Famous Iowans - James Stevens | DesMoinesRegister.com

James Stevens

Writer | 1892-1971

Written by Tom Longden

Stevens was photographed in San Francisco in 1928 aboard a steamer that was bound for South America, where Stevens planned to do some research for a book. He was best known for his stories about Paul Bunyan, Babe the Blue Ox, Big Swede and Johnny Inkslinger./

James Stevens had a mythical friend who brought him fame: the legendary, gigantic lumberjack Paul Bunyan.

It was Stevens who took assorted tall tales abut the logger and collected them into a best-selling book in 1925. It was the first time the Bunyan legend had been popularized on a national scale.

Stevens had heard many of the tales firsthand while working in Oregon logging camps. He also researched the Bunyan character, tracing the legend back to 1837 French Canada and a possible real logger named Paul Bunyon.

Stevens noted that by 1860 Bunyan had become an American hero, and seemed to have inhabited a number of states, including Maine, Michigan, California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, North Dakota - even "New Iowa."

James Floyd Stevens did not have an easy life. He was born Nov. 15, 1892, on a rented farm at Iconium, near Albia, in Monroe County, the son of what he called "a gypsy father" who decided to roam. His mother, Octavia Turner Stevens, had to work as a hired girl for $12 per month, and James lived with his grandmother in Moravia from 1897 to 1902.

"As I was not naturally a good boy," he later wrote, he learned how to chew tobacco his first summer in Moravia. He started attending school a year earlier than usual, and "after my seventh birthday I developed quite an appetite for reading, an appetite which had to be satisfied mostly by my grandmother's books - the Bible, 'Pilgrim's Progress' and 'The Swiss Family Robinson'.

As a child torn between virtue and vice, he dabbled in preaching, at ball games and around the livery barn, and was even called "Preacher" by his schoolmates. But, as he later said, he was guilty of "backsliding" and playing hooky until his grandmother felt he was too much for her.

At the age of 10, Stevens was sent - alone on a train from Kansas City - to live with his father's relatives in Idaho, where he learned to handle horses and cattle. He left that home at age 15 - some say he was expelled from school because of his tobacco habit - and went to work at many hard jobs in the West, mostly handling horses and mules on large construction projects and working in the forest industry.Later, he wrote: "The West was a great country those times, for a willing worker, and these hands were willing and not unskilled."

After serving in World War I in France, as a sergeant in the infantry, Stevens developed a deep interest in books, becoming as he said, "a hobo laborer with wishful literary yearnings." He became self-educated, spending hours at public libraries, which he called "the poor man's universities."

Settling in Portland, Ore., he began writing for H.L. Mencken's American Mercury magazine in 1923, and a story he wrote about mythical giant Bunyan evolved into a book of stories that initially sold more than 75,000 copies.By the end of his literary career, which lasted more than 50 years, Stevens' total output included nine books and more than 250 stories and magazine articles. His favorite subject was the working man and his role in nature.

Included among his works were: "Brawny Man" (1926), "Mattock" (1927), "Homer in the Sagebrush" (1928), "The Saginaw Paul Bunyan" (1932), "Paul Bunyan's Bears" (1947), "Big Jim Turner" (1948), and "Tree Treasure" (1950).

When "Paul Bunyan" was published in 1925, the New York World newspaper compared Stevens to Carl Sandburg and Ring Lardner. Total sales reached 200,000 in 1948 after the publication of a special armed services edition published in World War II.

Unflattering accounts
With a talent for satire and exaggeration, Stevens also had a talent for offending some readers with what he thought was the unvarnished truth. Some of his stories, published in American Mercury, were thinly disguised and unflattering accounts about the people of Moravia. One, "A Prairie Town" (1925), caused such a rumpus that The Des Moines Register rushed to print an article about the town's reaction.Nevertheless, when Iowa author Clarence Andrews included "A Prairie Town" in his 1981 anthology "Growing Up in the Midwest," he said of Stevens' stories, "their literary quality comes close to Twain's and is at least equal" to the writing of another Iowan, Hamlin Garland.

Stevens, who said his favorite people were foresters, lived his later years in Seattle. He was married to Theresa Seltz Fitzgerald in 1929, and they had no children.

In Seattle, Stevens was active in Plymouth Congregational Church and the local American Legion, and worked on the public relations committee of the Chamber of Commerce.He retired in 1957 as the public relations director for the West Coast Lumbermen's Association, and was 79 when he died in Seattle on Dec. 31, 1971.