William Bradford Huie

William Bradford "Bill" Huie (November 13, 1910 – November 20, 1986) was an American journalist and novelist. He wrote several books about controversial topics related to World War II and the Civil Rights Movement.

He was also known for the practice of checkbook journalism, paying subjects to gain interviews and articles about them. In January 1956 he published an interview in Look magazine in which the two white men who killed Emmett Till admitted their guilt and described their crime. They had been acquitted at trial several months previously by an all-white jury.

Huie had several of his books adapted as feature films during the 1960s and 1970s.

Early life and career
Born in Hartselle, Alabama in 1910, William Bradford Huie was the son of John Bradford and Margaret Lois (née Brindley) Huie, and was the eldest of three children. He attended Morgan County High School and graduated as class valedictorian. He attended the University of Alabama, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1930.

From 1932 to 1936, Huie worked as a journalist for the newspaper The Birmingham Post. In 1934, he married his grammar school sweetheart, Ruth Puckett. Their wedding took place in her parents' home in Hartselle. Huie later described the scene in his largely autobiographical first novel, Mud on the Stars (1942).

In late 1938, Huie was in Los Angeles and worked independently as an undercover reporter to gather information on gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. He reported on his experiences in the Los Angeles Times and later in the December 1950 issue of The American Mercury, a literary magazine.

Recognition as journalist
Huie's first national recognition came from his article "How To Keep Football Stars In College," Collier's Weekly, 1 January 1941. This piece about the University of Alabama 1940s football program included provocative quotes, such as "We who have recruited Alabama's players know who our competitors have been. And we've offered no higher prices than were necessary to compete in the open market."

World War II
During World War II, Huie served in the United States Navy, for a time as aide to Vice Admiral Ben Moreell of the Seabees. While chronicling the wartime activity of the Seabees, Lieutenant Huie had special permission to continue his own writing projects, both fiction and nonfiction. He drew from his Navy experiences, including his participation in D-Day, for his 1959 novel The Americanization of Emily. It was adapted as the 1964 film of the same name starring James Garner and Julie Andrews. Both Garner and Andrews consider it the personal favorite of their films.

Discharged in 1945 from the Navy, Huie went immediately to the Pacific theatre as a war correspondent. His experiences at Iwo Jima became the basis for the nonfiction work, "The Hero of Iwo Jima", published in The Hero of Iwo Jima and Other Stories in 1962. It was an account of the life of flag-raiser Ira Hayes. Huie's account was developed into the 1961 film The Outsider, starring Tony Curtis. He drew from his experiences in Hawaii during the war for his novel The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1951). This was adapted as the 1956 film of the same name starring Jane Russell.

The American Mercury
Before the war, Huie had been writing for The American Mercury, the notable literary magazine founded by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Like Mencken, Huie was a critic of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" policies during the Great Depression. After the war, he returned to the Mercury, becoming associate editor, then editor. In 1950, publisher Clendenin J. Ryan bought the magazine. Ryan and editor Huie wanted to develop the magazine as a journal of the fledgling American conservative movement, introducing new, mass-appeal writers such as evangelist Billy Graham, former communist Max Eastman, and long-time Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover. Young William F. Buckley, future National Review founder and editor, was one of Huie's early staffers.

By the mid-1950s, however, Huie and Ryan were unable to overcome financial difficulties and were forced to sell the magazine to one of its investors, Russell Maguire. After Huie's departure, Maguire and other owners drove The New American Mercury, in author William A. Rusher's phrase, "toward the fever swamps of anti-Semitism." He believed that they destroyed its legitimacy and contributed to its end. To Huie's disgust, the journal that had once featured the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes became a periodical advocating racism.

Freelance work (1950s to 1960s)
From 1950 to 1955, Huie was a popular speaker, traveling back and forth across the country on the professional lecture circuit. During the same period, he also became well known through his appearances on the weekly television current events program, Longines Chronoscope, produced in New York City. As a co-editor of the hour-long talk show, he interviewed newsmakers John F. Kennedy, Joseph McCarthy, and Clare Boothe Luce, as well as international figures, politicians, scientists, and economists. His program co-editors included figures such as Henry Hazlitt and Max Eastman. Domestic issues, Congressional activity, military defense, the Olympics, and foreign policy were all topics discussed on the program.

In the late 1950s, Huie and his wife resettled permanently in their native Hartselle. Ruth worked as a first grade schoolteacher. Huie continued to write full-time at home as freelance journalist and novelist.

During this period, activism in the Civil Rights Movement increased and Huie was commissioned by periodicals such as the New York Herald Tribune and Look magazine to cover breaking events in the South. In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, but most southern jurisdictions made no changes to their schools.

Huie attended the appeal and second trial in 1954 of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy married black woman in Florida who had shot and killed her white paramour, physician and state senator-elect Dr. Leroy Adams. She testified that he had forced her to have sex and bear his child when she got pregnant. The popular married doctor was being groomed to run for Governor of Florida. Huie had been contacted about the case by writer Zora Neale Hurston, who had worked with him earlier at The American Mercury and had covered the first McCollum trial in Live Oak, Florida for the Pittsburgh Courier. The judge had prohibited McCollum from talking to the press.

Huie attended the appeal and second trial, and conducted background investigations of the figures and events. He was arrested on contempt of court charges; the judge cited him for "meddling" in a trial that "could embarrass the community". Huie was soon freed from jail and he was pardoned years later. His book on the sensational case, Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail (1956), became a bestseller; it was banned in Florida. Ebony, Time, and other journals publicized McCollum's story worldwide.

Huie also reported on the lynching of African-American Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi in 1955. After an all-white jury found the two defendants not guilty, Huie paid the men $4,000 for an interview. They described how and why they committed the murder, and were protected by double jeopardy from being tried again for the crime. Huie published his account in Look magazine in January 1956. Some mainstream journalists criticized what they called his "checkbook journalism". Huie also published a full-length book on the case, Wolf Whistle (1959). Simeon Wright, Till's cousin and an eyewitness to the events at the store and to Till's abduction, refuted the killers' version in his 2010 memoir, written with Her Boyd, Simeon's Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till.

Huie also reported on various Ku Klux Klan activities, including the 1964 killing of "Freedom Summer" workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. His books on the latter included The Klansman (1965) and Three Lives for Mississippi (1965). The KKK to burned a cross on his front lawn in 1967 to try to intimidate him.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), wrote the Introduction for the second edition of Huie's Three Lives for Mississippi. He said that it "is a part of the arsenal decent Americans can employ to make democracy for all truly a birthright and not a distant dream. It relates the story of an atrocity committed on our doorstep." Subsequent editions of the work include an "Afterword" by Juan Williams. In 1970, Huie published He Slew the Dreamer, an account of the Memphis assassination of King, for which he had interviewed assassin James Earl Ray.

Huie's book The Execution of Private Slovik (1954) related the historic account of World War II G.I. Eddie Slovik, the only soldier since the American Civil War to be executed for desertion. The government had kept this quiet, not telling his widow how he died. After the book revealed Slovik's story, Huie and others tried for years to get the government to pay his widow a pension, but had no success. He had discussions with Frank Sinatra about adapting the work as a movie. Sinatra dropped it in 1960 due to objections to his choice of screenwriter, a man who was one of the Hollywood Ten blacklisted after refusing to testify to HUAC. The singer was campaigning at the time for John F. Kennedy as president. The book was later adapted as a television movie, entitled as The Execution of Private Slovik (1974), starring Martin Sheen, and aired by NBC.

Later years
In 1973 Huie's father died. This loss was followed several months later by the death of Huie's wife Ruth from cancer. In 1975 Huie met Martha Hunt Robertson of Guntersville, Alabama, an art instructor at a local college. They married in Huntsville, Alabama on July 16, 1977. They divided their time between their Hartselle and Guntersville homes. In a few years, the Huies moved to Scottsboro. By 1985 they resettled in Guntersville.

Huie wrote one more significant book after Ruth's death. In the Hours of Night is the story of the development of the atomic bomb and its effect on its creators and policy makers. It is loosely based on the life of James Forrestal, Secretary of Defense during the height of the development.

On November 20, 1986, Huie died of a heart attack. He left an unfinished novel, "The Adversary", which was intended to be the second of a trilogy that began with In the Hours of Night. Martha Huie, his widow and heir, continued to represent her late husband's literary properties. She managed ongoing projects until her death in Memphis in May 2014. Martha Huie's daughter, Mary Ben Heflin, now handles William Bradford Huie's literary properties and ongoing projects.

Legacy and honors

 * 1975, Alabama's Library Association honored Huie with the Best Fiction Award for In the Hours of Night.
 * Since 1974, the Alabama Authors Collection at Snead Community College, Boaz, Alabama, has been documenting Huie's life and career. It holds a variety of artifacts, as well as all of his books.
 * After Huie's death, his widow Martha Huie donated his papers to Ohio State University.
 * In November 2006, the City of Hartselle renamed the local public library in honor of Huie. The library has a permanent biographical display of Huie's work, as well as bibliographic resources.
 * In 2007, the Guntersville Museum and Cultural Center added a William Bradford Huie component to its permanent collection.
 * Huie's alma mater, the University of Alabama, honored him posthumously with a Fine Arts Award, and induction into the College of Communication and Information Sciences Hall of Fame.

Since Huie's death in 1986, dozens of publications have cited, quoted, referenced and analyzed his work. Recent examples include: David Halberstam's The Fifties; both volumes of Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941-1963 and 1963-1973; The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, 2006; and Devin McKinney's "An American Cuss," in Oxford American, Issue 57, 2007.

Fiction

 * Mud on the Stars (1942; reprinted with new material 1996) - (1960 film, Wild River)
 * The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1951) - (1956 film of the same name)
 * The Americanization of Emily (1959) - (1964 film of the same name)
 * Hotel Mamie Stover (1963)
 * The Klansman (1967) - (1974 film of the same name)
 * In the Hours of the Night (1975)

Nonfiction

 * How To Keep Football Stars In College (1941)
 * The Fight for Air Power (1942)
 * Seabee Roads to Victory (1944)
 * Can Do!: The Story of the Seabees (1944; reprinted with new material 1997)
 * From Omaha to Okinawa: The Story of the Seabees (1945; reprinted with new material 1999)
 * The Case against the Admirals: Why We Must Have a Unified Command (1946)
 * Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail (with Zora Neale Hurston) (1956)
 * The Execution of Private Slovik (1954; reprinted with new material 2004) - (1974 TV film of the same name)
 * Wolf Whistle and Other Stories (1959, retitled The Outsider and Other Stories in the UK, adapted as The Outsider, 1961 film)
 * "The Hero of Iwo Jima and Other Stories" (1962)
 * The Hiroshima Pilot: The Case of Major Claude Eatherly (1964)
 * Three Lives for Mississippi (1965; reprinted with new material 2000)
 * He Slew the Dreamer: My Search with James Earl Ray for the Truth about the Murder of Martin Luther King (1970)
 * "Did the FBI Kill Martin Luther King?" (1977)
 * A New Life To Live: Jimmy Putman's Story (editor 1977)
 * It's Me O Lord! (1979)