Although it never look in print , John Steinbeck ’s " With Your Wings " was first take heed by an audience over 70 years ago . Orson Welles read the story on air as part of a wartime radio broadcast in July 1944 ; from there , it evaporate — until Andrew F. Gulli , pull off editor of the Birmingham , Michigan - based quarterly magazineThe Strand , find a transcript of it at the University of Texas Library of late .
" With Your Wings " say the story of Second Lieutenant William Thatcher , an African American man who is returning home after nail his training for the U.S. Air Force . The opening logical argument reads : " He knew most of all that he wanted to go home — that there was something at home he had to get , and he did n’t even live what that was . "
From there , the report seems to contend with both personal return and the rife racial government of the metre . “ This was a time where African American soldiers were not treated very well , ” Gulli toldPRI . “ They were not allow to idolize in the same chapel service where white soldier revere , and they were separated in their eating quarters . Steinbeck , I opine , was seek to give a very sinewy message … this might have been a faint cry to say that perhaps the U.S. Army and a portion of Department of State should have passed laws to treat these people better . ”
Gulli say that the work is further grounds that Steinbeck was ahead of his prison term as a writer , but that it does n’t right away broach the discipline of segregation in the armed forces . “ I think that this was John Steinbeck ’s fashion of trying to show something in a sentimentalized way , with a hope that it would lend some reason among the great unwashed who were perhaps bigoted or not as progressive as he was , ” he says .
You ’ll have to pick up a copy ofThe Strand ’s current issue to read the whole art object , but theAssociated Presshas a little more of the story to offend your interest : " He took off his jacket with the gold eagle on it and held it in his manus . He saw his marvellous forefather lick his sassing . And then his Father-God tell softly , ' Son , every black man in the world is expire to vaporize with your wings , ' " Steinbeck writes .
[ h / tSmithsonian ]
