In 1979, I first met William Hogan, longtime book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. I was fresh out of SF State, the 21-year-old managing editor of his hometown weekly, the Mill Valley Record.
I idolized him. Because he was a big deal at the biggest newspaper in Northern California. Because, when he was my age, he took a train to Monterey to drop in on John Steinbeck. Because he was a soft-spoken, genuinely humble man who liked to help young writers.
And because I was in love with his daughter.
Years later, when I was an editor at the Oakland Tribune, that same daughter, Mary Ann Hogan, asked me to marry her — but first I had to get her dad’s blessing. Imagine my relief when Bill put his steady hand on my shaking one and said, “It’s about time.”
When Bill died at the age of 82, Mary Ann came home with a big box of letters her dad had kept in a small desk in his bedroom. Hundreds of pages. Going back to 1936. Just sitting in my father-in-law’s drawer.
By then, Mary Ann and I had moved East with our sons and were working at the original Newseum, the museum of news, in Rosslyn, Virginia. So we put on our white museum gloves, carefully placing each letter in high-quality storage binders. Kept them safe from heat and humidity, from movers and decluttering, for 30 years.
Reading The Letters to Bill, as we called them, was like going to a giant cocktail party with dozens of great American writers. Publisher Bennett Cerf is furious about the review of “In Cold Blood.” Rachel Carson wants to talk about her book on nuclear waste in the oceans. Ansel Adams, Allen Ginsberg, M.F.K. Fisher, Henry Miller, Hunter Thompson, Jessica Mitford, Gary Snyder — and on and on.
And now, the 215 Letters to Bill, from 129 writers, are being added, on Sept. 25, to the rare books and manuscript collection at The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
In the news release I quote my brother-in-law, teacher, rock star and Renaissance man Dennis Hogan. “My father lived through the turmoil of 20th century America: a great depression, world war, McCarthyism, cold war and cultural upheaval. Along the way, he acquired friends, acquaintances and admirers, a who’s who of post-war literati. We are so glad and thankful to have his letters reside at the Bancroft … Bill Hogan would have been very proud.”
The donation wagon started rolling earlier this year when UC Berkeley’s journalism dean Michael Bolden introduced me to the Bancroft librarian. It went so well, my only regret was not trying to donate the letters sooner. So I guess my quote is: “It’s about time.”
William Hogan was Chronicle book editor from 1955 to 1982. He started at the paper in 1938 on “This World,” the Sunday magazine supplement, writing theater, film and book reviews.
When he died in 1996, his obituary noted that John Steinbeck had called him “an old and valued friend” and “a man of taste and discernment.”
Hogan called himself “a kind of average ‘Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,’” whose job just happened to be to encourage California writers at a time of resurgence of literature in the American West.
He was not a “lit’ry fellow” but “a reporter … on an expedition” to find good books. His reviews usually were positive. If he didn’t like a book, he would not review it or find another writer to take it on. Too many good books, he would say, to waste time on the others.
The Mill Valley Library had a special shelf just for books he recommended.
Sometimes, Bill would ask an author to provide “a few paragraphs that have appeared nowhere else” on why they wrote the book or what it meant.
In two pages in 1957, for example, Jack Kerouac summed up his breakthrough novel “On the Road.” “It’s a story about the Beat Generation, a true story by the way… that’s why it’s weirdly funny and by the same law tragic.” He wrote it “to make peace with the angels.” Or maybe, as “a send off to a brand new American Literature of grand Goethean-Dostoevskyan confession.” Or, “more simply, ‘On the Road’ is just a tale of what happened told by a guy in a cafeteria.”
As with the others, the Kerouac letter was unknown to scholars. These were the days before electronic text. Either you had the original or you had nothing.
Alex Haley met Hogan before “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” sold 2 million copies in four years, only to be outsold by “Roots: The Saga of an American Family.”
In a 1970 letter, Haley remembered: “Never will forget how when I was here, still in the Coast Guard, struggling to sell now and then to sundry magazines, somehow I met you, and the big, powerful book critic William Hogan couldn’t have been more sincerely gracious, and interested in me, if I had been some major author. Never will forget it. I do not wish to sound maudlin, which would embarrass us both, but it really did mean such a lot in the way of encouragement.”
Hogan liked to help promising writers. An oft-told family story, recounted by stepdaughter and naturalist Michelle Liapes, starred a young Joan Didion. One day, before she wrote “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” she called Hogan out of the blue and asked to meet.
Didion introduced herself as “a writer from Sacramento.” To which Hogan replied: “You certainly are.” In the Letters to Bill is one from Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, who in 1982 wrote: “Joan remembers you. She still cannot believe, almost 20 years later, that you saw her … She says it was a true act of kindness that you did.” It was the same kindness John Steinbeck showed the young writer Bill Hogan when he arrived unannounced at Steinbeck’s house on the hill above Cannery Row.
In the collection is a letter that came after Hogan’s death. UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien wrote to his widow, Phyllis Hogan, to say: “He will serve as an inspiration to our aspiring undergraduates …” The chancellor noted that Hogan often reviewed books by UC faculty and invited them to review books by other writers.
Bill’s daughter Mary Ann was a journalist too, and kept the Hogan name to honor the family legacy. Her book “Circle Way” quoted the Letters to Bill and was illustrated with dozens of his drawings and paintings.
Bill turned to art after he retired. He had several shows but didn’t sell his paintings. He gave them all away. But the letters he kept, in that small desk in his bedroom — and he never once mentioned them.
I think I know why. They were gifts, what other people had handed him — Kerouac trying to explain himself, Haley remembering a kindness, Dunne passing along a 20-year-old thank-you from his wife. You don’t sell that. You hold onto it until you find the right person to hand it to – in this case, David Faulds, Curator of Rare Books and Literary Manuscripts at The Bancroft Library, who called the collection “a wonderful addition.”
So the letters go to UC Berkeley — where Bill wrote his first review, but never earned a degree. During the Depression, work came first.
And now anyone can see what he kept in that drawer.
As Bill often said: “Imagine that.”
Journalist Eric Newton was managing editor of three Bay Area newspapers — the Mill Valley Record, the Contra Costa Independent and the Oakland Tribune. He was the managing editor of the original Newseum, the first vice president of the Knight Foundation’s journalism program, and innovation chief at ASU’s Cronkite School. The family, including sons William and James, returned to the Bay Area in 2016. Mary Ann died in 2019. Her granddaughter, Maryanne, was born in 2023.
This article first appeared in Local News Matters here.