Paul Bunyan's Author: Iowa Time Machine December 31, 1971

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On December 31, 1971, author James Floyd Stevens passed away. The Iowa-born writer took scattered tall tales about a giant lumberjack and gathered them into a bestselling book in 1925, marking the first time the Paul Bunyan legend reached national audiences.

Stevens was born on November 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 childhood was fragmented early, when he moved to Moravia at age five to live with his grandmother, then to Idaho at ten to live with other relatives. By fifteen, Stevens had left home entirely, working in the logging camps of Idaho and Oregon, where he first heard the Bunyan stories around evening campfires.

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 educated himself in public libraries, which he described as the poor man's universities, reading voraciously as he drifted from one laboring job to another. In 1923, he began writing for H.L. Mencken's American Mercury, arguably the most influential literary magazine of the era. One of his stories about the giant logger caught enough attention that it evolved into a whole book.

The book "Paul Bunyan" was published in 1925 by the prestigious Alfred A. Knopf publishing house. It initially sold more than 75,000 copies, earning comparisons from the New York World newspaper to Carl Sandburg and Ring Lardner. Stevens had accomplished something remarkable: he took the fragmented oral traditions of working men. He shaped them into a coherent narrative that captured both the mythology and the reality of frontier logging life. #Iowa #History #OTD #Legend #PaulBunyon