Rupert Hughes

From Philosopedia

Hughes, Rupert (1872—1956)

The Missouri-born novelist of the philosophic work, Stately Timber (1939), Hughes was the uncle of industrialist Howard Hughes.

In the late 1920s, he created a stir because in a biography of George Washington he urged “that the cherry tree and other unfounded fables be dropped and the true grandeur of Washington’s character and achievements be emphasized.”

Asked his views about humanism, Hughes wrote to Warren Allen Smith:

I am certainly not theistic. I am perhaps atheistic humanistic. I think you’d better omit me as unclassifiable. . . .

A few days later, he added to his response:

I am a “humanist” as opposed to a “divinist,” may I say. I am an atheist. As for existentialism, I have read reams about it without getting any forwarder in mental grasp of just what it is supposed to be. I have read several of Sartre’s works in French and enjoyed them as strong and ingenious fiction, with no clear notion of their philosophic meaning. As to “existence preceding essence,” I am as much at a loss as the debater who was asked to define the word “is.” I’d rather change the subject. My attitude toward man is neither optimistic nor pessimistic. I am a very cheerful person because I always expect the worst and never quite get it. I believe in writing for the happiness of humanity, or at least its physical and other comforts; but I have no hopes of Utopia, perpetual peace, one world, the millennium—or any radical change in human nature or its response to “improvements.”

Hughes also wrote We Live But Once (1927); Why I Quit Going to Church (1934); City of Angels (1941, about Los Angeles); and The Giant Wakes (1950, about Samuel Gompers.

{FUS; WAS, 11 February 1951 and 19 February 1951}