.gif)
lthough born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911, it was the heartland of Montana that L. Ron Hubbard first called home. Of his youth in the state capital of Helena, he wrote: “I lived in the typical West with its do-and-dare attitudes, its wry humor, cowboy pranks and make-nothing of the worst and most dangerous.”
If a generally harsh and rude world, however, the Hubbard family home was by no means culturally deprived. Under the tutelage of his mother, Ron was reading by the age of three-and-a-half, and had soon digested whole shelves of classics. Further, he was writing by an early age, and a canvas-bound accountant’s ledger is filled with both diary sketches and fragments of short stories. Likewise scattered throughout are early bits of verse.
As a word on these early works, he tells of first experimenting with free verse in about 1927, to entertain the younger children of a visiting admiral, “and I learned from that, actually, the simplicity of the rendition; there’s nothing contrived about free verse if you’re really writing it in a free style.” In an apt description, he then spoke of the form as, “Not quite logical, but aesthetic,” adding, it has “a very, very broad general appeal.”
