Born in Hartselle, Alabama, Huie attended Morgan County High School and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1930 from the University of Alabama. He then went directly to work for a Birmingham newspaper.
In 1934, he married his grammar school sweetheart, Ruth Puckett. Their wedding took place in her parents' home in Hartselle, and Huie later immortalized the scene in his largely autobiographical 1942 first novel Mud on the Stars.
Huie's first national recognition was due to his piece "How To Keep Football Stars In College" (Collier's Weekly, January 1, 1941). This piece was about the University of Alabama football program in the 1940s and included controversial quotations such as: "We who have recruited Alabama's players know who our competitors have been. And we've offered no higher prices than were necessary to compete in the open market." In other words, winning at all cost was prevalent even prior to the arrival of Paul "Bear" Bryant.
In World War II, Lieutenant, Junior Grade Huie of the United States Navy, served as aide to Vice Admiral Ben Moreell of the Seabees. While writing for the Seabees chronicling their wartime activity, Huie had special permission to continue his own writing projects, both fiction and nonfiction work dealing primarily with the war.
His Navy experiences, including participation in D-Day, would become the basis for the 1959 novel adapted to film in 1964 under the same title, The Americanization of Emily, starring James Garner and Julie Andrews.
Released from the Navy in 1945, Huie went immediately to the Pacific theater as a war correspondent. His experiences at Iwo Jima and in Hawaii show up later in nonfiction such as The Outsider about flag-raiser Ira Hayes (developed into a film with Tony Curtis) and in the novel The Revolt of Mamie Stover (developed into a film starring Jane Russell).
Before the war, Huie had been writing for The American Mercury, a New York magazine and after the war he returned there, becoming associate editor, then editor.
In 1950, publisher Clendenin J. Ryan bought the Mercury. Ryan and editor Huie sought to develop the magazine into a journal of the fledgling American conservative intellectual movement, opening its pages to more mainstream writing and to new writers. Young William F. Buckley, future National Review founder-editor, was one of Huie's early staffers.
By the mid-1950s, Huie and Ryan were unable to overcome financial difficulties and were forced to sell the magazine to one of its investors, Russell Maguire. Maguire and other owners drove the New American Mercury, in author William A. Rusher's phrase, "toward the fever swamps of anti-Semitism," destroying its legitimacy and presaging its demise.
From 1950 to 1955, Huie was a popular speaker traveling back and forth across the country on the professional lecture circuit. During the same period, he was also appearing on the weekly New York television current events program Longines Chronoscope. As a co-editor of the hour-long talk show, he interviewed newsmakers John F. Kennedy, Joseph McCarthy, and Clare Booth Luce, as well as international dignitaries, southern politicians, scientists, and economists. Domestic issues, Congressional activity, military defense, the Olympics, and foreign policy--all are examples of topics discussed on the program.
Bill and Ruth Huie moved their permanent residence back to native Hartselle later in the 1950s. She became a first grade schoolteacher, and he continued to write full-time at home as freelance journalist and novelist, traveling only periodically on work-related matters.
These were the early days of The Civil Rights Movement, so Huie was well-positioned to be called upon by New York Herald Tribune, Look magazine, and other publications to cover breaking events in the South. He reported on the murder of African-American Chicago teenager Emmett Till; Ku Klux Klan activity; and the killing of "Freedom Summer" workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner resulting in articles, stories, and books like Wolf Whistle, The Klansman, and Three Lives for Mississippi.
Continuing this work into the 1960s, Huie produced He Slew the Dreamer, the true story, with James Earl Ray's initial cooperation, of the Memphis assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had written the introduction for the second edition of Huie's Three Lives for Mississippi.
Huie's 1956 book Woman in the Suwannee Jail was written in collaboration with Zora Neale Hurston, who had covered the first Ruby McCollum trial in Live Oak, Florida for The Pittsburgh Courier newspaper.
McCollum, a black woman, had shot and killed her physician and white lover, Dr. Leroy Adams, who as senator-elect, was being groomed to run for governor of Florida. Hurston was not allowed to interview McCollum, so she called on Huie, whom she thought might stand a better chance to convince the judge in the trial, Hal W. Adams, to grant an interview. However, not only was he not allowed to see McCollum, but there was also an incident shortly thereafter resulting in Huie's arrest on contempt of court charges, the judge citing him for "meddling" in a trial that "could embarrass the community." Huie was soon freed from jail and eventually pardoned years later. Huie's book was banned in Florida, but Ebony, Time, and others disseminated the story worldwide.
After a Mississippi jury found the accused murderers of Emmett Till not guilty, Huie paid the killers to describe how and why they committed the murders. Since they could not be tried again, the killers complied, and the truth was revealed in Look magazine. Huie's activities caused the KKK to burn a cross on his lawn in 1967, and some mainstream journalists have expressed criticism of his "checkbook journalism."
Huie's book The Execution of Private Slovik relates the true story of World War II G.I. Eddie Slovik, the only soldier since the American Civil War to be executed for desertion, a fate kept so quiet by the government that even Slovik's widow did not know how her husband had died. After the book exposed the event and told Eddie's story, Huie and others tried for years to get the government to pay his widow a pension, but with no success, even though the most-watched television movie of all time up to 1974 was NBC's The Execution of Private Slovik, starring Martin Sheen.
Huie's wife of almost 40 years died of cancer in 1973, following the death of his father just months before. In 1975, the same year that Alabama's Library Association honored him with Best Fiction Award for In the Hours of Night, Huie met Martha Hunt Robertson of Guntersville, Alabama, Art Instructor at a Community College. They married in Huntsville, Alabama on July 16, 1977. She continued teaching at the college, and he continued to write, while they divided their time between their Hartselle and Guntersville homes. In a few years, the Huies moved to Scottsboro, Alabama, by 1985 settled in Guntersville.
On November 20, 1986, Huie died of a heart attack. Left unfinished or unpublished were works titled The Ray of Hope, Battle Without Song," "To Live and Die in Dixie", "The Q Secret", "Codsack Chronicals, and Recollections of a Loner. His widow and sole heir donated the Huie papers to Ohio State University, Columbus. In Memphis, Tennessee, Huie's wife continues to represent her late husband's literary properties and manages ongoing projects.
Since 1974, the Alabama Authors Collection at Snead Community College's McCain Learning Resource Center, Boaz, Alabama, has been documenting Huie's life and career and has a variety of artifacts, as well as all of his books. In November, 2006, the City of Hartselle renamed the local public library in honor of Huie. The William Bradford Huie Library of Hartselle has a permanent biographical display of Huie's work, as well as bibliographic resources. In 2007, the Guntersville Museum and Cultural Center added a William Bradford Huie component to its permanent collection.
Since Huie's death in 1986, dozens of publications have cited, quoted, referenced and analyzee his work. Recent examples are David Halberstam's The Fifties; both volumes of American Journalism 1941-1963 and 1963-1973; The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, 2006; and Devin McKinney's "An American Cuss," in Issue #57 of the Oxford American, 2007. Huie's alma mater, the University of Alabama, honored him posthumously with a Fine Arts Award as well as induction into the College of Communication and Information Sciences Hall of Fame.
