Eudora Welty Letter to Margaret Millar (Z/2345)

Biography:

Margaret Ellis Sturm Millar was born on February 5, 1915, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. The daughter of Henry William and Lavinia Ferrier Sturm, she had three siblings: Harold (b. 1907), Ross (b. 1909), and Dorothy (b. 1917). By the time of her birth, her father, Henry W. Sturm, had trained as a barber and was working at J. J. MacCallum’s News and Barbershop, which also included a billiard hall and lending library, in Kitchener, Ontario. There Henry Sturm rose to be a manager, and by 1924, had become a city councilman, a post he filled repeatedly until 1953. From 1933 to 1934, Henry Sturm served as mayor of Kitchener.

Margaret Sturm attended high school at the Kitchener-Waterloo-Collegiate Institute, where she met Kenneth Millar: they both served on the debating team, and contributed pieces to the student annual, The Grumbler, when Kenneth Millar was literary editor. Margaret Sturm was a pianist, studied Latin and Greek, and won a classics scholarship to the University of Toronto. She studied there for three years, from 1933 to 1936. After her mother died in 1935, Margaret left the university to study business and then psychiatry. She met Ken Millar again in London, Ontario, and they were married the day after his graduation from the University of Western Ontario, on June 2, 1938. On June 18, 1939, their only child, Linda Jane Millar, was born.

During an illness following Linda’s birth, Margaret read numerous mystery/detective novels. She had helped Ken Millar prepare his manuscripts of stories to sell to magazines, and in 1941, using a plot outline Ken gave her, Margaret wrote The Invisible Worm. She continued to use the Millar name, so Ken worked under a succession of pseudonyms, by 1949 he was penning his Lew Archer detective stories under the name Ross Macdonald. Ken Millar continued to give her plot outlines, help in editing and titling works, and occasionally collaborate with her (as they did on a short introduction to William Faulkner’s “The Hound” in the 1947 anthology Murder by Experts, and on some television and film scripts). However, Margaret established a reputation in her own right. By 1942, she was represented by the Harold Ober agency, and would work with various agents there, including Dorothy Olding, who would also represent Ken Millar. Millar would credit Margaret’s quick literary success with permitting him to give up teaching to write novels while also working towards his Ph. D. at the University of Michigan. In 1945, when Ken Millar was in the navy, the success of Margaret’s novel, The Iron Gates, won her a contract to write its screenplay for Warner Brothers. The film was not made, but Margaret Millar used the money to buy a house in Santa Barbara, California.

Despite some interruptions, and changes in address, the Santa Barbara area would remain the principal residence of the Millars, who were joined there by Margaret’s sister, Dorothy Sturm. Dorothy married Clarence Schlagel in 1951, and became a nurse, and worked as an X-ray technician at the Sansum Clinic in Santa Barbara. Margaret and Ken Millar were active in outdoor sports and environmentalism in their town. They bicycled, Margaret interested Ken in birdwatching, and the two helped establish the Audubon Society in Santa Barbara. Her work with Audubon and the Sierra Club were two reasons the Los Angeles Times named her “Woman of the Year” in 1965; in 1968, Margaret Millar would publish a birdwatching memoir, The Birds and the Beasts were There. The following year, Margaret demonstrated against the environmental contamination caused by the oil leak off Santa Barbara.

Margaret and Ken Millar had become regulars at the Santa Barbara Coral Casino Beach Club where they swam and had a cabana as early as 1948. By 1950, they were also frequenting criminal trials at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse. These two activities were useful for observing people and thus for their craft of writing mystery novels.

Between 1941 and 1986, Margaret Millar wrote twenty-seven books. Most were mystery and suspense (sometimes termed psychological suspense) novels; for these Margaret Millar received several honors. She won the Mystery Writers of America “Edgar” Award for her book Beast In View in 1955, and became president of the organization in 1956. Two other books were nominated for “Edgar” awards, The Fiend (1965), and Beyond this Point There Are Monsters (1971), and the former was a finalist for the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger. In 1983, Margaret won the Mystery Writers of America’s lifetime achievement award, the “Grand Master,” and in 1986, the Crime Writers of Canada’s Derrick Murdoch award for special achievement.

Margaret Millar’s personal life was troubled. Her daughter Linda’s youth was marked by a hit-and-run accident in which she was driving, and by a sudden disappearance while in college. On September 9, 1961, Linda married a computer engineer working on Saturn rockets, Joseph J. Pagnusat, and on April 1, 1963, had a son, James. In 1970, Linda suffered a stroke and died a few days later. It was five years before Margaret published another book, Ask For Me Tomorrow. In a letter responding to Eudora Welty’s thank you note described below, Margaret Millar credited Welty’s visit in 1975 with inspiring her to write again, and thanked Welty for doing so.

Margaret’s health, however, declined in the mid-1970s. She had a cancer removed from her face in 1975, and then in 1977, had an entire lobe of her lung removed for cancer. In 1978, she had shingles, and then had laser surgery for increasing eye trouble, which resolved itself into macular degeneration. Margaret Millar kept on working, using various aids including a magnifier and tape recorder in her writing. At first, Ken Millar was able to help her by reading to her, but by 1978, he was more clearly experiencing the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, which worsened. Margaret, with help, including that of her sister, Dorothy, maintained Ken at home until December 1982. After stays in two rest homes, and time in a hospital, Ken Millar died in July 1983. Six years later, in 1989, the Millars’ grandson, James Pagnusat, died of a drug overdose.

Margaret had sold their house after Ken left it, and moved to a condominium in Montecito, Santa Barbara County, near the Coral Beach Casino Club. She continued her work in mystery and suspense fiction: she finished her twenty-seventh novel (Spider Webs) in 1986, and was to be the guest of honor at the World Mystery Convention (“Bouchercon XXIII,” named for mystery and fantastic literature author Anthony Boucher) in Toronto, Canada, in 1992, when she broke her hip. Margaret Millar died of a heart attack on March 26, 1994, and was cremated as her husband had been.

For further information on Eudora Welty, see the catalog record biography and the finding aid for Eudora Welty Collection (Z/0301).

For further information on Ken Millar and his relationship with Eudora Welty, see the finding aid for Welty-Millar Letters (Z/2330).

Scope and Content Note:

This letter, written by Eudora Welty on June 22, 1975, thanks Margaret Millar for the hospitality she afforded Welty during the Santa Barbara’s Writers Conference in June of 1975. Written the same day as her thank-you letter to Ken Millar, this letter of gratitude affords the researcher a glimpse of the lives and interests of Ken and Margaret Millar, through the people Welty met, the places she went, and activities she enjoyed during her visit with them in Santa Barbara, California.

After expressions of thanks, Welty reminisces about a luncheon given for her by the Millars at the Coral Casino beach club in Santa Barbara, listing the people the Millars invited to join her. Present were the Millers’ grandson, James, and his father Joseph J. Pagnusat. Welty refers also to the Freemans, Clymers and Eastons, families that included author and illustrator Don Freeman, who did the portrait of Margaret Millar on two of her books, and his wife, writer, painter and illustrator Lydia Cooley Freeman; former University of Minnesota professor of elementary education and writer Theodore Clymer and his first wife Lois; and Robert Easton and his wife, Jane Faust Easton. Robert Easton, viewed by Kenneth Millar as his closest friend, had authored Black Tide, describing the impact of the 1969 oil spill at Santa Barbara, for which Millar had written the foreword. A little later in the letter, Welty also states her pleasure at meeting “Dorothy,” probably Margaret’s sister, Dorothy Sturm Schlagel.

Welty expresses her pleasure in accompanying the Millars to the places they frequented: visiting their beach club cabana, and accompanying Margaret to the courthouse in Santa Barbara to observe a trial in progress. Welty notes souvenirs she took back to Jackson, thanking Margaret for a box of See’s candy, and mentions picking up a game of “Jotto” she found in Sausalito, implying that the Millars introduced her to it.

Welty’s letter makes it clear that she feels her visit has allowed her to understand more of the lives of Ken and Margaret Millar. For instance, she thanks Margaret Millar not only for receiving her in her home, but for sharing her memories of her early meetings with Ken on the debate team in their high school years, and of their first stories in the Grumbler.

In the last long paragraph of her letter, Welty discusses her stop in Sausalito, California, en route back to Mississippi. Welty went there to consult on the editing of the episode of The Writer in America film series devoted to her work, that the producer, Richard O. Moore, director Philip Greene, and sound editor, Mark Berger, had filmed in Jackson the preceding April. During their meeting in Sausalito, Greene showed Welty a film the same team had made on the environmental changes in California: Welty remembered it as “The Place Without A Story [sic].” Familiar with the activism of the Millars, Welty describes the scenes in “The Place for No Story” depicting the natural beauty of California, and the subsequent ones portraying the environmental damage done by man.

Series Identification:

Series 1: Letter. 1975. 1 folder.

Box List:

Box 1. Folder 1. Letter of Eudora Welty to Margaret Millar. June 22, 1975.