Just finished it today.

What a tragic story.

So much promise and talent, and alcohol ruined it.

Rather sad read for those of us that enjoyed some of his writing.

pm sent.
It has to be a great read.
Frank

Thought Someone of Value by Foster was actually better. Ritchie did have some good info on how the day to day stuff ran but the conclusions were basically the same.

I read the book last year. I enjoyed the insight to the day to day stuff. How they wrote, deadlines, etc.

I agree it with the above about a tragic life style. I am grateful for his writings, and regretful I never shared a campfire with him.

I'm sure Ruark had a ball for most of his 49 or so years.

quote:

Originally posted by Mvu:
I'm sure Ruark had a ball for most of his 49 or so years.

Yes, he was committing suicide - slowly!

I just did a google image search for Ruark. Man, there was hardly a pic where he didn't have a drink in his hand or sitting next to him. I couldn't do that at 20 much less at 40! Makes me wonder if he wasn't cultivating this image (as Dean Martin did) and then had it get away from him.

This raises an interesting question. To what degree do professional hunters in Africa still fall into the "hard drinking" persona (either real or artificial)? To what degree do we conform to this history when we are there out of some warped sense of tradition? Was this all a holdover from the bored English colonists who had nothing better to do in Kenya than drink a lot of G&T? Any insights?

None of the many PHs I have shared a camp with were heavy drinkers.

In fact, a lot of them even refused a single glass of wine at the dinner table.

Most Would enjoy a glass of wine or a beer once back at the camp, that is it.

quote:

Originally posted by Saeed:

quote:

Originally posted by Mvu:
I'm sure Ruark had a ball for most of his 49 or so years.

Yes, he was committing suicide - slowly!

Mr Saeed,
may I ask if you drink (alcohol, that is)?

No I do not drink, or smoke.

Ruark did both in great quantities.

from a number of thing I have read about Ruark, I also come to the conclusion that he created this bold, two-fisted womanizer; and then killed himself slowly trying to live up (or down) to the hype. He was distant from his parents, who were alcoholics, and tried the rest of his life to substitute the short and a bit sad lack of a proper husband/wife relationship by seducing every woman he could. I think when you do not have a strong church life, there is often a void in your soul that you cannot fill anywhere else.
Cirrhosis of the liver is a pretty bad way to die.

I enjoy his writings more than about anybody else from that period. The man could write!

The biggest problem with being a swashbuckling Peter Pan, is that someday you have to fact the fact that you are growing old. So many talented writers, especially; commit suicide when health issues drag them back down to earth. In Idaho we have had Hemingway and Ted Trueblood both die by firearms.

Rich
Buff Killer

quote:

Originally posted by Saeed:
No I do not drink, or smoke.

Ruark did both in great quantities.

As was his right.

quote:

Originally posted by Mvu:
I'm sure Ruark had a ball for most of his 49 or so years.

Here for a good time,not a long time

quote:

Originally posted by TOP_PREDATOR:

quote:

Originally posted by Mvu:
I'm sure Ruark had a ball for most of his 49 or so years.

Here for a good time,not a long time

Well said sir.

Not drinking or smoking does not necessarily mean that you will live longer, it just seems longer.

For me, the value of the book is that Ritchie tells it "like it was..." and does a good job of humanizing our hero. I feel almost like I know Robert Ruark.

Rich
Buff Killer

I think it is sad that Ruark was such a drunk that he pissed his life away on the bottle. Especially since he was a talented writer that introduced many to the lore of Africa.

HOWEVER I think that writing, Africa, hunting and any number of other influences that any of us appreciate had little to nothing to do with his alcoholism.

Alcohol is a problem that transcends almost all races, creeds, classed and backgrounds. I am sure that if Rurark was not a writer he still would of been a drunk if he was an unknown sanitary engineer in NYC where he was from.

And for the record I do drink (in moderation, I didn't always) and I don't smoke ( I quit 9 years ago)

quote:

NYC where he was from

Wasn;t from NYC, Wilmignton, NC...

Does that book discuss whatever became of Ruark's wife?

I knew he was divorced in the late 50's or early 60's, but trying to find information on her is tough.

Ruark's wife died of cancer shortly after Ruark's death.

Virginia deserves a great deal of pity in in the whole Ruark saga... she really got the shaft in many ways. YEs she stuck with him but I think she wanted it to work despite the obviousness that it wouldn;t.

Ruark's "habits" were part of who he was, and it's entirely possible that without his various "crutches" he couldn't have strung three coherent written words together.

Or he might have been an even better writer and lived another 30 years.

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Richards:
Ruark's wife died of cancer shortly after Ruark's death.

That's terrible. I wonder if the party lifestyle caught up with her also?

Thanks for the info.

I have seen elsewhere elliptical references to Ruark's "issues," but the Ritchie book brought them out in technicolor. I kinda wish I hadn't read it. Ruark is not of "my" business; he was a syndicated columnist and successful novelist; I'm just a gunwriter, which is another word for "hack." Even so, I discovered Ruark in the early 60s (I was pretty young), and I clearly remember when he died (as I remember when Hemingway died). Some of his later writing was repetitive, possibly the bottle, but some of it was THE BEST STUFF EVER DONE ON HUNTING. In our world he is remembered for "Horn of the Hunter" and "The Old Man and the Boy," both of which are superb--but if you haven't read "Something of Value" then you should. I rank it as the best thing ever written about Africa. Great hunting stuff in there, too--you could do that in a general novel in the mid-50s!

I am an unabashed Ruark fan. Some of his work was simply outstanding, and when he was on his A game,he was a top notch writer. The thing that amazes me the most is that he was syndicated columnist who turned out columns five days a week. For anyone who has ever written for money or pleasure, it is truly an impressive feat. Over nineteen years, Ruark would write some 4000 colums, nineteen books, and over one thousand magazine articles.

The sad thing is that outside the sporting community and people that love all things African, Ruark is rarely known or heard of.


From Wickipedia

Early life

Born Robert C. Ruark, Jr., to Charlotte A. Ruark and Robert C. Ruark, a bookkeeper for a wholesale grocery, young Ruark attended local schools and graduated from New Hanover High School in Wilmington, North Carolina. He graduated from high school at age 12 and entered the University of North Carolina at age 15.The Ruark family was deeply affected by the Depression,but despite his families' financial travails, he earned a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. In the 1930s he was fired from an accounting job in the Works Progress Administration and did a hitch in the United States Merchant Marine. Ruark worked for two small town newspapers in North Carolina, the Hamlet News Messenger and later the Sanford Herald. Ruark had an adoptive brother named David, about whom little is known.

In 1936 he moved to Washington, D.C., and was hired as a copy boy for the The Washington Daily News, a Scripps-Howard newspaper. In just a few months he was the paper's top sports reporter. During World War II Ruark was commissioned an ensign in the United States Navy. Ruark served ten months as a gunnery officer on Atlantic and Mediterranean convoys.

Writing career

Upon his return to Washington, Ruark joined the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance. As the New York Times said, Ruark was "sometimes glad, sometimes sad, and often mad--but almost always provocative." Some of his columns were eventually collected into two books, I Didn't Know It Was Loaded (1948) and One for the Road (1949).

As he grew in notoriety, Ruark began to write fiction; first for literary magazines, and then his first novel, Grenadine Etching in 1947. The novel parodied the popular historical romances of time and set the stage for his many humorous novels and articles published in the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and other popular publications.

In 1953, Ruark began writing a series for Field & Stream magazine entitled The Old Man and the Boy. Considered largely autobiographical (although technically fiction), this heartwarming series ran until late 1961. Many of the articles in the series were collected into a book of the same name, followed shortly thereafter by another companion book entitled The Old Man's Boy Grows Older. The stories were punctuated by the philosophical musings of the Old Man, who was a character modelled after both of Ruark's grandfathers, though based mostly on Ned Adkins, Ruark's maternal grandfather. In the stories, young Bob Ruark grows up hunting and fishing in coastal North Carolina, always guided by the Old Man. However, the pain of his parents' difficult domestic life and his relatively few childhood friends - Ruark, something of a child prodigy in school, was a loner - are tellingly absent from the stories. Today these two books are his best remembered works; his other novels are long out of print.

Ruark's first bestselling novel was published in 1955. It was entitled Something of Value and was about the Mau Mau Uprising by Kenyan rebels against the British rule. The novel drew from the author's personal knowledge and experiences on safari in Africa and was adapted into a successful 1957 film. Later [1962], Ruark delivered Uhuru, a continuing and similar theme, but not intended to be a sequel. "Uhuru" is the Swahili word for freedom. He had intended to write a final chapter in the series with the working title of A Long View From a Tall Hill, but this never materialized.

African safari

After he began to gain success as a writer, Ruark decided that it was time to fulfill a lifelong dream to go on safari to Africa. Legendary Ker and Downey Safaris booked him with Harry Selby, and Ruark began a love affair with Africa. It is interesting to note that Ruark was booked with Selby because of a desire to use a tracker named Kidogo, who had hunted with Ernest Hemingway on an earlier safari. Ruark's pairing with Selby, though fortuitous, was merely luck. Kidogo was a member of Selby's crew.

As a result of this first safari, Ruark wrote a book called Horn of the Hunter, in which he detailed his hunt. Selby became an overnight legend and was subsequently booked for up to five years in advance by Americans wishing to duplicate Ruark's adventures. After the first safari, Selby and Ruark again went out hunting, and this time they took cameras along. The result was a one hour documentary entitled Africa Adventure, released by RKO pictures. Though extremely difficult to find, a 16mm print of this movie was discovered in around 2002 and a DVD copy was created and donated to the Robert Ruark Foundation in Southport, NC.

After his first half dozen books or so, Ruark continued to write, though few of his subsequent novels surpassed his early successes. Ruark moved to Palamos, Spain in 1960 after a bittersweet visit to his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina. He died in London, England on July 1, 1965 most likely as a result of alcoholism. His last novel, The Honey Badger, exemplified the personal condition of the author at this time in his life. Indeed, this book was published posthumously, as was Use Enough Gun, which is essentially a collection of segments from his earlier works. More notable are the two collections published by McIntosh and Casada, both of which are quite representative of Ruark's finest work.

In 1938 Ruark married Virginia Webb, an interior designer from an upper middle-class family in the Washington DC area and a graduate of Georgetown University. Married for over 20 years, they had no children and divorced in 1963. Virginia Webb-Ruark died in 1966.

Robert Ruark is buried in Palamos, Spain.

Just FYI, he never actually earned a degree in Journalism. Yes, he took classes but the degree was not a Journalism one. He's not even listed in the yearbook as a Journalism student. This fact is very often mis-stated.

Ritchie's book is very well done, IMHO.

In spite of Ruark's many and self-admitted flaws, and his untimely death, he was a truly talented and remarkable man.

Most men who die at 90 do not live lives as exciting or accomplished.

I found the Ritchie fascinating. Ruark's life was a continuous novel with himself as the central character. It is unfortunate that his writing has not gotten it's proper due outside of the hunting community. If you have not read something of value, you should.

A View From a Tall Hill by Terry Wieland is also a good book providing insight into Ruark and his self destructive behavior. What is interesting is that his talents as book author were largely secondary to his talents as a regular synidcated columnist.

quote:

What is interesting is that his talents as book author were largely secondary to his talents as a regular synidcated columnist.

This as well, is often overlooked. Many folks just see Ruark as an outdoor writer which is completely halving his work. The columns were his bread and butter and even as hard as he worked on the books, the columns (and articles) were always happening in the background and provided the continual income he needed.

Some of the more talented people that I've encountered in my life have shared the same tragic flaws as Ruark. He is my all-time favorite writer and it is frustrating to read about someone with that kind of a gift struggling with demons that slowly killed him.

The list of artists who died before their time from hard living is not a short one.

edit

quote:

Originally posted by craig boddington:
I have seen elsewhere elliptical references to Ruark's "issues," but the Ritchie book brought them out in technicolor. I kinda wish I hadn't read it....

I felt much the same way.

Many writers have their "creative juices" fueled by alcohol. Ruark may have been one of them. I believe it was Wm Manchester who said he didn't realize when alcohol stopped being his partner and became his master. Norman Mailer had a room 8' off the ground and 16' from the rest of the house where he wrote. He could only get there by walking a 2"x6" plank. If he couldn't walk the plank he was too drunk to write. I knew Mailer's first wife in her later life. If you asked her about him she would vomit spontaneously.

Robert Ruark crammed as much living into his life as most of us could do if we lived to be 100. Ruark is a household word, at least in my household. How long will we be remembered after our death? It is writers like Ruark and PHC that got many of us interested in going to Africa to hunt in the first place. Just last night my wife pointed to one of the mounts in the trophy room and asked "what do you call that black animal with the white on his back" Rather than answer, I walked over to the book shelf and pulled out one of the books and showed it to her. Name of the book - "The Honey Badger by Robert Ruark". I could only wish that there were someone like Robert Ruark and Peter Hathaway Capstick to step forward and give us those wonderful books to fuel another generation of African Hunters. God bless Robert Ruark.