Customer Reviews

Angie Debo: Pioneering Historian (Oklahoma Western Biographies)

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The same guys who were afraid of Virginia Woolf, that's who. Shirley Leckie has written a fine biography in the conservative biography tradition. It is published by the same press that gave Angie Debo the runaround back when she was doubting her own significance as a writer in mid-career. When she was in despair. Published by the same university, who, in the heyday of history department chauvinism, chose to groom and tenure by far less accomplished male scholars rather than to throw a crumb to Miss Debo, the one whose work would be of supreme importance. Leckie's version of the story is balanced in tone, raking no muck and slinging no mud, but the truth comes glimmering through, even so. Handled especially well is the relationship Debo shared with her mentor, Dale. He might have actually been a two-faced jerk who wouldn't have rescued her or her manuscripts from a criminal Faulkner fire. Leckie veers away from harsh judgement and leaves it to the reader to decide how much he really cared. Many things come to mind from reading this insightful book, especially the fact that men who ran history departments could get by with a lot of crap, like promoting their publish-nothing buddies while placing one of the century's outstanding and memorable historians such as Debo on the back burner. Is there any doubt that she may have scorched back there? Angie Debo was the last of the old maids in many respects. Never married, never encouraged flirtation. Lived with and lived for her mother in the little town of Marshall. Pretty much given the cold shoulder by the universities during her 30s and 40s. Finally, in her fifties, the Old Boys loosened up a little. Leckie does make it clear that Debo was more of a lone wolf than a team player, especially when the team-players were a little thick. And yeah, I guess I wanted more from a bio, wanted Debo to be more than an old maid, jilted by the academic system, as far as personal relationships go. Perhaps if the biographer had focused upon the truly intense relationship Angie Debo had for her own writing and research of the Creeks and Choctaw tribes, the drama of the bio would have been heightened. When the life and the work is one and the same, as it was with Debo, the life had to have higher highs and lower lows. I think her early childhood illnesses which nearly killed her probably altered her ways that the biographer did not explore. Maybe the Debo soup was actually a little thicker than that which has been served here. The biographer chose to be choosy, to write a tasteful and conservative assessment of a life. Maybe Miss Debo wouldn't want anymore said than that. Could it be I suffer from some kind of popular misconception about the life of such a significant writer, believing like Dolly Pardon, who said: "Some people think less is more, but I say more is more"?

Leckie's biography of Angie Debo (1890-1987) is unusual in that it was to some degree inspired by a film instead of the other way around. A fuller account of Debo's story is well worth the telling if for no other reason than that Leckie sands down the edges of some of the more extreme claims made on Debo's behalf in "Indians, Outlaws and Angie Debo," the 1988 PBS film produced by Barbara Abrash and Martha Sandlin. (Debo herself had a hand in creating one serious inaccuracy in the film by implying that her beloved mentor, Edward Everett Dale, had prevented her best-known work, And Still the Waters Run, from being published by the University of Oklahoma Press.)

Leckie's biography is sympathetic without being uncritical, and the author notes how Debo's independent thinking may have hindered as well as advanced her career. Debo was a life-long diary keeper, and Leckie makes good use of those many volumes in a biography that is sensibly, if not excitingly, written. I would have preferred less about Debo's reactions to news events and foreign travels and more about Debo's religion, which is treated cursorily even though Debo both served as a Methodist lay pastor and opposed missionary activity on the reservation.