Author Walter Wangerin’s many lives and words
Those of us who worked with him sometimes suspected he had cloned himself.
Despite his cohabitation with cancer for 15 years, Walter Wangerin’s death on August 5 came as a surprise. To friends he seemed to have lived multiple lives—some public, others more private. He, and we, expected more.
Wally, as family and schoolmates called him, grew up in Lutheran parsonages and parochial schools. Biblical characters and ecclesiastical officials populated his world along with the Dakotans, Oregonians, and Albertans in his father’s parishes. In novels and poems, however, Wally discovered other worlds, and concomitantly a yearning to become a storyteller and writer himself.
While still a high schooler, Wangerin entered a pre-seminary school. But when it came time for seminary, he parted ways with classmates, did graduate study in literature at Miami University in Ohio, and then began teaching at the University of Evansville in Indiana.
