Garry Wills

Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934)^[2] is a prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church.

Wills has written nearly 40 books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for the New York Review of Books.^[3] He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor of History.

Early years

Wills was born in Atlanta, Georgia.^[2] His father, Jack Willis, was from a Protestant background, and his mother was from an Irish Catholic family.^[4] He grew up in Michigan and Wisconsin, graduating from Campion High School, a Jesuit institution, in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in 1951. He entered and then left the Jesuit order.

He earned a B.A. in philosophy from Saint Louis University in 1957 and an M.A. from Xavier University in 1958, both in philosophy. William F. Buckley, Jr. hired him as a drama critic for National Review magazine at the age of 23. He received a PhD in classics from Yale University in 1961,^[1] and taught history at Johns Hopkins University from 1962 to 1980.

Personal life

Wills has been married to Natalie Cavallo since 1959: she was the flight attendant on his first flight on an airplane.^[5] They have three children: John, Garry, and Lydia.^[1][6]

A trained classicist, Wills is proficient in Greek and Latin. His home in Evanston, Illinois is "filled with books", with a converted bedroom dedicated to English literature, another containing Latin literature and books on American political thought, one hallway full of books on economics and religion, "including four shelves on St. Augustine", and another with shelves of Greek literature and philosophy.^[1][7]

Religion

Wills describes himself as a Roman Catholic and, with the exception of a period of doubt during his seminary years, has been a Roman Catholic all his life.^[8] He continues to attend Mass at the Sheil Catholic Center in Northwestern University. He prays the rosary every day, and wrote a book about the devotion (The Rosary: Prayer Comes Around) in 2005.^[9]

Wills has also been a critic of many aspects of church history and church teaching since at least the early 1960s. He has been particularly critical of the doctrine of papal infallibility, the social teaching of the church regarding homosexuality, abortion, and contraception, and the Eucharist, and of the church's reaction to the sex abuse scandal.^{[10][11][12][13]}

In 1961, in a phone conversation with William F. Buckley Jr., Wills coined the famous macaronic phrase Mater si, magistra no.^[8] The phrase, which was a response to the papal encyclical Mater et magistra and a reference to the then-current anti-Castro slogan "Cuba sí, Castro no", signifies a devotion to the faith and tradition of the church combined with a skeptical attitude towards ecclesiastical authority.^[9]

Wills published a full-length analysis of the contemporary Catholic Church, Bare Ruined Choirs, in 1972, and a full-scale criticism of the historical and contemporary church, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, in 2000. He followed up the latter with a sequel, Why I Am a Catholic (2002), as well as with the books What Jesus Meant (2006), What Paul Meant (2006), and What the Gospels Meant (2008).

Politics

Wills began his career as an early protégé of William F. Buckley, Jr. and was associated with conservatism. When he first became involved with National Review he did not know if he was a conservative, calling himself a "distributionist."^[14] Later on, he was self-admittedly conservative, being regarded for a time as the "token conservative" for the National Catholic Reporter and even writing a book entitled Confessions of a Conservative.^[9]

However, during the 1960s and 1970s, driven by his coverage of both civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements, Wills became increasingly liberal. His biography of president Richard M. Nixon, Nixon Agonistes (1970) landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.^[15] He supported Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential Election, but declared two years later that Obama's presidency had been a "terrible disappointment". ^[16]

In 1995, Wills wrote an article about the Second Amendment for The New York Review of Books. Originally entitled "Why We Have No Right to Bear Arms", that was not Wills contention and he neither wrote the title nor approved it prior to the article's publication.^[17] Instead, Wills argued that the Second Amendment does not justify private ownership of guns but rather refers to the right to keep and bear arms in a military context only. Furthermore, that military context does not entail the right to overthrow the government of the United States:

The Standard Model finds, squirrelled away in the Second Amendment, not only a private right to own guns for any purpose but a public right to oppose with arms the government of the United States. It grounds this claim in the right of insurrection, which clearly does exist whenever tyranny exists. Yet the right to overthrow the government is not given by government. It arises when government no longer has any authority. One cannot say one rebels by right of that nonexistent authority. Modern militias say the government itself instructs them to overthrow government – and wacky scholars endorse this view. They think the Constitution is so deranged a document that it brands as the greatest crime a war upon itself (in Article III: 'Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them...') and then instructs its citizens to take this up (in the Second Amendment). According to this doctrine, a well-regulated group is meant to overthrow its own regulator, and a soldier swearing to obey orders is disqualified from true militia virtue.^[18]

Public appraisal

The New York Times literary critic John Leonard said in 1970 that Wills "reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus."^[19] The Roman Catholic journalist, John L. Allen, Jr. considers Wills to be "perhaps the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in America over the last 50 years" (as of 2008).^[9] Martin Gardner in "The Strange Case of Garry Wills" states there is a "mystery and strangeness that hovers like a gray fog over everything Wills has written about his faith".^[20]

Honors

• 1978: Inventing America – National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-Fiction (co-winner, with Facts of Life by Maureen Howard)^[21]
• 1979: Inventing America – Merle Curti Award
• 1982: Honorary degree of L.H.D. by the College of the Holy Cross
• 1992: Lincoln at Gettysburg – National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
• 1993: Lincoln at Gettysburg – Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction^[22]
• 1995: Honorary degree from Bates College
• 1998: National Medal for the Humanities^[1]
• 2004: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates^[23]

Works

• Chesterton: Man and Mask, Doubleday, 1961. ISBN 978-0-385-50290-0
• Animals of the Bible (1962)
• Politics and Catholic Freedom (1964)
• Roman Culture: Weapons and the Man (1966), ISBN 0-8076-0367-8
• The Second Civil War: Arming for Armageddon (1968)
• Jack Ruby (1968), ISBN 0-306-80564-2
• Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-made Man (1970, 1979), ISBN 0-451-61750-9
• Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (1972), ISBN 0-385-08970-8
• Values Americans Live By (1973), ISBN 0-405-04166-7
• Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1978), ISBN 0-385-08976-7
• Confessions of a Conservative (1979), ISBN 0-385-08977-5
• At Button's (1979), ISBN 0-8362-6108-9
• Explaining America: The Federalist (1981), ISBN 0-385-14689-2
• The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (1982), ISBN 0-316-94385-1
• Lead Time: A Journalist's Education (1983), ISBN 0-385-17695-3
• Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (1984), ISBN 0-385-17562-0
• Reagan's America: Innocents at Home (1987), ISBN 0-385-18286-4
• Under God: Religion and American Politics (1990), ISBN 0-671-65705-4
• Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992), ISBN 0-671-76956-1
• Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (1994), ISBN 0-671-65702-X
• Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth (1995), ISBN 0-19-508879-4
• John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity (1997), ISBN 0-684-80823-4
• Saint Augustine (1999), ISBN 0-670-88610-6
• Saint Augustine's Childhood (2001), ISBN 0-670-03001-5
• Saint Augustine's Memory (2002), ISBN 0-670-03127-5
• Saint Augustine's Sin (2003), ISBN 0-670-03241-7
• Saint Augustine's Conversion (2004), ISBN 0-670-03352-9
• A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (1999), ISBN 0-684-84489-3
• Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (2000), ISBN 0-385-49410-6
• Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire (2001), ISBN 0-684-87190-4
• Why I Am a Catholic (2002), ISBN 0-618-13429-8
• Mr. Jefferson's University (2002), ISBN 0-7922-6531-9
• James Madison (2002), ISBN 0-8050-6905-4
• Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003), ISBN 0-618-34398-9
• Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005), ISBN 0-618-13430-1
• The Rosary: Prayer Comes Round (2005), ISBN 0-670-03449-5
• What Jesus Meant (2006), ISBN 0-670-03496-7
• What Paul Meant (2006), ISBN 0-670-03793-1
• Bush's Fringe Government (2006), ISBN 978-1590172100
• Head and Heart: American Christianities (2007), ISBN 978-1-59420-146-2
• What the Gospels Meant (2008), ISBN 0-670-01871-6
• Bomb Power (2010), ISBN 978-1-59420-240-7
• Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer (2010), ISBN 978-0-670-02214-4
• Augustine's 'Confessions': A Biography (2011), ISBN 978-0691143576
• Verdi's Shakespeare: Men of the Theater (2011), ISBN 978-0670023042
• Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (2011), ISBN 978-0300152180
• Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism (2012), ISBN 978-0199768516
• Why Priests? (2013), ISBN 978-0670024872
• The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis (March 2015), ISBN 978-0525426967

References

Further reading

• Perlstein, Rick, "The American Atom", Bookforum: Rick Perlstein talks to Garry Wills about "The Bomb".
• Delbanco, Andrew, "The Right-Wing Christians", New York Review of Books, Review of Wills's Head and Heart: American Christianities.
• New York Times, "Featured Author" page.
• New York Times, Index of articles about Garry Wills, (covers 1983 to 2008).
• Northwestern University, History Faculty of NW university
• Wills at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, a live conversation with Dean Alan Jones (archived)
• Wills, Garry, October 13, 2007, Lecture at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. to promote his book, Head and Heart.
• Works by or about Garry Wills in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Wills on Under God: Religion and American Politics, December 30, 1990.
  • In Depth interview with Wills, January 2, 2005