"So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty. All other pacts of love or fear derive from it and are modeled upon it." -- Haniel Long
Haniel Clark Long (March 9, 1888 – October 17, 1956) was an American poet, novelist, publisher and academic. He is best known for his novella, Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca (1936), a fictionalized account of the true story of a Spanish conquistador in 16th century North America.
"And who is any of us, that without starvation he can go through the kingdoms of starvation?""For support, I fall back on my heart. Has a man any fault a woman cannot weave with and try to change into something better, if the god her man prays to is a mother holding a baby?""The moment one accosts a stranger or is accosted by him is above all in this life the moment of drama... Whoever we meet watches us intently at the quick, strange moment of meeting, to see whether we are disposed to be friendly."
Born to Methodist missionaries Samuel P. and May Clark in what is now Myanmar (then known as Rangoon, Burma), Haniel Long was taken to Pittsburgh at the age of three with his family. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, Long started a career as a reporter for the New York Globe but returned to Pittsburgh to teach at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon). He was promoted to head the English Department in 1920, the same year his first book was published, Poems, a collection of his poetry. In 1926 he published a collection of fairy tale-like short stories called Notes for a New Mythology.
Long moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1929 with his wife Alice and his son Anton for health reasons, and spent the rest of his life there. He helped founding a publishing organization called Writers' Editions, which concentrated on works by New Mexican authors. The organization published Long's poetry collection, Atlantides, in 1933 and his Pittsburgh Memoranda in 1935. In 1936 Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca appeared, considered Long's best statement of his beliefs on man's place in the world.
Long continued to publish other works over the next two decades: Walt Whitman and the Springs of Courage (1938), Malinche (Dona Marina) (1939), Pinon Country (1941), Children, Students and a Few Adults (1942), French Soldier Home from Being a War Prisoner (1942), The Grist Mill (1945), and A Letter to St. Augustine (1950). He also wrote for the New Mexico Sentinel, editing its writers' page. Long finished his final novel, Spring Returns, in 1956 shortly before his death. It was published posthumously, as were two other works: If He Can Make Her So (1968) and My Seasons (1977).
The main repository for Long's manuscripts is the Special Collections of the Libraries of the University of California, Los Angeles, with other material at Carnegie Mellon and Washington University in St. Louis.