W.D. Ehrhart

by W.D. Ehrhart Back in 1990, at the first Conference of U.S. & Vietnamese Veteran-Writers in Hanoi, Le Minh Khue, a novelist who had been a teenager with a young volunteers team assigned to the military engineering command, told me that she had gone off to the war with several books in her knapsack: translations of Ernest Hemingway and Jack London. “I learned a love of life from Jack London, as well as the courage to transcend death, to keep up hope against any odds,” she said.  “I cherished the anguish of Hemingway, whose wonderful short stories deal with loneliness, death, and love of life, …

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by W.D. Ehrhart Lately I have been struggling to find something worth writing about. What is the point? Nothing changes. I’ve written multiple essays about the madness of our uniquely U.S. gun culture; but Americans keep dying at the wrong end of firearms in record numbers, and in most states it’s easier to acquire and carry a firearm than it was ten years ago. I’ve written multiple essays about the need for the Democratic Party to get its collective head out of its ass and start functioning effectively to counter the insidious and pervasive evil that has become the Retrumplican Party, yet the Democrats keep …

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by W.D. Ehrhart I’ve just purchased a piece of the state of New Jersey. Really. It’s ten feet by ten feet and located in a lovely pine forest. Sooner or later—I’m 73 now, so I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for “later”—it will become my final resting place when I shuffle off this mortal coil and join the Choir Invisible. My wife will eventually be there with me, too, though she’s younger than me and thus has a better shot at “later.” But why South Jersey? I’ve never lived there and have no family connection to the area. All my life, I’ve been completely …

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by W.D. Ehrhart Lately I have been revisiting one of my favorite writers, Stephen Crane. Most famous for his novel of the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, his collected writing—fiction, poetry, and journalism published by the University of Virginia Press—runs to ten full volumes. So enamored of his poetry was I that I still have a slim volume of his poems I “removed” (stole would be more accurate) from the Pennridge High School library back in 1965 or 1966. (In my defense, the town I grew up in didn’t even have a bookstore, and I wanted to possess those poems.) The best …

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by W.D. Ehrhart Recently, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a news report saying law students at Georgetown University were so upset by a professor criticizing President Biden’s determination to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court that they demanded “an office they can go to . . . if they want to cry, if they need to break down.”  They are demanding a Crying Room. Seriously? I dutifully wrote up an irate essay excoriating the “Snowflake” sensibilities of many of my Left Progressive fellow travelers, whose sometimes frivolous and inane demands make it so easy for the Radical Reactionary Right to …

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