Pennell, Joseph Stanley, 1903-1963

Joseph S. Pennell (1903-1963), novelist and short story writer, was born in junction City, Kansas and educated at the University of Kansas and Oxford. He was a newspaper reporter and teacher.

His first novel, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters (1944) was a book "based on the author’s recollections from his own Kansas family as well as his reading of more than 1,000 Civil War books and the 128 volumes of the Official Records, Pennell depicted in Rome Hanks the lives of ordinary soldiers with gripping realism."

Pennell’s second novel, The History of Nora Beckham: A Museum of Home Life (1948), continued his family’s Kansas saga, focusing on the life of Pennell’s mother. A projected third volume, entitled The History of Thomas Wagnal, apparently further continued the family’s Kansas saga and exists in manuscript, and is part of the Pennel collection.

He married Elizabeth Horton in St. Louis in 1945. After she died from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1949, he married her sister, Virginia Horton, who survived him. He had no children.

In 1947, Pennell moved to Oregon and he published one more book, Darksome House, a collection of his poems, in 1959. He lived in Oregon for sixteen years until his death, at the age of 60, in 1963.

Source: Biography Reference Center website: http://web.ebscohost.com/brc/detail?sid=0393e300-942e-4578-8e76-a9b345aa9a22%40sessionmgr110&vid=6&hid=104&bdata=JnNpdGU9YnJjLWxpdmU%3d#db=b6h&AN=35194877

From the guide to the Joseph Stanley Pennell papers, 1924-1961, (Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries)