21 Facts About Walker Winslow

Walker Winslow's mother remarried when Walker was five, and the stern approval-withholding nature of his step-father played a dominating and detrimental role in Walker's psychology.

Walker Winslow left home at the age of sixteen and joined the peacetime army, and was already drinking heavily by the age of 18.

In Hawaii Walker Winslow worked in the publicity departments of the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce and in the sugar industry.

Walker Winslow's writing appeared in the left wing magazine The Anvil, and Kathryn kept up a correspondence with its editor, the novelist Jack Conroy, for the next dozen or so years.

Kathryn later heard that while he had been visiting his parents, Walker Winslow had met again a "sort of cousin," who had, through "some dim relationship" with his family, entered his life several times during his childhood; she had been visiting from New York.

In 1938 Walker Winslow was living in Portland, Oregon, and working on 'Mining Life in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest' for the Federal Writers' Project.

Weldon Kees had known not only of Helen's novel, but had been in particular impressed by the fact that Walker Winslow had had eight poems appear in an illustrated full page of Esquire.

One drinking binge, which started on a Saturday, was fuelled by copious drinks at a dinner with the Kees on Sunday, and culminated a few days later at the house of the poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril, who at that time was a publicity man for Great Western Sugar; Walker Winslow ended up punching the sugar company's president.

Walker Winslow separated from Helen and lived a down-and-out alcoholic's existence in New York, ending up in Bellevue Hospital.

Walker Winslow moved from Bellevue to a Christian-run institution for alcoholics in a rural setting about fifty miles from New York, and while there he started working on an old manuscript for a novel.

In 1941, after returning to the city, he was involved with Alcoholics Anonymous in its early days; the wider publicity that a Saturday Evening Post article gave the organisation led to growth and changes, which at first Walker Winslow had been swept up in, but in the end led to him tapering off his involvement.

Walker Winslow then moved on to work as a ward attendant in the psychiatric wards of a Veteran's Administration facility, where he worked until 30 December 1944.

Miller describes how one morning Walker Winslow woke him early to come and witness a strange phenomenon of what looked like twin stars gyrating near the horizon, and Miller goes on to talk about how there were subsequently many reports of 'flying saucers' in the area.

Walker Winslow wrote at top speed, and seemingly without interruption, in a tiny shack by the roadside which Emil White had built to house the steady stream of stragglers who were forever busting in on him for a day, a week, a month or a year.

Walker Winslow was being represented by the New York literary agent Maxim Lieber during this period.

At the time of his initial involvement with the Topeka Hospital Walker Winslow was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Edna was writing to him from Rochester, New York.

In 1951 Walker Winslow was back in Big Sur, writing a book about the Menninger psychiatric clinic.

When Miller's third wife, Janina Martha Lepska, returned to Big Sur in October 1951, not long before the couple finally divorces, Walker Winslow helped Miller in his efforts to be a sole parent to the couple's two children, after it had been agreed that the children would spend six months with their father followed by six months with their mother.

Around 1961 Walker Winslow was acting as the director of Beacon House, Monterey, California, which was a community rehabilitation center for alcoholics.

In 1969 Walker Winslow was found dead in his apartment in Pacific Grove, California, having succumbed to pneumonia.

Walker Winslow is buried in the El Carmelo Cemetery, Pacific Grove.