Title: Charles Haldeman: A Memoir; Mid-Century Journeys of a Vagabond Author
Author: Richard Haldeman
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
ISBN: 978-1647010546
Pages: 212
Genre: Author Biographies/Memoirs/Arts & Literature
Synopsis
Charles Haldeman (1931-83) was a man with unusual literary and artistic abilities who sought to identify his and his generation’s mission in the world of the midtwentieth century. Charles was born in the Depression; lived six months as a child in Hitler’s Germany during the 1930s; grew up in a US Army town during World War II; and traveled, studied, and worked throughout the US, the Pacific, Europe, and Canada during the midtwentieth century. He lived his final 25 years in Greece, where he befriended and hosted the literary elite of this time and published three novels based on his experiences and knowledge of his generation and time. Charles Haldeman’s letters reveal his search for his own identity. He was born to a mother from the segregated South and a father who migrated to the United States from Germany less than a decade before Hitler came into power. From an early age he sought to understand and separate himself from the racism in his family’s American and German heritage, to reconcile the principles of the American dream with the reality of American life, and to help bring about a world in which human beings no longer used “war as a school for life” to build “monuments to stupidity.” Seeking a country where the artist had the freedom to thrive, he made Greece his home, only find ultimate disappointment in his “love affair with Greece.” Despite this disappointment and his early death, Charles Haldeman left a legacy of three novels that described a time in American and world history, giving voice to his “silent” generation. This memoir attempts to honor that legacy.
About the Author
Richard H. Haldeman grew up as next younger brother of Charles Haldeman, with whom he shared nine family relocations before Charles entered the Navy in 1950. Richard graduated from high school in Columbus, Georgia, where he won city and state journalism awards, and from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where he edited the all-American student newspaper. After working as a reporter for daily newspapers in Columbus, Georgia, and Orlando, Florida, he earned a master’s degree in English from George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University and taught English in Orange County, Florida, schools. He currently lives in Due West, South Carolina, where he served for thirty-four years as director of public relations for Erskine College and his wife, Dr. Janice H. Haldeman, was named professor emerita of biology in 2002. She continues to teach for the fifty-third year. As Erskine public relations director, Richard Haldeman wrote for and edited all publications. He continues to contribute articles to local media and college publications and has published articles in South Carolina historical magazines. Richard and Janice Haldeman are parents of two daughters—Robin Talbot of Beverly, Massachusetts, and Nancy Cochran of Powell, Tennessee—and of a deceased son, Ross. They have two grandsons, William Talbot, a sophomore at Clark University in Massachusetts, and Erzhan Cochran, a junior at Halls High School in Tennessee. This memoir of Richard’s brother and family fulfills his long-held desire to share memories of a unique man, family, and time.