Garry Wills
Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934) is an American author, journalist, political philosopher, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993.
For the American jazz musician, see Gary Willis.
Garry Wills
- Author
- journalist
- historian
1961–present
- Nixon Agonistes (1970)
- Inventing America (1978)
- Lincoln at Gettysburg (1993)
Wills has written over fifty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books.[1] He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is an Emeritus Professor of History.
Early years[edit]
Wills was born on May 22, 1934, in Atlanta, Georgia.[2] His father, Jack Wills, was from a Protestant background, and his mother was from an Irish Catholic family.[3] He was reared as Catholic and grew up in Michigan and Wisconsin, graduating in 1951 from Campion High School, a Jesuit institution in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. He entered and then left the Society of Jesus.
Wills earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Saint Louis University in 1957 and a Master of Arts degree from Xavier University in 1958, both in philosophy. William F. Buckley Jr. hired him as a drama critic for National Review magazine at the age of 23. He received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in classics from Yale University in 1961.[4] He taught history at Johns Hopkins University from 1962 to 1980, and is a fellow at the University of Edinburgh.[5]
Personal life[edit]
Wills was married for sixty years (1959–2019) to Natalie Cavallo, a collaborator and photographer for his work. They have three children: John, Garry, and Lydia.[4][6]
A trained classicist, Wills is proficient in Ancient Greek and Latin. His home in Evanston, Illinois, was "filled with books", with a converted bedroom dedicated to English literature, another containing Latin literature and books on American political thought, one hallway full of books on economics and religion, "including four shelves on St. Augustine", and another with shelves of Greek literature and philosophy.[4][7] After his wife's death in 2019 and the sale of their house, he donated most of his library to Loyola University Chicago, but retained what he termed "the core".[8]
Religion[edit]
Wills was a Catholic and, with the exception of a period of doubt during his seminary years, had been one all his life.[9] He continued to attend Mass at the Sheil Catholic Center at Northwestern University. He prayed the Rosary every day, and wrote a book about the devotion (The Rosary: Prayer Comes Around) in 2005.[10]
In a May 2024 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Wills revealed that he no longer considers himself a Catholic nor takes communion. Instead he refers to himself as an "Augustinian Christian." Wills attributes this change to the influence of his late wife, Natalie, who died in 2019 after 60 years of marriage and deeply influenced his thinking on everything from the day that he met her on an airplane two years before they married. Wills is pursuing the idea of writing a book on leaving Catholicism.[8]
Wills has also been a critic of many aspects of Church history and Church teaching since at least the early 1960s. He has been particularly critical of the doctrine of papal infallibility; the social teaching of the church regarding homosexuality, abortion, contraception, and the Eucharist; and of the church's reaction to the sex abuse scandal.[11][12][13][14]
In 1961, in a phone conversation with William F. Buckley Jr., Wills coined the famous macaronic phrase Mater si, magistra no (literally "mother yes, teacher no").[9] The phrase, which was a response to the papal encyclical Mater et magistra and a reference to the then-current anti-Castro slogan "Cuba sí, Castro no", signifies a devotion to the faith and tradition of the church, combined with a skeptical attitude towards ecclesiastical–Church authority.[10]
Wills published a full-length analysis of the contemporary Catholic Church, Bare Ruined Choirs, in 1972 and a full-scale criticism of the historical and contemporary church, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, in 2000. He followed up the latter with a sequel, Why I Am a Catholic (2002), as well as with the books What Jesus Meant (2006), What Paul Meant (2006), and What the Gospels Meant (2008).
Public appraisal[edit]
The New York Times literary critic John Leonard said in 1970 that Wills "reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus."[20] The Roman Catholic journalist John L. Allen Jr. considers Wills to be "perhaps the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in America over the last 50 years" (as of 2008).[10] Martin Gardner in "The Strange Case of Garry Wills" states there is a "mystery and strangeness that hovers like a gray fog over everything Wills has written about his faith".[21]