Picking Up the Pieces: Traveling Abroad

With John Gould Fletcher's death in 1950, Charlie May Simon became a widow once again. In her grief, she turned to a familiar outlet: writing and educating young people. In many ways, this was the time of her greatest achievements.

Three years after her husband's death, she shared her readiness to carry on with her autobiography, Johnswood. "Now that I could face my memories, I found to my surprise that they were of the living and not the dead," she wrote. "I could hear John's voice again, saying...I feel I'm getting back to normal again." She tried to do just that.

She put her life back together through writing biographies and traveling around the world, including to colonial Africa and postwar Japan. Her subjects shared common traits, even though they came from different backgrounds and professions. She told stories of peacemakers and philosophers with beliefs rooted in healing societal wounds. Much like her ex-husbands, these were successful people in their own right, and one could not help but wonder how Simon identified with them.

In 1953, she traveled to west Africa for the first time to visit Dr. Albert Schweitzer, a well-esteemed theologian and philanthropist. Schweitzer operated a famed hospital in French Equatorial Africa and had won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his endeavors to improve public health. Her biography, All Men Are Brothers: A Portrait of Albert Schweitzer, was released in 1956.

Her most extensive travel, however, was when she lived in Japan from 1957 to 1961 and wrote two biographies on high-profile subjects. In A Seed Shall Serve, Simon covered Christian spiritual leader and social reformer Toyohiko Kagawa, who had frequently been subject to Nobel Prize intrigue and held a long resume of activism in Japan. This included working with the poor in Japan’s slums, organizing labor, and defying Japanese military expansion policy.

In 1960, she wrote The Sun and the Birch about Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko, the future emperor and empress of Japan. She wrote about their marriage, which started with an encounter at a tennis court and the crown prince’s courtship with a commoner, an event that foreshadowed the royal couple’s endeavor to humanize the position of emperor.

While in Japan, Simon taught English literature at Nihon Joshi-Dai, Japan Women’s University, located in Tokyo. She taught a group of college sophomores on how to write, including her specialty of biographies. Her students, even at a young age, had experienced much in their lives. They all shared the disquiet history of the aftermath of World War II: food shortages, conscription, and lost family members.  Many returned to their homes destroyed. Some faced religious persecution under the regime. The nuclear weapon attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not be uttered, although its memory lingered in their writing about massive Japanese death tolls. But her students still had a bedrock to rebuild their lives, much like their teacher, of a rich culture and natural beauty of home.

With Fletcher’s death further behind her, she returned to Little Rock and continued writing biographies that included figures such as Gilded Age industrialist Andrew Carnegie, philosopher Martin Buber, and French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Her career flourished.