Charlie May Simon: A Life Reexamined

The Charlie May Simon web exhibit is a follow up to the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture's (CAHC) John Gould Fletcher Character Collection, a vignette of Fletcher's life that briefly explores his marriage to Charlie May Simon. CAHC staff created this character collection because of Fletcher's notoriety as winner of the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the first Southern poet so honored, and to promote the John Gould Fletcher Papers. Much has been written about the socially prominent and talented Fletcher, perhaps most notably Ben Johnson’s biography Fierce Solitude: A life of John Gould Fletcher. As staff members explored Simon's life through the Charlie May Simon Papers, and additional research materials, we discovered that she lacked an in-depth biography such as Johnson's work on Fletcher. Consequentially, we raised the question: who was this woman who married Arkansas’s Pulitzer prize-winning poet? We discovered that Charlie May Simon was as complex a character as her well-known spouse. In fact, her character complexity and strong sense of self allowed her to navigate several rocky crossings in her life, including poverty and challenging marriages. Yet Simon emerged triumphant from life's difficulties as a 20th century Arkansas writer of distinction.

Simon grew up in an impoverished Arkansas delta family, poverty possibly being the motivation for marrying Walter Lowenstein of the Memphis-based, department-store family. Simon allegedly endured cruel gossip about this marriage as some suggested that Simon knew that the wealthy Lowenstein was ill and that she married him for his money. Lowenstein died several years into their marriage, allowing Simon the luxury of study and travel with her inheritance. While studying art in Paris, she met and married the artist Howard Simon in 1926. In 1931, Simon again confronted poverty during the Great Depression, when out of the desperation the young couple moved to Arkansas, homesteading on property close to Charlie May's grandparents original land. To earn money for subsistence, Charlie May wrote and successfully published an article entitled "Retreat to the Land" that described the Simons' homesteading life in Perry County, Arkansas.

John Gould Fletcher, taken with this article, vowed to meet the author. Upon meeting, the couple discovered that they were attracted to each other and married in 1936. During their marriage from 1936 to 1950, Simon wrote several children's stories, one book of adult fiction, and one memoir. Simon drew upon her hard-scrabble youth as starting points for her children's books. She never talked down to her young audience and used straight-forward sentences and carefully-crafted mountain dialog so that her readers could identify with the characters. But Simon's third marriage experienced difficulties as she had witnessed Fletcher's diminishing literary popularity, mental illness, and jealously of her writing ability. Fletcher's suicide in 1950 forced Simon to question whether she should keep or sell Johnswood, the house that she and Fletcher built together. As described in her memoir Johnswood, Simon decided to keep the house after painful soul searching.

With poverty and three marriages behind her, Simon's later life filled with literary triumphs and awards. She went on to write seven biographies and additional children's books. the Arkansas Department of Education honored her with the establishment of the Charlie May Simon Award for children's literature. Her additional honors included a Doctor of Laws degree from University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the Albert Schweitzer Book Prize, the Boy's Club of America Junior Book Award, and the Charles and Bertie G. Schwartz Award of the Jewish Book Council of America.

Now, in the 21st century, perhaps Charlie May Simon's posthumous and final rocky crossing is her corpus of out-of-print books. Researchers currently interested in Simon now argue that such a distinguished author of adult fiction, biography, and children's literature should be rediscovered and her books republished, making her works accessible to those who value regional authors of exceptional ability.