William March
William Edward March Campbell, commonly known as William March, was an American author born on September 18, 1893, in Mobile, Alabama. Growing up in a family that faced economic challenges and frequent relocations, March completed high school with difficulty and pursued higher education briefly at Valparaiso University and the University of Alabama's law school. His life took a significant turn when he enlisted in the Marines during World War I, where he was wounded and experienced the traumatic effects of war. Following his military service, he found stability working for the Waterman Steamship Corporation, eventually rising to vice president.
March began his writing career in 1929, drawing from his wartime experiences to create impactful narratives that explored the psychological effects of conflict. His notable work, *Company K*, is a collection of stories reflecting the psychological aftermath of war. He later focused on themes such as racial injustice and familial dysfunction in a trilogy set in fictitious Pearl County, Alabama. March became widely recognized for his 1954 novel *The Bad Seed*, which addressed dark themes of inherent evil and was adapted for stage and film. March's writing is characterized by deep psychological insights into troubled characters, often grappling with complex social issues before his death on May 15, 1954, shortly after his most famous work was published.
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William March
Writer
- Born: September 18, 1893
- Birthplace: Mobile, Alabama
- Died: May 15, 1954
- Place of death: New Orleans, Louisiana
Biography
William Edward March Campbell was born September 18, 1893, in Mobile, Alabama. Because his father was a sawmill worker who followed employment opportunities, March lived in several towns in rural Alabama and Florida while growing up. Given that itinerant lifestyle and with the family often struggling economically, March completed high school with some difficulty. He briefly attended Valparaiso University in Indiana (1913-1914) and enrolled for a year in the law school at the University of Alabama.
Hoping to find stable income to complete his education, March headed to New York and found work at a law firm before enlisting in the Marines in World War I. March was wounded in action. Although he was decorated for heroic service overseas, the experience of such brutality caused physical hardship and far more destructive long-term psychological traumas. To provide economic and emotional stability upon his return stateside, he accepted an entry-level position at the fledgling Waterman Steamship Corporation in Mobile.
Finding in business a world of clarity and rationality, March thrived. Over the next eighteen years he rose to vice president, along the way becoming quite wealthy as a stockholder. To further assist in his own program of postwar recovery, March began publishing in 1929 under the name William March—March was his mother’s maiden name. He wrote stories about his service experience. At the encouragement of friends, March assembled more than a hundred of his wartime vignettes into a network of related stories told from shifting perspectives (or voices) that recalled Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Company K, a harrowing account of the psychological impact of war and the exposure to its mayhem, was hailed, despite its appearance long after the heyday of World War I fiction, for its vivid characters and searing honesty.
Drawn to the imaginative richness of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County stories, March then completed a trilogy of novels set in fictitious Pearl County, Alabama, that probed in turn racial injustice, marital infidelities, and dysfunctional families. In addition, March continued to produce a steady stream of short fiction, most often heavy-toned Freudian case studies of tormented characters who under emotional duress evidence unexpectedly aberrant, often violent behavior.
March retired from Waterman in 1938 to devote himself entirely to writing. After completing The Looking-Glass, a finely crafted psychological study of two families, one rich, one poor, in a Southern town, March experienced an intense psychological breakdown. After recovering, he settled in 1952 in the environs of New Orleans.
There, he completed work on the novel that finally established his national reputation, a dark work that spelled out his unsettling vision of the inevitable reality of evil within the heart. In 1954’s The Bad Seed, a woman discovers to her horror that her dead mother was a serial killer and then must confront evidence that her own eight-year old daughter is as well a dispassionate killer. The novel, a national sensation, was later adapted to the stage by Maxwell Anderson and then made into a film. March would not live to see the sensation caused by his darkling tale: He died of heart failure on May 15, 1954, just weeks after the book’s publication.
Struggling with demons of his own, March created vivid case studies of anxious characters caught up in psychological dilemmas and struggling to find resolution for crises caused by economics, family, sexuality, and race.