He told Joe he’d “go hungry” to have him attend college. Knight made the Freeh kids cut corn faster by placing a caramel at row’s end. Eric introduced the 14 Freehs to the wonders of live music, analytical thinking, the belief they could be bigger than a Springfield Township farm. Joe mailed 14 pages of single-spaced memories of Knight educating and entertaining Freeh’s large rural family. The longest reminiscence was sent by Joe Freeh, a former neighbor of Knight and his second wife, Jere, in Pleasant Valley, Bucks County. You see, it’s less a review than a primer on life. Nearly 50 years have passed, and Darr hands out Knight’s critique at the end of her creative-writing class. Her first assignment for Knight at the University of Iowa was an excerpt from her diary. It’s the tale of an English-American celebrity largely forgotten after dying in the middle of a world war, who was demoted to the quiz-show question: “Who wrote ‘Lassie Come-Home’?”Īnn Darr, a writing teacher in suburban Washington, D.C., spoke of a memorable ritual. It’s a documentary, in letters, of Knight’s two frustrating, funny, oddly profitable sentences in Hollywood, preparing a new personality for a rookie actress named Shirley Temple, preparing rookie soldiers to defeat democracy’s enemies. This unblinking, winking voice animates my book, “Down But Not Quite Out in Hollow-weird” (Scarecrow Press 228 pp. A champion yarner who turned his funniest character, an ale-swilling, self-flummoxing, once-flying Yorkshireman named Sam Small into an accidental Nazi fighter. A humanitarian who donated a fancy car financed by his first international best-seller to a civil-defense ambulance unit. An artillery expert who, after surviving some of World War I’s bloodiest campaigns, declared the rest of his life would be “velvet.” A best-selling novelist who interrupted a newly velvety life to write military guides for American recruits. A decade of reviewing his papers and interviewing his friends revealed mortality’s best friend.Įric Knight was a Quaker dedicated to saving peace through battle.

That statement, so wry and profound with the world at war, forced me to write Eric Knight’s biography. “Petey,” the writer Eric Knight said to his good friend, painter Peter Hurd, “you don’t want to live forever, do you?” In the fall of 1942, an Army captain told an Air Force captain his philosophy of death and life.

The foxhole court eric