To just about anyone who knew him—or of him—Lou Sheaffer was the tirelessly dedicated researcher awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for O’Neill: Son and Artist, the concluding volume of the two-part biography to which he devoted sixteen years of his life.For me, however, he was first and foremost my uncle. Which is to say, my father’s only (and slightly younger) brother, whom I never remember seeing at all until I was a teenager who had been given a visit to him in ’65—for the New York World’s Fair—as a high school graduation gift. From him, though, I’d long been receiving such presents as a tin toy typewriter (when I was in grade school) and, after that, every book he thought I should own as soon as he learned how much I loved to read. Two I particularly remember: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.Even from far away, he simply intuited, wonderfully, all that the two of us shared.He’d rejected our hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, heading to New York City, where he instinctively knew he belonged, in 1933, when he was twenty-one. It was the Depression and a brief stint at the University of North Carolina was all that he managed after graduating high school. It didn’t really matter, though. For to live and work in Brooklyn—at that time possessing not the tiniest amount of the fashionable allure it now has gained—was his special goal.This was owing to his enormous admiration for the writing of Thomas Wolfe, another Southerner already living there (and whose origins in the state had also drawn him to Chapel Hill).Taking this moment to stop and look back at my uncle’s life, what seems to me most miraculous is how quickly, once arrived in Brooklyn, he managed to be hired at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (later the Brooklyn Eagle)—then still one of the country’s highly respected papers. Okay, maybe he started there only as a copy boy, but it was exactly where he wished to be. (It mattered to him, too, that Walt Whitman had been a crusading columnist and editor there for two years, from 1846 to 1848.)Next, to reinvent himself for the new life that he, from that time on, intended to live—having left Louisville (which never for an instant matched his idea of the proper home for him) in ways greater than just distance—he chose a new name. Born Louis Slung—my father was Rafael Slung; two more different men would be nearly impossible to imagine!—he became Louis Sheaffer. He cleverly picked this new surname for the pun embedded in it, Sheaffer being a company founded in 1913 and even today celebrated for its luxury pens.It was, in short, a “pen name,” one that became my uncle’s legally adopted identity.I’ll now move on ahead—succinct histories of the rest of his life can be seen online—to after his death in 1993, when cleaning out his apartment was my responsibility. Since shortly after returning from active US Army duty in 1946, he’d begun living at 5 Montague Terrace, in the very building Thomas Wolfe also had resided in from 1933 to ’35. (It was where Wolfe wrote his celebrated short story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.”)Bear with me . . . we’re cutting back now to 1936, to a postcard (see figure 3). Amazed, I discovered it in a corner of his desk drawer, saved, at that point in time, for nearly sixty years—then preserved by me to sit, framed, on my mantelpiece ever since.This is owing to how very much what’s written on it had meant to him.And to me as well.Depicting the Falls of the Ohio River at Louisville, and sent by traveling friends, as you can see, to his Eagle address (90-37 161st St., Jamaica, Queens), what it says is this:Unfortunately, I can’t quite make out the signature giving the name of the family—obviously, a couple and their young daughter—the husband/father of which, passing through Louisville, thought writing such a fondly teasing note appropriate. Though my uncle was gay, always having been aware of this (a great many of his friends were as well), I don’t wish to force an interpretation on what I see, penned as it was nearly 100 years ago by a man I never knew.For me, the message here is simply about Lou’s successfully having escaped the life he didn’t want to live . . . while finding the one he’d never doubted was right for him.
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May 4, 2023
Sokhiba Makhmudovna Madirimova 
Open Access
