SOURCE: “Author First Wrote Love Letters for a Fee,” in Richmond Times Dispatch, April 7, 1968, p. H14.

[In the following essay, Galloway traces Hoffman's early experiences as a writer, his relationship with his wife, and discusses with the author aspects of Hoffman's house in the town of Charlotte Court House, Virginia.]

Author William Hoffman, who got his “professional” writing start composing love letters for classmates at the tender age of 16, now finds himself cast in the role of country squire.

As author-in-residence at Hampden-Sydney College, he teaches creative writing, a field dear to his heart, and as the owner of “Wynard,” a pre Civil War house, he is living the life he likes.

“We looked for this kind of a house from the day we were married,” said Hoffman’s wife Sue, who is fond of horses and antiques. “I came to an auction at the house next door and found out about this one. We moved in five years ago.”

Built about 1832, the main section of the house in Charlotte Court House was later enlarged. The house came complete with ghost.

“We scoffed of course, and didn't believe in ghosts,” Mrs. Hoffman explained pertly, then added in a matter of fact voice, “but we have heard footsteps upstairs, and one night about 1 or 2 a.m. I heard someone come halfway down the stairs and then stop. I checked and both of the girls were sound asleep.”

“He's benign and benevolent, but he’s here,” commented Hoffman, with an amused smile.

The Hoffmans have two children, Ruth, 9, and Margaret, 6. They also have eight horses, a pony, and 50 acres of rolling countryside.

A courteous, friendly man, Hoffman looks the part of a college teacher. His English is precise, but a warmth and feeling for many subjects, especially people, comes through when he speaks.

The author of five published novels, Hoffman is presently putting finishing touches on a sixth, and has also written a play. The novels, all published by Doubleday & Co., Inc., are The Trumpet Unblown. Days in the Yellow Leaf, A Place for My Head, The Dark Mountains, and Yancey’s War. His latest not-yet published work concerns a minister accused of wrongdoing.

He has also written short stories for such publications as Ladies’ Home Journal, Playboy and Cosmopolitan. His interest in drama is a recent development.

“I feel that one of my strongest points is dialogue, and I can really turn it loose when I write a play,” he explained.

The name of his play, a serious drama, is The Love Touch, and it has already been performed at the Barter Theater in Abingdon. He is interested in finding theater groups to perform his works, and says he feels a need to ally himself with the theater.

“But,” he mused, “it is hard to find the right doors.”

One of the first floor bedrooms in the Hoffman house has been converted into an office, and it is here that the author writes from 5:30 to 9:30 a.m. each day, a habit he developed before he began teaching.

A native of Charleston, West Virginia, Hoffman attended Kentucky Military Institute in Lyndon. That’s where he began writing love letters for other students for pay.

Through contact with a Hampden-Sydney graduate at the military school, he became interested in the Virginia college. After serving in the United States Army in Europe for three years, he enrolled at Hampden-Sydney. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the school, he afterward considered studying law at Washington and Lee University in Lexington.

“But I wasn't sure I should go into law,” he said, recalling his indecision. “I was advised to take a year and just study the courses I wanted to at Washington and Lee, and I did. I concentrated on languages, philosophy, creative writing.”

It was in his creative writing class that he got the idea that “maybe” he could be a writer. In 1950 he went back to Farmville, near Hampden-Sydney, and rented a room, intending to write short stories.

“But they didn't sell,” he said with resignation. “I needed to talk to someone about my writing. A lawyer, a doctor, an architect, can go to another lawyer, doctor, or architect to talk about professional problems, but I had no one.”

At that point in his life he decided to enroll in the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa, and was granted a fellowship.

“I met some wonderful people there, but I thought the course made me too introspective,” said Hoffman. “They were highly pleased with my writing, but I wasn’t. I did know that from that time on, I definitely wanted to be a writer.”

He hitchhiked to Washington from Charleston with a friend in the summer of 1951, and “hacked around” as he describes it, working as a reporter for the Washington Evening Star.

“My friend, who had a job with a ‘secret’ government agency and was making lots of money, talked me into quitting my job at the paper and taking one with the agency,” Hoffman said. “My new job paid twice as much. I stayed one week—I detested it. But I didn't have enough nerve to go back to the paper and tell them I had made a mistake.”

“I decided to go to New York, and sold my car and everything else I owned—records, books. I rented a room way out on W. 103rd Street—it was so far out that the movies across the street were in Spanish—and started looking for a job. I figured I had no chance on a New York newspaper since I didn't have any references exactly,” he said with a sheepish smile, “having quit the Star.”

He wound up working for a large New York bank handling correspondence with foreign banks. His hours were from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m.

“It was great. Everyone in the department was going to Columbia or NYU. There were writers, singers, dancers, would be actors, even one dress designer. They were intellectually stimulating, fine people,” Hoffman said. “I was writing and writing well. I was trying to write a novel.”

Then came an invitation to join the Hampden-Sydney English faculty, and in September 1952 Hoffman became a college teacher.

“I came with the idea that I was going to concentrate on teaching and forget about writing for the time being,” he recalled. “For the first six weeks, I was able to do just that, but then I started writing again.

“I was working on my novel, and I poured everything into it. But this time I had made contact with a New York agent, and sent her my manuscript. She said it was pretty long, but she'd send it out. Doubleday said they were interested, but asked, ‘Doesn't he ever write anything nice?’”

“To take my mind off waiting to hear about that first novel, I started on another. Let me point out that this was a golden time in my life. I had friends, I liked Hampden-Sydney, I was hunting, fishing, playing tennis and golf. I wrote in a state of mind that wasn’t torture and torment, but almost easily.”

Immediately after the first novel was refused, Hoffman’s agent sent the second to Doubleday. There was “no hope” on his part, according to Hoffman, and he had resigned himself to teaching or possibly studying law or doing graduate work in English.

“I had come back from hunting one day, and found there had been a call from my agent,” he said. “Now agents are ‘chintzy’ and they don’t call for nothing, so I knew something had happened. Doubleday had bought the book.”

This was The Trumpet Unblown, a World War II story about the United States Army, which Hoffman said received good reviews in all of the major publications and was “an astonishing success.”

“Two months later MGM offered to buy the movie rights. I went to New York, and several of their lawyers grilled me about whether or not any of my characters represented people I had actually known,” Hoffman said.

“I had used the nickname—only the nickname, nothing else—of one person I had known in the service. They panicked and were afraid to buy. This frightened the publisher, and Doubleday out of fear of a law suit, took the book off the market at the top of the sale.”

In another year, he had written Days in the Yellow Leaf, published in 1958, which the New York Times picked as one of the best novels of the year. It centered on the adjustments of servicemen to post war life.

A third novel, A Place for My Head, concentrated on problems related to integration in the modern-day South.

Hoffman stopped teaching for awhile in 1960 and concentrated on writing. His own favorite among his novels. The Dark Mountains, which concerned coal mining, was written during this period and published in 1963.

“It sold more hardback copies than any other book I've written and yet it got the least favorable reviews,” he said. “I think there is a bias among reviewers against conservative books, and this one was sympathetic to the mine owner. People still write me for that book. I sent out 12 or 15 this past Christmas. So although the book got the least favorable reviews, it is still living.”

Yancey's War, Hoffman’s fifth novel, concentrates on an antihero and is another World War II story. It was published in 1966.

Hoffman said he never counsels any of his students to be writers.

“It’s much too risky,” he philosophizes. “If they’re going to do it, they’ll do it whether anyone tells them to or not. This profession is one of feast and famine. There are lean years, too.

“More often than you think, I see students with a great deal of talent. There are so many bright young people, with good educations, and the temptation is not to put in the years necessary to be a writer. It takes character, too.”

Trying to “teach” someone to write is a misnomer, according to Hoffman.

“I can only give my students the discipline,” he said. “If you write a great deal, you have to learn something about writing. And you must learn to read. I don’t do as much reading as I would like anymore.”

He agrees with those who say every book is autobiographical to a certain extent, although he said he has never taken one character and “dwelt on him.”

“Instead, I put characteristics together,” he said. “I might take a trait from one person I’ve known, another from someone else. I like a well plotted story. I think plot and character are very important.”

Hoffman said he writes rapidly and then rewrites many times. Once one of his books has been published, he cannot make himself go back and read it again.

Hoffman’s wife is from Bluefield, West Virginia. She met the author while visiting an aunt in Farmville, and they were married in 1957. Her father had visited as a boy in the house the Hoffmans now own and had slept in one of the bedrooms.

The Hoffmans have made some changes in the house.

“We painted, wallpapered, scrubbed down the old floors, removed partitions, to restore it as much as possible to its original appearance,” said Mrs. Hoffman.

Among the furnishings are a number of family pieces and other antiques.

Hoffman raises vegetables, and each year makes wine from his white and blue grapes. He and his wife spend leisure hours horseback riding.

Always at the center of Hoffman’s life, though, is his writing and his devotion to it.

“To me, every book—even the bad—is a sort of miracle,” he said with near reverence. “Out of paper and ink, the author creates life.”