Everything about Louis Adamic totally explained
Louis Adamic (
March 23,
1899 –
September 4,
1951) was a
Slovene-
American author and
translator.
Adamic was born at the Praproče castle in Blato near
Grosuplje, in what is now
Slovenia. The oldest son of a peasant family, he was given a limited childhood education at the city school and, in 1909, entered the primary school at
Ljubljana. Early in his third year he joined a secret students' political club associated with the Yugoslav Nationalistic Movement that had recently sprung up in the South-Slavic provinces of Austria. Swept up in a bloody demonstration in November 1913, Adamic was briefly jailed, expelled from school, and barred from any government educational institution. He was admitted to the Jesuit school in Ljubljana, but was unable to bring himself to go. "No more school for me. I was going to America," Adamic wrote. "I didn't know how, but I knew that I'd go."
On December 31, 1913, at the age of 14, Adamic
emigrated to the United States.He finally settled in the
Croatian fishing community of
San Pedro,
California. He became a
naturalized citizen in 1918. At first he worked as a
manual labourer and later at a Slovenian daily newspaper,
Narodni Glas ("the voice of a nation"), that was published in New York. As an American
soldier he participated in combat on the
Western front during the
First World War. After the war he worked as a
journalist and professional writer.
All of Adamic's writings are based on his labour experiences in America and his former life in Slovenia. He achieved national acclaim in America in
1934 with his book "The Native's Return," which was a best seller directed against
King Alexander's regime in Yugoslavia. This book gave many Americans their first real knowledge of the Balkans. It contained many insights, but proved far from infallible: Adamic predicted that America would prosper by eventually "going left", ie. turning
socialist.
He received the
Guggenheim Fellowship award in 1932. During the
Second World War he'd supported the
National liberation struggle (NOB) and a
new Yugoslavia. From 1949 he was a corresponding member of the
SAZU.
From 1940 onwards he served as editor of the magazine
Common Ground. Adamic was the author of
Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (1931);
Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (1932);
The Native's Return: An American Immigrant Visits Yugoslavia and Discovers His Old Country (1934);
Grandsons: A Story of American Lives (1935, novel);
Cradle of Life: The Story of One Man's Beginnings (1936, novel);
The House in Antigua (1937, novel);
My America (1938);
Two-Way Passage (1941);
My Native Land (1943);
Dinner at the White House (1946); and
The Eagle and the Root (1950).
Plagued by failing health, he's believed to have shot himself at his residence in
Milford,
New Jersey. He died at a time of political tension and intrigue in Yugoslavia, and there was press speculation in America that his death might have been an assassination by some Balkan faction, but no definitive proof of this theory has ever surfaced.
According to John McAleer's Edgar Award-winning
Rex Stout: A Biography (1977), it was the influence of Adamic that led
Rex Stout to make his fictional detective
Nero Wolfe a native of Montenegro, in what was then Yugoslavia. Stout and Adamic were friends and frequent political allies, and Stout expressed uncertainty to McAleer about the circumstances of Adamic's death. In any case, the demise seems to have inspired Stout's 1954 novel
The Black Mountain, in which Nero Wolfe returns to his homeland to hunt down the killers of an old friend.
Adamic told
The Literary Digest: "My name is pronounced in this country (America) exactly as the word
Adamic, pertaining to Adam":
a-dam'ik. (Charles Earle Funk,
What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.) His original surname was Adamič, pronounced in Slovenian a-DAH-mich.
Sources
- Elizabeth Bentley FBI deposition, 30 November 1945, FBI file 65-14603.
- FBI Silvermaster file
(PDF format pgs. 38,39, 52,53) pgs. 437, 438, 451, 452 in original.
- "Home Again From America," Harper's Magazine, October 1932.
Further Information
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