At Home with Ernie Pyle

Pyle, Ernie. At Home with Ernie Pyle. Edited and with an introduction by Owen V. Johnson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. 368 pp. $30.Journalism historian Owen V. Johnson writes something quite curious in his introduction to this hook:"We are only beginning to understand Ernie Pyle."Uiat is a rather odd statement for Johnson to make, given that he has dedicated much of his academic career to studying the life and works of Indiana's most celebrated journalist. A literature review of Pyle, a war correspondent killed by a Japanese machine gunner in 1945, would be quite lengthy. Many of Pyle's wartime columns for the Scripps-Floward newspaper chair appeared in collections during his lifetime: Ernie Pyle in England, Here Is Your War, and the haunting Brave Men. Posthumously, we have been treated to books containing columns from his stint as an aviation reporter, his writings while attached to the Navy, his decade as a traveling observer of life in the Americas, and his take on his beloved Southwest. Biographical treatments have followed, the best being James Tobin's Ernie Pyle's War.What could be left undone?Having read the collection of all things Pyle wrote about, or from, his home state, I am convinced Johnson is right.Pyle's work had never been indexed or cataloged, so finding Indiana connections in his nearly two decades of columns must have been tiresome work. Johnson acknowledges this as such with a tip of his hat to former grad student Emily Ehmer, who did much of the sleuthing. The result of their labors appears comprehensive to a fault. Entries include full columns, and even series on a particular topic (Brown County, Evansville, Indiana University), all dated and annotated, and where appropriate, footnoted. Entries also include one- and rwo-paragraph snippets. For example, on November 9, 1937, Pyle gave only a nibble of a column to the fact that a racecar in the Indianapolis 500 cost $10,000 to $15,000.There is much meat in the book for those seeking to know more about Pyle or about Indiana in the first half of the twentieth century.Regarding Pyle, his writing still shines both for its simplicity and for its ability to trigger emotion. Most columns have a melancholy tinge, and Pyle was known to have suffered depression. No column hits harder than his description of his arrival in Dana, Indiana, after a hurried flight from London:"My father met me at the train in Indianapolis. When we shook hands there were no tears in his eyes, and I was glad."When we drove up the lane to the farmhouse my Aunt Mary came rushing out onto the front porch. And she did not cry. And I was glad."And then the dog Snooks came running up, but she was timid and afraid as though she could not make up her mind. …