November 17, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): Come September

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

[NOTE. I originally shared this post as part of a September 2015 series on September-tastic cultural works. But I think it sets up this week’s topics well, so I wanted to start with it!]

On how biography adds compelling layers and questions to a forgettable romantic comedy.

I honestly tried to watch the 1961 romantic comedy Come September in preparation for writing this post, but after a certain early point I gave up. Even the Wikipedia summary of the film’s plot, and more exactly of who is wooing or leaving whom at any given moment, is almost impossible to follow; and on watching the opening the film feels more like an advertisement for Italy’s spectacular Ligurian coast than a coherent story. And the part that I did most fully understand, and that explains the film’s title, is more creepy than romantic: September is the month when American businessman Robert (Rock Hudson) annually escapes to his Ligurian villa with his Italian mistress Lisa (Gina Lollobrigida); but this year his visit is moved up to July instead, and when he informs Lisa of the change she cancels her imminent wedding to join Robert per usual. The course of true love and all, but not exactly the sweetest way to meet these two star-crossed lovers.

So not exactly a must-watch classic—but if we delve into the biographies of the film’s stars, it takes on additional and more interesting layers of meaning. For one thing, the film’s two young lovers are played by popular crooner Bobby Darin and up-and-coming ingénue Sandra Dee, and the story of their connection behind the scenes is by far the film’s most romantic: Darin and Dee met for the first time on set, fell in love, and were married that same year. Portrayed in the recent biopic Beyond the Sea (2004), with Kevin Spacey starring as Darin and Kate Bosworth as Dee, the marriage lasted seven tumultuous years and produced their son Dodd Mitchell Darin before the couple divorced in 1967. And no matter what the future held for these two, there’s something fascinating about watching two young performers pretending to fall in love while (we know) they were actually falling in love as well, and the romance between these two popular artists makes for a much more compelling story than anything presented on screen in Come September.

And then there’s Rock Hudson. It would be homophobic, narrow-minded, and just plain dumb for me to suggest that a gay actor couldn’t play a straight character, and of course Hudson’s entire career (much of it as the lead in romantic comedies) would belie that notion. Yet at the same time (and of course I’m far from the first to argue this), there’s something inarguably compelling about the reality that one of the most popular, traditional (that is, starring in the kinds of traditional love stories that were permissible and widespread in the buttoned-up entertainment culture of the 1950s) romantic leads in Hollywood history was throughout his life and career performing that sexuality, acting the part of a heterosexual sex symbol. Sir Ian McKellen argued earlier this year that when he finally came out as a gay man (at the age of 49), it made him a better actor; “my acting was disguise,” he put it, “Now, my acting is about revelation and truth.” Seen through that lens, and given that he never came out publicly during his lifetime (although his 1985 diagnosis with AIDS led to awareness of his sexuality shortly before and then after his death), Hudson’s acting was always a multi-layered, complex facet of his life, and one that lends another compelling layer to a film like Come September.

Next Rock Hudson post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 15-16, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: Three 21C Stories

[For Veterans Day, I’ve AmericanStudied five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to this weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

Three texts and voices that can help us commemorate 21^st century veterans’ communities:

1)      Miyoko Hikiji’s memoir All I Could Be: My Story as a Woman Warrior in Iraq (2013), on which see that hyperlinked post;

2)      Phil Klay’s short story collection Redeployment (2014), on the stunning and heartbreaking title story of which see that article;

3)      and Ross Caputi, Richard Hil, and Donna Mulhearn’s The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History (2019); Ross is an Iraq War veteran as well as one of my favorite former students, and this project embodies veteran critical patriotism amazingly well;

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

November 14, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: The Best Years of Our Lives and WWII

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On the film and performance that capture the spectrum and significance of veterans’ experiences.

There are no shortage of memorable World War II stories in our national narratives—of course there are the overarching narratives like The Greatest Generation and Rosie the Riveter; there are the explicitly and centrally celebratory texts, such as in films like Midway or Saving Private Ryan; the more complex mixtures of celebration and realism, films like From Here to Eternity or Flags of Our Fathers; and the very explicitly critical and satirical accounts, as in the novels Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. One could even argue, with some accuracy, that if there is any single event or era that doesn’t need additional reinforcing in our national consciousness, it is World War II. And similarly, one could argue that if there’s any group of American films that can’t be considered generally under-exposed or –remembered, even if some have waned in popularity or awareness over time, it’d be those that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Well, I guess I like a challenge, because I’m here to argue that a World War II-centered film that in 1947 won not only Best Picture but also Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Editing, and Music has become a much too forgotten and underappreciated American text. [NOTE: I initially wrote this post more than a decade ago, and I hope and believe that this is no longer as much the case.] That film was The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s adaptation of MacKinlay Kantor’s 1945 novel Glory for Me about three returning World War II veterans and their experiences attempting to re-adapt to civilian life on the home front. It’s a far from perfect film, and features some schmaltzy sections that, perhaps, feel especially dated at more than sixty years’ remove and have likely contributed to its waning appeal. But it also includes some complex and powerful moments, and a significant number of them can be attributed directly to Wyler’s most famous and important casting choice: his decision to cast former paratrooper Harold Russell, an amateur actor who had lost both of his hands in a training accident, in the role of Homer Parrish, a similarly disabled vet with hooks replacing his hands. Homer’s relationship with the extremely supportive Wilma (played by Cathy O’Donnell) offers its share of the schmaltz, but in other ways his character and performance are much more dark and complicated, affecting the emotions through their realism and sensitivity rather than just overt heartstring-tugging.

That’s especially true of the scene that stood out to me most when I watched the film (as a college student in the late 1990s) and that has stuck with me ever since. Homer, once a star high school quarterback who was used to being watched and admired by younger boys in that earlier role, is attempting to work on a project in his garage but struggling greatly with his prostheses; he knows that a group of neighborhood boys are spying on him in fascination and horror but tries to ignore their presence. He can’t do so, however, and in a burst of anger releases much of what he has been dealing with since his injuries and return, breaking the garage windows with his hooks and daring the kids to fully engage with who and what he has become. The moment, big and emotional as it is, feels as unaffected as it gets, and manages to do what few of those more well-known World War II stories can: celebrating and critiquing in equal measure, recognizing the sacrifice and heroism of a Homer while mourning what war does and takes and destroys. Ultimately the scene, like the film, provides no definite answers, no straightforward adulation of its veterans nor darkly comic takedown of war myths, but instead simply asks us to think about what life (in and out of war) has meant and continues to mean for someone like Harold Russell, and all his veteran peers.

Indeed, Best Years is ultimately about precisely that—the experiences and identities of the soldiers themselves, at their best, at their worst, and everywhere in between. On Veteran’s Day, and on every other day as well, I think it’d be ideal to focus not on wars at all, horrific and cold and impersonal and, yes, hellish as they always are, but on remembering those Americans whose lives were and continue to be so impacted by these experiences—not least, I have to add, because I think we’d be a lot less cavalier about starting wars if we did so. Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

PPS. For another take on Best Years, make sure to check out my wife Vaughn Joy's excellent Review Roulette newsletter!

November 13, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: “Returning Soldiers” and WWI

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On how an under-remembered community of veterans helps us make national sense of a complex foreign war.

As part of a June 2017 centennial series on the U.S. and World War I, I shared this post on African American WWI soldiers, including an extended discussion of W.E.B. Du Bois’s May 1919 The Crisis column “Returning Soldiers.” I’d ask you to check out both that post and that column (the hyperlink in the original post no longer works, but the second one in this paragraph should) if you would, and then come on back for further thoughts on that column and community.

Welcome back! Since I wrote that column, I’ve learned much more about the Red Summer of 1919, a year-long, nationwide orgy of white supremacist violence and racial terrorism that very consistently targeted African American WWI veterans, often in uniform and/or taking part in commemorative marches and events. As that second hyperlinked article from the National World War I Museum and Memorial describes it succinctly and accurately, while the violence was always—let me say again, always—initiated by white supremacist mobs, “the Red Summer saw Black populations fight back aggressively against racial violence and intimidation in ways that were not typical before.” Proving prophetic indeed Du Bois’s stirring lines, “we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.”

Those are the most specific and to my mind the most important takeaways from this veteran community and Du Bois’s column alike. But I think these histories also frame a broader point, one that has helped me analyze what this complex foreign war—one in which the U.S. got involved very late compared to most of the rest of the world—meant in and for the U.S. When we take into consideration that 1919 violence targeting veterans, and add in ongoing catastrophic crises in that same year including the influenza pandemic and the Palmer Raids (both of which emerged directly out of World War I), it’s fair to say that for the United States the “wartime” period very fully extended past the November 1918 Armistice and into 1919 (if not beyond). Of course that’s always the case for veterans, as I hope every post in this series makes clear. But in this case, I would argue that the entire nation remained in many ways “at war” well past the conclusion of the foreign war, and no community better reflects that reality than African American veterans.

Last veteran’s story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

November 12, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: A Fool’s Errand and the Civil War

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On how the protagonist’s status as a veteran adds to a novel’s ironies, and why that’s not the whole story.

Earlier this year, I dedicated a post in my April Fool’s series to the great Albion Tourgée’s historical and autobiographical Reconstruction novel A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools (1879). I focused there on the novel’s ironies, so would ask you to check out that prior post and then come on back from some thoughts on how that element can be connected to veterans’ stories.

Welcome back! Like Tourgée, the novel’s protagonist Comfort Servosse—the narrator mostly just calls him The Fool—is a Civil War veteran, with the opening few chapters depicting his service with the Union army. Although the novel then jumps ahead four years to focus on Servosse’s move to North Carolina and time in that state during Reconstruction, that Civil War service thus becomes a foundation for everything that follows, on at least two ironic levels. More obviously, Servosse chooses to move his young family and blossoming legal career alike into the heart of enemy territory, a choice that immediately foreshadows why this might indeed be the titular “fool’s errand.” And more subtly but even more ironically, that time in the Reconstruction South will constitute, at least in the novel’s presentation of it, a far more difficult and painful battle than did his Civil War military efforts. Given how badly Reconstruction ultimately went for African Americans and their allies, that’s a very telling and bracing irony to be sure.

But it’s not the whole story, not of this novel and certainly not of Reconstruction. More exactly, the fact that white supremacists, both in the former Confederate states and (especially) on the national stage, successfully managed to sabotage and torpedo Reconstruction and move the country even closer to a white supremacist exclusionary state than it had been in the antebellum period, shouldn’t in any way minimize the impressive and inspiring work of African Americans and allies (like Albion Tourgée) in fighting for a more equal and just South and America. While the tortured irony of A Fool’s Errand can be difficult to parse, or at least to reduce to any single clear point, I would argue that the title itself is meant ironically as well—that this Reconstruction-era work was genuinely a knight’s errand, the most worthy thing this character and author alike could be part of at that moment, indeed a fully worthy extension and amplification of their Civil War service; and that it was not them but rather all of us who were fools, as much for failing to support those efforts as in all the other ways in that painful period.

Next veteran’s story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

November 11, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: William Apess and the War of 1812

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On two ways to AmericanStudy the significance of a Native American veteran’s experiences.

I’ve written about William Apess, one of my very favorite American writers and voices, many times in this space and beyond. Most of those posts have focused on individual texts of his, but in this post I wrote more broadly about the arc of his life (as well as how he traced it in his autobiographical writing). I’d ask you to check out that post if you could, and then come on back for thoughts on Apess’s military service during the War of 1812.

As I note in that post, just about every detail of Apess’s life seems hyperbolic; but perhaps the most extreme is captured in this clause: “enlisting in a New York militia at the age of 16 and fighting in the War of 1812.” The U.S. did not yet have a standing army at this time, so it relied on state militias to do the bulk of the fighting (alongside assembled armies like the amazingly diverse one Andrew Jackson commanded at the Battle of New Orleans), and I have to imagine that they weren’t great at checking the ages of their soldiers. But at the same time, I don’t think we can separate Apess’s extreme experience of military service from the fraught and complicated multi-century story of Native Americans service in U.S. wars and conflicts. From Crispus Attucks to Ira Hayes, the U.S. Army Indian Scouts to the Najavo code talkers, and so many other individuals and communities, Native Americans have played a role in every American conflict, one far exceeding their percentage of the overall population. And as we see most potently in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977), that service has always affected them profoundly and too often painfully, something I have to imagine was part of Apess’s story as well, especially given just how young he was when that service began.

Alongside such negative effects, of course, veterans can also take away meaningful positives from their wartime service, and one positive aftermath in which I’m especially interested is the critical patriotic perspective that many veterans express and then act upon. William Apess undoubtedly drew his own critical patriotism from a variety of sources, including his faith and his profound understanding of Scripture, his connection to and love for his fellow Native Americans, and more. But I don’t think we can discount the role that this teenage military service played in shaping both Apess’s awareness of the worst of America and his desire to continue fighting to push the nation closer to its best—and when he expressed all those perspectives in his best work, “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836), he did so in the heart of Revolutionary-celebrating 1830s Boston, an act of aggressive activism that seems likewise to continue with that youthful fighting spirit.

Next veteran’s story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

November 10, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: The Shoemaker and the Tea Party

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On two important lessons about veterans that we can draw from Alfred F. Young’s book about George Robert Twelves Hewes.

I wrote at length about Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (2000) in this 2012 Beach Reads post. I’d ask you to check out that post if you would, and then come on back for a couple further thoughts about Hewes as a Revolutionary War veteran.

Welcome back! In that post I focused mostly on Hewes’s role in and then 1820s memories of pre-Revolutionary events like the Boston Tea Party and Boston Massacre, which are also the main focal points of Young’s book. But Hewes did go on to fight in the American Revolution as well, both as a militiaman and as a privateer, and I think that’s as important part of his story that can also help us engage with a couple broader layers of veterans’ experiences. For one thing, I would say that we can sometimes focus on veterans’ wartime experiences as if they exist in a vacuum, or at least as something distinct from the rest of their story; but while of course war is its own thing, it’s also always part of a soldier’s ongoing and larger life story, and more specifically it always follows on whatever had come before for that individual. While most soldiers likely don’t take part in events that directly lead up to the war as Hewes did, they certainly do all live in the society that is experiencing those pre-war events and trends, and I have no doubt that for nearly all of them that means they come to the war with existing perspectives and ideas that have to be considered as part of their wartime experiences.

By definition, veterans also return from their wartime experiences (something that is of course far from guaranteed for soldiers serving in a war). Most of our narratives of returning veterans focus, understandably, on the ways that they carry the war with them for the rest of their lives, a subject I’ve written about many times in this space. But what Hewes and The Shoemaker remind us is that veterans also play a role in shaping our stories, narratives, and collective memories of the wars that they take part in. That they don’t generally do so as overtly as Hewes did through his contributions to 1820s commemorations, or for that matter as overtly as many of the folks and texts I’ll write about in this week’s series, doesn’t change the fact that every time a veteran talks about wartime experiences, tell stories of the war, participates in a meeting or gathering or conversation related to those subjects, and so on, they are helping shape our collective memories of that conflict. That can mean many different things in practice, but no matter what it’s a key role that veterans play, and one that the Shoemaker helps us remember and think about.   

Next veteran’s story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?