As the years began to pile up, and George R. Stewart felt his age, he began to think back over his life. Had he lived a good life?
To answer the question, he wrote another book.:
Good Lives: The Stories of Six Men and the Good Life That Each Won for Himself
By examining six men throughout western history who seemed to share the same qualities and the same sense of accomplishment, Stewart found a definition of what comprised a (not “the”) good life: Joab of the Old Testament, William the Marshall, Heinrich Schleiman, John Bidwell of California, Architect Francisco Eduardo Tresguerras of Mexico, and Prince Henry the Navigator, (He apologized, with explanation, for not including any women). The men where selected from those he’d encountered in his scholarly work over the decades. In most cases, they were not widely known.(I suspect he profiled some because he wanted to let readers know about their lives – how else would the average reader in this country learn about the brilliant Francisco Eduardo Tresguerras?) The subjects ranged from the ancient – Joab of the Old Testament – to the fairly recent – John Bidwell of Chico, California.
In their lives, he discovered six qualities of character common to all. Each had clear goals, and stayed committed to those goals until they were accomplished. Heinrich Schleimann, for example, continued his search for the lost city of Troy during years of suffering the humiliation of failure and criticism from professional archaeologists and finally found the city. Each accepted responsibility for his acts. Each had great courage, sometimes in battle, sometimes, like Schliemann, in the pursuit of a goal. And, at the end of their lives, each man felt fulfilled in things personal and professional, and had an integration of his spirit with his physical, material life.
The book is an interesting set of biographies of remarkable men, many of whom most readers had only met before in passing. Discovering a pattern of character that helped him, and the reader, to understand why they are worth studying, added a layer of meaning to the book.
It may lack the power of Earth Abides. But the book is none-the-less an important part of his body of work. In a day when reading was still the primary method of informal education, the book introduced the lives of important but largely unknown historical figures to Stewart’s large reading audience. It also found in those lives a set of standards by which all lives can be judged – thus using them as a microcosm, in the best Stewart manner.
Perhaps most important, it teaches us about George R. Stewart – what sort of man was he? What values did he hold highest? How did his life measure against the six in the book? He didn’t answer that last question in the book. But he once told his son Jack, “That’s a book an old man writes.” In other words, in studying those lives he was giving us a key to his, as it drew close to the end.
But he wasn’t through with life yet. He was already hard at work on another game-changing book, which would win a major prize and help his readers understand the nuts-and-bolts of living properly in the Whole Earth ecosystem that he had first visualized and shared, in the 1930s.
the EARTH ABIDES project 