — briefly — to her family’s apartment.
His steadiest gig? Teaching journalism at the University of Delaware for 25 years, until 2016.
But primarily Yagoda considers himself a writer of books. “I like storytelling,” he says. “I like figuring out what I think about something. I like doing research in the archives. Doing a good nonfiction book lets me do all those things.”
The books he has most enjoyed writing have space for digressions, excursions, and mini-histories. His biography of Will Rogers detoured into vaudeville, Wild West shows, and early silent films, while his history of the New Yorker magazine delved into the history of the short story, the nature of editing, and the relationship between sophistication and snobbery.
For Yagoda, breadth on the page is balanced by the through line of compelling storytelling. He strategizes about what to tell and what to withhold, alert for clues to plant early that will pay off later as the story unfolds. Once, interviewing the investment guru John Bogle, Yagoda noticed a squash bag in the corner of the office. After a while, Bogle started talking about his health. He’d had a serious heart attack that changed his life, and he was preoccupied by the idea that he might have died if it had happened on a squash court.
The bag wasn’t there because he played. It was a memento mori.
“I was, ‘Okay, I gotta use it!’” Yagoda recalls.
In Town
Yagoda moved to Swarthmore in 1994 with his wife, Gigi Simeone, and their two young daughters. Being a writer played a role in the choice. He had written about great area school districts for Philadelphia Magazine, so he knew about Wallingford-Swarthmore.
Simeone took a job at Swarthmore College as the pre-med and pre-law advisor. “I’ve been able to piggyback on being a spouse,” Yagoda says. He uses the library regularly. Also the tennis courts.
For his latest gig, Yagoda has become the Swarthmorean’s survey editor.
“Surveys appeal to my nerdy side,” he says. “I always liked statistics.” When Yagoda writes about language, he sometimes charts changes in usage over time.
Yagoda’s first Swarthmorean survey — about how people pronounce “Swarthmore” — was one of his favorites. Another favorite asked what people call the center of town: the ville, the village, downtown, uptown, town center, or plain old town.
“Those two were interesting because they’re consistent with my interest in language,” he says. “They were a lot of fun.”
Maybe not as much fun as lunch with Uma Thurman.
