What steps should one take to see published the letters their grandfather wrote during the Second World War?
In the past couple years, I've taken an extreme interest in searching for family history. This has primarily been as simple as spelunking in my parents' attic, where boxes have been placed and eventually forgotten. As for my grandfather, he was part of a marine detachment on the U.S.S. Montpelier CL-57 in the Pacific theater of the Second World War. During the war, he began a correspondence with the woman who was to eventually become his wife. In the process, he chronicled his experience and also the romance that resulted in him proposing to her on his last leave home during the war.
Tragically, this marriage ended when she died from complications of childbirth four years later. It was thought that he had burned all the letters when he remarried, as a sign of fidelity to his new wife. Thus, it was a terrific discovery to find more than a hundred of these letters in our attic, which had been saved by the first wife's mother and eventually had made it to my father. There are also six letters that she wrote to him (the rest must of have been destroyed).
The individuals involved came from farming backgrounds in Appalachia in the southwest part of Virginia and had full high school educations (a first for both families). Thus, their words are elegant and witty, and also retain a sort of down home sense of humor that makes them quite fun to read. Not to mention, their romance is doubly sweet and heartbreaking with the knowledge that it was to end suddenly not long after.
My father, the only son of the two, has told me he would be happy to see them in a published form, and so I would like to take up the task to see if I can accomplish the goal. I see it as a way to honor my grandfather, whom I loved dearly, and the grandmother I never had the chance to meet. From an economic sense, if such a publication could make any money, I'd direct it to the restoration of my grandmother's home, a 200 year old farm house that her family had lived in for generations.
As for the publishing, while I'm aware of some of the self publishing sites online, like Lulu.com, I have had no experience with them. And I can easily say that I know next to nothing about the traditional publishing houses. I do know that about ten years ago there was a wartime diary that was published,"
Pacific War Diary, 1942 - 1945: The Secret Diary of an American Sailor," by James Fahey. Fahey actually served on the same ship as my grandfather, so I'm curious if the presence of this book would help or hurt my own chances at the task.
I appreciate all and any advice, my thanks in advance.
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The second is obviously much harder than the first. There are a lot of war diaries and memoirs and letter collections out there. You're going to have to really sell your grandfather's story to the publisher. Read a bunch of similar books. (Your local library should have at least five.) What do your grandfather's letters have that the other collections don't? (I'd also advise tracking down the book by your father's shipmate and reading that.) You're also going to have to edit the letters. How do you want to present them? Would the story be enhanced if you had "bridges" between the letters describing what was happening at home/on the ship/including quotes from friends and family members? Do you have any other source material for your grandfather's life during this period which could be included? Photographs? Letters from the first wife (or your grandfather) to other people during the period? Diaries? Anything?
If you don't want to spend a huge amount of time and energy on the project, then I'd advise self-publishing. You can edit and polish the book as much as you want to, and then you have copies which can be distributed to relatives, and if you want to try selling it a bit-- putting up a website, getting it listed on Amazon-- you can do that, too. There are a lot of WWII books out there (and non-books, too-- for a good example of how the Internet was used to handle information like this, see Private Art; a thorough Googling should turn up a bunch of other examples) and I suspect getting another one professionally published would take a lot of effort and some pretty extraordinary source material. (Which you may have, I don't know.)
One thing to keep in mind, and I don't mean this in a bad way, is that other people may just not find your family history as interesting as you do. We dug up my great-grandfather's diary of a boat trip to Vladivostok in 1919, but while there are a couple of stories in there which are great, the whole is unpublishable. It's short, a lot of it is boring, and there's no context for most of it. He played a lot of chess with some guy named Ivanov who was the head of a relief mission. What relief mission? He didn't know, or didn't write it down. It would take a lot of work to whip that thing into shape, and I just don't care enough about pineapple plantations in Hawaii to do that research. Lacking that context, the only people who care are his descendants.
Let us know whatever you decide to do, though... I personally will read just about anyone's letters/memoirs from long ago and far away, and would love to hear what you do with this.
posted by posadnitsa at 8:09 AM on May 29, 2006