Willard R. Espy

Willard R. Espy (1975)

Willard Richardson Espy (born December 11, 1910 in Olympia , Washington , † February 20, 1999 in New York City , New York ) was an American publisher , philologist , author , poet , and local history researcher . He was the most famous word game collector and commentator of his time and is particularly renowned for his bestseller Oysterville: Roads to Grandpa's Village .

Life

Willard Richardson Espy was born in Olympia, Washington, and grew up in Oysterville , Washington, a small coastal town founded in 1854 by his grandfather R. H. Espy. Espy graduated from the University of Redlands in 1930; then he spent a year abroad and enrolled at the Sorbonne . In 1941 he was recruited by Reader's Digest , and for the next sixteen years he worked there in a variety of positions, including promotions director. His writing career began in the late 1960s, eventually writing fifteen books on language, and his poetry and articles appeared regularly in Punch , Reader's Digest , The Atlantic Monthly , The Nation , and Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics . His comic poetry is often compared to that of Lewis Carroll , W.S. Gilbert , Ogden Nash, and Cole Porter .

Later in life, Espy split his time between Manhattan and Oysterville, where he wrote bestselling books on home history (including Oysterville: Roads to Grandpa's Village in 1977 and Skulduggery on Shoalwater Bay in 1998). Two of his books on wordplay, The Game of Words and An Almanac of Words at Play , were honored at the Governor's Writers Day Awards (now the Washington State Book Awards ).

In 1999, Espy died in a New York City hospital at the age of 88. His daughter, Freddy Medora Espy, was George Plimpton's first wife editor .

Works

• The Game of Words (1971) ( ISBN 0-7234-0173-X )
• Oysterville: Roads to Grandpa's Village (1976) ( ISBN 0-517-52196-2 )
• The Game of Words (1972) ( ISBN 0-448-01196-4 )
• Omak Me Yours Tonight, or, Ilwaco million miles for one of your smiles: A Ballard of Washington State (1973) ( ISBN 0-9634294-1-8 )
• An Almanac of Words at Play (1975) ( ISBN 0-517-52463-5 )
• The Life and Works of Mr. Anonymous (1977) ( ISBN 0-380-45047-X )
• O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun (1978) ( ISBN 0-517-53511-4 )
• Say it My Way: How to avoid certain pitfalls of spoken English together with a decidedly informal history of how our language rose (or fell) (1980) ( ISBN 0-14-005733-1 )
• Another Almanac of Words at Play (1981) ( ISBN 0-233-97288-9 )
• The Wars of the Words (1980)
• A Children's Almanac of Words at Play (1982) ( ISBN 0-340-34852-6 )
• Have A Word on Me: A Celebration of Language (1984) ( ISBN 0-671-25255-0 )
• Espygrams: Anagram Verse (1982) ( ISBN 0-517-54598-5 )
• Word Puzzles: Anagrams from America's Favorite Logophile (1983) ( ISBN 0-934878-31-5 )
• The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary (1983) ( ISBN 0-06-181256-0 )
• Espygrams II: 80 New Anagram Verses (1984) ( ISBN 0-517-54757-0 )
• Words to Rhyme With (1986) ( ISBN 0-8160-4313-2 )
• The Word's Gotten Out (1989) ( ISBN 0-517-07940-2 )
• Skullduggery on Shoalwater Bay (1998)
• The Best of An Almanac of Words at Play (1999) ( ISBN 0-87779-145-7 )

Web links

Commons : Willard R. Espy  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Alleen Nilsen, Don Nilsen: Literature and humor . In: Victor Raskin (Ed.): The Primer of Humor Research . Walter de Gruyter, November 6, 2008, ISBN 978-3-11-018616-1 , pp. 243-280.
2. ^ ^{A b c} Willard R. Espy: The Best of An Almanac of Words at Play . Merriam-Webster, 1999.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Robert McG., Jr. Thomas : Willard Espy, Who Delighted In Wordplay, Is Dead at 88 . In: The New York Times , February 25, 1999.  
4. ↑ A. Ross Eckler : Look back! . In: Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics . 43, No. 3, 2010, pp. 228-229.
5. ^ Governor's Writers Day Awards at the Washington State Library, 1966–2000 . Washington Secretary of State. Retrieved November 23, 2014.