Hickory Era Golf Writing Survey

Overview

Hickory-era golf writing was unusually literary for a sport press. It ran in three modes: newspaper and magazine reportage (Bernard Darwin in The Times and Country Life, Henry Leach, O.B. Keeler, Grantland Rice); instructional books by champion players (Hutchinson, Park Jr., Vardon, Taylor, Braid, Travis, Jones); and reflective essays and golf-course-architecture writing (Sir Walter Simpson, John L. Low, Arnold Haultain, Charles Blair Macdonald, Alister MacKenzie, Robert Hunter, H.N. Wethered & Tom Simpson, P.G. Wodehouse). In his September 3, 1956 Sports Illustrated tribute "Dean of the Grand Old Game," Herbert Warren Wind called it "the sturdiest literature of any game" and credited Darwin with showing the writers who came after him how golf should be written.

The era's defining institutional venues split by geography. On the British side: the weekly "Golf" (1890–1899) and its successor "Golf Illustrated" (London, 1899–); "Country Life," where Darwin filed weekly columns from 1907 onward in parallel with his Times work; and "Golf Monthly" (Edinburgh, founded 1911). On the American side: "Golf" (1897, official USGA bulletin 1898–1909); "The American Golfer" (founded 1908 by Walter J. Travis, taken over by Grantland Rice in spring 1920); "Golf Illustrated" (US, 1914); and the trade journal "Golfdom" (Chicago, 1927).

Roughly forty distinct authors and works are surveyed below. Almost all survive in scanned form and are freely readable.

Key Figures and Forces

The hickory era, when shafts were hickory, ran until around 1929–1935, when steel shafts were legalized and took over. It coincided with the rapid expansion of golf from Scottish links to a transatlantic middle-class pursuit, and public writing about golf grew up with that expansion, splitting into three distinct but overlapping modes.

Bernard Darwin shaped reportage, his Times columns (1907–1953) and Country Life essays redefining what a sportswriter could be; the American equivalent was the Atlanta Journal's O.B. Keeler, whose three-decade chronicling of Bobby Jones is the model of the embedded-narrator sportswriter, and Grantland Rice, who fused verse, column, and editorship at The American Golfer. The amateur Horace G. Hutchinson pioneered instructional writing (1886, 1890), and Willie Park Jr., the first playing professional to write a book, broadened it with "The Game of Golf" in 1896; from there the "Great Triumvirate" (Vardon, Taylor, Braid) and a procession of American champions (Travis, Travers, Jones, Wethered) treated technique with increasing analytic precision. Essays and belles-lettres ran from Sir Walter Simpson's witty 1887 "Art of Golf" through Arnold Haultain's metaphysical 1908 "Mystery of Golf" and Wodehouse's Oldest Member stories (from 1919), culminating in a brilliant decade of golf-course-architecture writing (1920–1933) by MacKenzie, Hunter, Macdonald, Thomas, Wethered & Simpson, and posthumously MacKenzie's "Spirit of St. Andrews."

The Three Modes

British and Scottish Reportage and Journalism

The dominant figure is Bernard Darwin (1876–1961), grandson of Charles Darwin, who became golf correspondent of The Times in 1907 (a post he held with almost unbroken authority until 1953) and simultaneously wrote weekly for Country Life. His first book, "The Golf Courses of the British Isles" (London: Duckworth, 1910, with sixty-four color plates by Harry Rountree), was the first comprehensive hole-by-hole survey of the leading courses of Scotland, England, and Ireland and remains foundational. The book sets its tone early—the muddy pre-heathland London courses set against the "priceless gift of youth" of Sunningdale and Walton Heath.

Darwin's other essential hickory-era volumes are "Tee Shots and Others" (1911, a collection of Evening Standard pieces), "Golf from the Times" (1912), "A Friendly Round" (1922), "Green Memories" (1928), "Out of the Rough" (1932), and "Playing the Like" (1934). His American reporting (e.g. on the 1922 Walker Cup, where he played as a substitute) yielded characteristic remarks like "the Lido is the work of Mr. CB Macdonald…he must have the imagination of a poet and a seer."

Henry Leach (1873–1942) was Darwin's nearest rival as a literary-reportorial essayist. "The Spirit of the Links" (London: Methuen, 1907) opens with the line "To discover the secret of its wonderful charm is not the least of the problems of golf." The chapter structure follows the seasons. His "Great Golfers in the Making" (1907), "The Happy Golfer" (Macmillan, 1914), and "Letters of a Modern Golfer to His Grandfather" (1910) are the most sustained body of reflective golf journalism of the period after Darwin's. Leach reportedly owned one of the largest golf libraries in the world.

Horace G. Hutchinson (1859–1932), Amateur champion in 1886 and 1887, was both an instructional pioneer and a leading journalist-essayist. He contributed the golf article to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica and edited "British Golf Links: A Short Account of the Leading Golf Links of the United Kingdom" (1897), "Famous Golf Links" (1891, with F.P. Hopkins and Thomas Hodge), and "The Book of Golf and Golfers" (Longmans, 1899). His "Fifty Years of Golf" (Country Life, 1919) is the great memoir of the early game.

Garden G. Smith was founding editor of "Golf Illustrated" (London) from its 1899 launch until his death in 1913; his "The World of Golf" appeared in 1898 in the A.D. Innes "Isthmian Library."

Harold Hilton (1869–1942), the first non-American to win the U.S. Amateur (1911) and twice Open champion as an amateur (1892, 1897), was first editor of "Golf Monthly" (Edinburgh, founded 1911) from 1911 to 1914, and edited "Golf Illustrated" (London) from 1913 until his death—the two posts overlapping briefly in 1913–14. His memoir "My Golfing Reminiscences" (Nisbet, 1907) and instructional "Modern Golf" (Outing, 1913) are central documents of British golf publishing.

W. Dalrymple edited "Golf: A Royal and Ancient Game" (Edinburgh: Black, 1892), one of the first historical compendia. Robert Browning (Robert Henry Kirkwood Browning, 1884–1957) was editor of "Golfing" magazine (UK) for an extraordinary forty-five years, 1910–1955. Though his celebrated "A History of Golf: The Royal and Ancient Game" (Dent, 1955) is just post-hickory, his editorial voice shaped golf journalism throughout the period.

American Reportage and Journalism

O.B. Keeler (Oscar Bane Keeler, 1882–1950) was the Atlanta Journal's golf writer from 1909 and the inseparable chronicler of Bobby Jones, traveling with him to all thirteen of his major victories. He co-wrote "Down the Fairway" (1927)—discussed below under instructional/memoir—and "The Boys' Life of Bobby Jones" (Harper, 1931). H.G. Salsinger of the Detroit News wrote that "while Jones composed his epics, Keeler sang them to the world."

Grantland Rice (1880–1954) was the most influential American sports columnist of the era; his New York Herald Tribune column "The Sportlight" was, per LINKS magazine's profile "O.B. Keeler and Grantland Rice: The Masters' Voices," syndicated to roughly 100 newspapers nationwide. Rice edited "The American Golfer" from the spring of 1920 (after Walter Travis sold the magazine he had founded in 1908) until its absorption, in January 1936, when Stuart Scheftel reorganized it as "Sports Illustrated & The American Golfer" (a publication wholly separate from Time Inc.'s Sports Illustrated, which would not launch until August 16, 1954). Rice co-wrote "The Winning Shot" with Jerome D. Travers (Doubleday, Page, 1915, Library of Congress 15018885) and "The Duffer's Handbook of Golf" with the cartoonist Clare Briggs (Macmillan, 1926). His many golf verses are scattered through The American Golfer; the lines often quoted as "it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game" are a paraphrase of the closing of his poem "Alumnus Football," first delivered at Vanderbilt in 1908 and printed in the Vanderbilt University Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 3 (July 1908), p. 219: "For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, He writes—not that you won or lost—but how you played the Game."

H.B. Martin (Harry Brownlow Martin, 1873–1959) produced "Fifty Years of American Golf" (Dodd, Mead, 1936, foreword by Grantland Rice), along with earlier "Golf Yarns" (1913); he also ghostwrote much of Walter Hagen's prose. Innis Brown was a long-running American Golfer contributor and later co-author with Ernest Jones. William D. Richardson was the New York Times golf correspondent for decades. Charles Price's important work is post-hickory.

British and Scottish Instructional and Technical Writing

The genre begins with Horace G. Hutchinson's "Hints on the Game of Golf" (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1886), the first golf instructional offered for public sale; it ran through fourteen editions to 1906. Hutchinson then edited the Badminton Library "Golf" volume (Longmans, Green, 1890), with contributions from Lord Wellwood (Lord Moncreiff), Sir Walter Simpson, Andrew Lang (writing the opening "History of Golf"), Arthur Balfour, and H.S.C. Everard. It was the first compendium aimed at the educated general reader.

Sir Walter Simpson's "The Art of Golf" (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887) is the first golf book to use photographs to demonstrate the swing (including images of Old Tom Morris), and one of the wittiest ever written; Darwin called it "the most entertaining book ever written on the foibles of the human golfer." Simpson coined the canonical definition: links are too barren for cultivation, but sheep, rabbits, geese, and professionals pick up a precarious living on them.

Willie Park Jr.'s "The Game of Golf" (London: Longmans, 1896) was the first golf book written by a playing professional and a turning point: Park covers stance, grip, swing, the rules, and includes a pioneering chapter, "Laying Out and Keeping Golf-Links," the first written design philosophy by a working architect. Park's later "The Art of Putting" appeared in 1920.

Harry Vardon (1870–1937) wrote "The Complete Golfer" (Methuen, 1905), going through a second edition the same month, with revised editions in 1914 and after. Vardon's other books include "How to Play Golf" (1912), "Progressive Golf" (1920), and the late-career memoir "My Golfing Life" (1933).

J.H. Taylor (1871–1963) published "Taylor on Golf: Impressions, Comments and Hints" (Hutchinson, 1902; American ed. Appleton, 1903), running to five revised editions by 1911. James Braid's "Advanced Golf, or Hints and Instructions for Progressive Players" (Methuen, 1908) was even more ambitious, with chapters fifteen through eighteen functioning as one of the first real treatises on hole design. Braid was the first male author to publish a women-focused instructional, "The Ladies' Field Golf Book" (Newnes, 1908). Vardon, Taylor, and Braid together also produced "How to Play Golf" (1907).

John L. Low's "Concerning Golf" (Hodder & Stoughton, 1903, with a chapter on driving by Harold Hilton) is brief but the most influential strategic-design statement of the early era; Low's argument that "no hazard is unfair wherever it is placed" runs through much of the later architectural writing.

American Instructional and Technical Writing

Walter J. Travis (1862–1927), the first non-Briton to win the British Amateur (1904), wrote "Practical Golf" (Harper, 1901, with a "New & rev. ed." in 1903) and "The Art of Putting" (1904), and founded "The American Golfer" in 1908, which he edited until selling it to Grantland Rice in spring 1920. Travis was the first to win a major event with the Haskell rubber-cored ball (the 1901 U.S. Amateur), which he later wrote about in his magazine columns.

Jerome D. Travers (1887–1951) published "Travers' Golf Book" (Macmillan, 1913, Library of Congress 13012319) and, with Grantland Rice, "The Winning Shot" (1915). His later "The Fifth Estate: 30 Years of Golf" (1926) is also hickory-era. Chick Evans's autobiography "Chick Evans' Golf Book" (Reilly & Lee, Chicago, for Thos. E. Wilson, 1921, Library of Congress 21005387) followed his 1916 U.S. Amateur/U.S. Open double. Francis Ouimet wrote "Golf Facts for Young People" (Century, 1921) and "A Game of Golf: A Book of Reminiscence" (Houghton Mifflin, 1932), with an introduction by Bernard Darwin.

The capstone American instructional of the hickory era is Robert T. Jones Jr. and O.B. Keeler's "Down the Fairway: The Golf Life and Play of Robert T. Jones, Jr." (Minton, Balch, 1927), written when Jones was twenty-four and after his 1926 transatlantic Open double. Herbert Warren Wind, in his Foreword to the Classics of Golf Library edition (1983), called it simply "the best book about golf ever written." Jones's columnar instructional pieces of the late 1920s and early 1930s were collected as "Bobby Jones on Golf" (1929) and the post-hickory "Golf Is My Game" (1960).

Seymour Dunn (1882–1959) issued "Golf Fundamentals: Orthodoxy of Style" (Lake Placid: S. Dunn / Edinburgh: Golf Monthly, 1922), an unusually analytic Anglo-American treatise. Jones's student Daryn Hammond first set out the Ernest Jones swing method ("swing the clubhead") in book form, as "The Golf Swing: The Ernest Jones Method" (Chatto & Windus, 1920); Jones's own "Swinging into Golf," co-authored with Innis Brown (McBride, 1937), falls just outside the hickory era. Tommy Armour's instructional career and Walter Hagen's books are also primarily post-1935; the era yielded only Hagen's short pamphlet "Hagen on Golf" (W.J. Brueckman, 1929) and his magazine articles (e.g. "Relaxation in the Golf Swing," Golfers Magazine, April 1922).

Joyce Wethered (1901–1997), whom Bobby Jones, after the 1935 exhibition match at East Lake, described as "the greatest golfer of all time, man or woman" (per the Memorial Tournament's 2004 honoree profile) and as possessing the finest swing he had ever seen, published two books. "Golf From Two Sides" appeared jointly with her brother Roger (Longmans, 1922), and "Golfing Memories and Methods" (Hutchinson, 1933) was divided into "Championship Golf," "Technical Golf," and "Other Golf." Darwin remarked, in his pre-publication notice, that she was "wise to give of memories as well as methods."

British Essays, Belles-lettres, and Architectural Writing

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) wrote the opening "History of Golf" chapter for the Badminton Library volume (1890), and his light verse and essays were collected in the anthology "A Batch of Golfing Papers" (Edinburgh: Simpkin, Marshall, 1892), edited by R. Barclay; his "Ode to Golf" appears earlier in "On the Links" (Douglas, 1889). Lord Wellwood (the judge Henry Moncreiff) opens the Badminton volume with the famous summary that golf is "a fascination… a passion… a madness."

Sir Walter Simpson's "Art of Golf" (1887, above) is the great early belletristic instructional. John L. Low's "Concerning Golf" (1903) belongs equally to instructional and essayistic categories. Arnold Haultain (Theodore Arnold Haultain, 1857–1941)—Indian-born Canadian belletrist and secretary to Goldwin Smith—published the era's most metaphysical golf book, "The Mystery of Golf" (Boston: Riverside Press for Houghton Mifflin, 1908, in a limited edition of 430 copies; trade edition Macmillan, 1910). Earlier essay versions had appeared in the Contemporary Review (August 1902) and Atlantic Monthly (July 1904). Haultain's line "A false stroke in golf is more keenly felt than a rejected proposal" captures the tone.

Henry Leach's two essay collections, "The Spirit of the Links" (1907) and "The Happy Golfer" (1914), bridge journalism and belles-lettres. Hutchinson's "Fifty Years of Golf" (1919) is the great elegiac memoir of pre-WWI British golf. Bernard Darwin's essay volumes—"Tee Shots and Others" (1911), "Green Memories" (1928), "Out of the Rough" (1932), "Playing the Like" (1934), "Rubs of the Green" (1936)—span the era and define the form. Darwin also edited the elegantly produced "A Golfer's Gallery by Old Masters" (1927).

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) launched his Oldest Member golf-club narrator in story magazines in 1919; the stories were collected as "The Clicking of Cuthbert" (Herbert Jenkins, February 3, 1922; US edition by George H. Doran, 1924, retitled "Golf Without Tears"), followed by "The Heart of a Goof" (1926). The opening tale, "The Clicking of Cuthbert," has the Russian novelist Brusiloff dismiss Tolstoy as "not good, but not bad" before being awed to meet a French Open winner. The series remains the great body of golf-themed comic fiction.

H.N. Wethered (Joyce's father) and Tom Simpson's "The Architectural Side of Golf" (Longmans, 1929, with a preface by J.C. Squire and forty-four plates by Simpson plus twenty-six etchings by Wethered) is the most lavishly produced and most literary of the great late-1920s architecture books. Martin H.F. Sutton's "Golf Courses: Design, Construction and Upkeep" (1933) closes the era. Lord Wellwood, A.J. Balfour, and the Rev. John Kerr ("The Golf Book of East Lothian," 1896) round out the British essayistic field.

American Essays, Belles-lettres, and Architectural Writing

Charles Blair Macdonald's "Scotland's Gift: Golf" (Scribner, 1928) is the foundational American golf memoir and architectural manifesto; it chronicles the spread of American golf from the early 1890s, when there were only a handful of courses, to over four thousand by 1927, and devotes chapters to his template-driven designs (National Golf Links, Mid-Ocean, Lido, Yale).

Robert Hunter (1874–1942)—the socialist reformer and partner of MacKenzie on Cypress Point and other West Coast courses—wrote "The Links" (Scribner, 1926), described by MacKenzie as "the classic of the subject." Hunter's central claim—that what draws men to the game is its maddening difficulty—sets the philosophical tone.

George C. Thomas Jr. (1873–1932), designer of Riviera, Bel-Air, and Los Angeles Country Club North, wrote "Golf Architecture in America: Its Strategy and Construction" (Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Press, 1927), the chief American counterpart to MacKenzie's "Golf Architecture" (Simpkin Marshall, 1920), the latter a brisk distillation of MacKenzie's thirteen design principles. MacKenzie's longer manuscript "The Spirit of St. Andrews" was written in 1933 but stayed lost until 1995; a hickory-era composition, it is the most expansive of his works.

A.W. Tillinghast (1874–1942), designer of Winged Foot and Bethpage Black, was equally a writer: "Cobble Valley Golf Yarns and Other Sketches" (Philadelphia, 1915), followed by "The Mutt and Other Golf Yarns" (privately printed, 1925), are golf fiction; he wrote for The American Golfer under the pen-name "Hazard," became editor of "Golf Illustrated" (US) in June 1933, and contributed monthly to the PGA's "Professional Golfer." His magazine essays were collected posthumously as "The Course Beautiful," "Reminiscences of the Links," and "Gleanings From the Wayside."

Ring Lardner (1885–1933) is the great American golf-humor fiction writer; "A Caddy's Diary" first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1922 and was collected in "How to Write Short Stories" (Scribner, 1924) and "Round Up" (1929). His golf story "Mr. Frisbie" (1928) is in "Round Up." Lardner's syndicated "In the Wake of the News" (Chicago Tribune, 1913–1919) and his Bell Syndicate weekly column also carried frequent golf material.

Magazines and Publishing Venues

The British weekly "Golf: A Weekly Record of Ye Royal and Auncient Game" was founded September 1890 in London and ran to June 1899, when it was renamed "Golf Illustrated"—edited by Garden G. Smith until his death in 1913 and then by Harold Hilton until 1942. "Golf Monthly," founded in Edinburgh by Outram Press in 1911 with Hilton as its first editor (1911–1914), remains the oldest surviving golf magazine in the world. "Golfing" (UK) was edited by Robert Browning from 1910 to 1955. "Country Life," the magazine of landed Edwardian Britain, was Darwin's other weekly base from 1907 onward, and published the country-house portraits of golf clubs that created the visual genre of golf-course photography.

In the United States, "Golf" began in 1897 and served as the official bulletin of the USGA from 1898 to 1909, after which it continued as an independent monthly. "The American Golfer," founded by Walter J. Travis in 1908, was the dominant prose venue of the period: Travis edited it 1908–1920; Grantland Rice took the chair in spring 1920 and held it until the January 1936 issue, the last under that title, after which Stuart Scheftel relaunched the magazine as "Sports Illustrated & The American Golfer." Under Rice, the masthead at various times included contributions by Innis Brown, O.B. Keeler, A.W. Tillinghast (as "Hazard"), and Ernest Jones. "Golf Illustrated" (US) was founded in 1914 and became "Golf Illustrated and Outdoor America" by 1926; Tillinghast was named editor in June 1933. "Golfers Magazine" of Chicago and Herb Graffis's "Golfdom" (founded 1927 as the trade-business journal of American golf) round out the American press of the era.

A Working Library

If the goal is to read primary texts: begin with Darwin's "The Golf Courses of the British Isles," Sir Walter Simpson's "Art of Golf," Vardon's "Complete Golfer," Hutchinson's "Fifty Years of Golf," Henry Leach's "Spirit of the Links" and "The Happy Golfer," Haultain's "Mystery of Golf," Wodehouse's "Clicking of Cuthbert," and Macdonald's "Scotland's Gift: Golf." These nine texts together cover all three modes and both geographies.

If the goal is scholarly mapping of the era: prioritize the architectural-writing decade 1920–1933 (MacKenzie 1920, Hunter 1926, Thomas 1927, Macdonald 1928, Wethered & Simpson 1929, Sutton 1933, MacKenzie "Spirit" written 1933), the moment when golf prose became self-conscious as a profession and discipline.

If building a teaching collection or anthology, pair Hutchinson 1886 with Park Jr. 1896 to show the amateur/professional handoff in instruction; Darwin 1910 with Leach 1907 to show how Edwardian sport prose became literary; Travis 1901 with Jones & Keeler 1927 to track the American instructional autobiography; and Haultain 1908 with Wodehouse 1922 to show the metaphysical and the comic poles of the essay tradition.

Triggers that would change the recommendations: if access to the U.S. magazine corpus (American Golfer back-issues 1908–1936, Golf Illustrated US 1914–1935, Golfdom 1927–) opens via HathiTrust or other digitization, the center of gravity should shift toward the periodical record, where the bulk of Rice, Keeler, Tillinghast, Innis Brown, Bobby Jones's columns, and Joyce Wethered's American writing actually lived.

Corrections and Boundary Cases

I intentionally included a few border cases though they fall just outside the strict 1880s–1935 frame: Robert Browning's "History of Golf" (1955) is outside the era but his editorial influence as editor of "Golfing" magazine from 1910 onward is inside it; MacKenzie's "Spirit of St. Andrews" was written 1933 but not published until 1995; H.B. Martin's "Fifty Years of American Golf" (1936) appears one year after the conventional close of the era. Ring Lardner's "Champion" (1916) is a boxing story, not a golf one, and I excluded it; "Mr. Frisbie" (1928) is the correct golf companion to "A Caddy's Diary." Tommy Armour's and Walter Hagen's full instructional books are post-hickory (1953 and 1956), appearing only via their hickory-era magazine work. Ernest Jones's signature book "Swing the Clubhead" did not appear until 1952, though Daryn Hammond's 1920 "The Golf Swing: The Ernest Jones Method" sets out his teaching within the era. Charles Price (b. 1925) is purely post-hickory and is excluded. Sources for the date of Grantland Rice's takeover of The American Golfer vary between "spring 1920" (Walter J. Travis Society, dominant) and "around 1921" (one secondary source); the 1920 date is the consensus. Lifespans cited are drawn from standard reference works:

• Bernard Darwin (1876–1961)
• Horace G. Hutchinson (1859–1932)
• Henry Leach (1873–1942)
• Harold Hilton (1869–1942)
• Arnold Haultain (1857–1941)
• J.H. Taylor (1871–1963)
• James Braid (1870–1950)
• Harry Vardon (1870–1937)
• Willie Park Jr. (1864–1925)
• Walter J. Travis (1862–1927)
• Jerome D. Travers (1887–1951)
• O.B. Keeler (1882–1950)
• Grantland Rice (1880–1954)
• H.B. Martin (1873–1959)
• A.W. Tillinghast (1874–1942)
• Charles Blair Macdonald (1855–1939)
• Alister MacKenzie (1870–1934)
• Robert Hunter (1874–1942)
• George C. Thomas Jr. (1873–1932)
• Joyce Wethered (1901–1997)
• Andrew Lang (1844–1912)
• Ring Lardner (1885–1933)
• P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975)