Davis Grubb
Biographical Information
Davis Grubb was born and raised in Moundsville, WV, and he forever carried with him the traditions and lore of the Ohio River region and of the people bound together by its winding cord. His father was an architect, a social conservative whose business slowly died during the Great Depression. His mother, though, worked for the Department of Public Assistance, and brought home stories of the desperate poverty and the depressed people with whom she worked. These stories, and his mother's fights for change and justice, would later provide Davis Grubb with much of the subject matter that he would write about. After attending public schools in Moundsville, and later, Clarksburg, Grubb worked for a time at a Clarksburg radio station. Seeking to combine his interests in writing and drawing Grubb spent a year (1938-39) at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, PA, but was forced to abandon thoughts of a career in painting because of color blindness. From then on, Grubb decided to focus on becoming a professional writer.
Grubb left West Virginia in 1940, moving to New York to work as a page for NBC. A year later, he had started to write copy for radio broadcasts, and wrote fiction in his spare time. He spent the next few years working as a radio announcer and copywriter in Florida and Philadelphia. In 1944, He sold his first story to Good Housekeeping for $500. More publishing success followed as he published widely in magazines like Colliers and American Magazine in the next several years.
By 1950, though, the short story market was rapidly diminishing, and Grubb turned his focus to the novel. He wrote two novels that would remain unpublished, Not in Our Stars and And Spring Came On Forever, before The Night of the Hunter was published in 1953. The Night of the Hunter, the story of two children left alone by the imprisonment of their father who are forced to face a psychopathic murderer, Henry Powell aka The Preacher, who wants to find the money their father left. It is a story of evil--powerful, encroaching evil that threatens the children and breaks up what is left of their family. Critics generally praised the novel; many commenting on the suspense of the novel, on the powerful, perverse figure of Powell, and on Grubb's storytelling abilities. The Night of the Hunter is now generally considered to be a minor American classic.
Davis Grubb believed that "no one book should be like the others," and so he experimented widely with genre and technique. After Night of the Hunter, he turned to historical romance with A Dream of Kings (1955). Set in Elizabethtown, WV (then Virginia) during the War Between the States, A Dream of Kings is the story of two children, who are raised together though unrelated, and the love-hate affair that grows between them. While moderately well received, most critics agreed that A Dream of Kings did not live up to the potential that The Night of the Hunter had promised.
After A Dream of Kings, Grubb continued to write and to experiment, publishing seven novels and two story collections between 1961 and 1978. Two of his novels Night of the Hunter (1955) and Fools' Parade (1991) were adapted into motion pictures. Two other works Ancient Lights (1982) and You Never Believe Me and Other Stories (1989) were published after his death in 1980.
Critical Responses
The critical response to Davis Grubb has been as varied as the work he produced. While critics generally praised The Night of the Hunter, naming it a minor American classic, the works that followed were not on the whole as well received. Even The Night of the Hunter received some negative response; some critics felt it to often lapsed into melodrama and the language was at times too poetic, detracting from the darkness of the story. Gene Baro of the New York Herald Tribune Book Review in some way summarized the critical response to The Night of the Hunter when he wrote that it was "a remarkable first novel, conveying the strength of a rich talent. It is not without flaw; the author's intelligence sometimes obtrudes upon and complicates his materials; but it is nevertheless an unusually exciting and readable book." As a group, the literary critics felt that The Night of the Hunter was a good start; a strong introduction to what should be a promising literary career.
When Grubb's second novel, A Dream of Kings, was published in 1955, though, the literary critics felt that the potential shown in The Night of the Hunter was left unfulfilled. The novel, set in Elizabethtown, (West) Virginia, before and during the Civil War, is a historical romance chronicling the love-hate relationship of two children raised together who must try to find a way to love and live as adults. One critic called A Dream of Kings "a rich but often exasperating book," one whose emotional power is too often is lost by a slide into melodrama.
A later novel, The Voices of Glory (1962), is one of Grubb's most ambitious works and most clearly demonstrates the concern for social justice that he learned from his mother. The novel describes the trial of Mary Cresap, a US Department of Public Health nurse who attempts to supply the poor with free tuberculosis vaccinations during the Depression. What makes The Voices of Glory stand out is its narrative style -- Grubb allows the "voices" of twenty-eight individuals, living and dead, touched by Cresap's life to speak, and to tell their own stories. Critics were quick to compare the work to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology, to whom Grubb clearly owed a debt, and to praise its sense of town and community. But the critics also commented that the work was too long, that Grubb's prose was overdone, and the characters were too simple--too easily seen as "good" or "evil." Still, many believe that The Voices of Glory is one of Grubb's best works, and one that deserves more attention than it has received.
Unfortunately, that sentiment is one that could describe Davis Grubb's entire career. Grubb himself once commented that critics could not understand or appreciate his need to experiment with each new work -- "They [the literary critics] seem to get very upset when you don't write the same thing. They say you have sold your talent." But critics have responded by complaining that many of Grubb's books do tell a similar story, though perhaps in varying genres and voices, and that his work is limited by his tendencies to overuse stereotypes and to manipulate the plot of his work in obvious ways.
Works Published
Novels
The Night of the Hunter
A Dream of Kings
The Watchman
The Voices of Glory
A Tree Full of Stars
Shadow of My Brother
The Golden Sickle
Fools' Parade
The Barefoot Man
Ancient LightsStory Collections
Twelve Tales of Suspense and the Supernatural (also published as One Foot In the Grave)
The Siege of 318: Thirteen Mystical Stories
You Never Believe Me and Other StoriesDavis Grubb also published prolifically in various periodical publications. For a complete list of these short pieces of fiction, visit the Literature Resource Center.
Selected Bibliography
Fitzpatrick, William P. The Great American Novel and The Night of the Hunter. The Bulletin of the West Virginia Association of College English Teachers. 2:1, 1975. pp. 18 - 31.
Mills, Moylan. Charles Laughton's Adaptation of Night of the Hunter. Literature and Film Quarterly. 16:1, 1988. pp. 49-57.
Welch, Jack. Davis Grubb: A vision of Appalachia. Carnegie-Mellon University, 1980.
Author Website
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