Harry Hervey a Savannah Writer

Harry Hervey

Savannah has had many great writers. We have had two Pulitzer Prize Winning writers: Conrad Aiken and James Alan McPherson, and one National Book Award winner Flannery O’Connor. We have had one record breaking New York Times Bestseller writer John Berendt of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fame. These four writers stand at the top of the pantheon of Savannah writers. Yet there is another writer who won awards too and even wrote a book about the sultry side of Savannah. This was the writer Harry Hervey. His book The Damned Don’t Cry is the original book about the dark side of Savannah.

Harry Hervey was born November 5, 1900. He graduated from the Georgia Military Academy in Atlanta. After completing school he became a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution. He wrote his first novel called Caravans By Night, a romance of India in 1922.  He planned to leave America and travel the world as a cruise director in 1923. But before he left, he came to Savannah to see his mother who was working as a manager of The Desoto Hotel. It was on this Savannah visit he met Savannahian Carleton Hildrith. Carleton Hildreth would be his lifelong love. Carleton was working for the Savannah Morning News. They would live together as a couple and would collaborate on many projects. Hildreth worked as typist, co-writer, and researcher for many of Hervey's novels, travel books, plays and screenplays with him, and acted in at least one of their productions on Broadway. Hildreth was his travel companion going with him to Southeast Asia and the Orient in the mid- 1920s.They would together live in many different places besides Savannah such as Hollywood and Charleston.

After his sojourn with his mother and his partner in Savannah he went with Carleton to search for the lost Khmer city in Southeast Asia on a trip sponsored by McCall’s magazine. This would be the first of many trips to Asia to inform his novels and travel logs. Upon their return to America they lived with his mother at the Desoto Hotel. From 1926 to 1932 they spent summers in New York City and returned to either Savannah or Charleston.

Hervey was a prolific writer with a body of work surpassed by few. In his book The Iron Widow he explores gay life and issues. For a book written during the Depression it was well ahead of its time. The book was popular enough for a second printing but for some reason has never had a place in the LGBTQ literary history.

But what may be considered one of his greatest novels was The Damned Don’t Cry. It is a novel of a Savannah girl who struggles in the wild lands of Savannah to stay loyal to who she is and maintain her integrity. She eventually marries into the elite Savannah culture. The book has murder, trials, wealth, class wars and deception. It shows the underside and southern nature of Savannah. The book of course was very controversial because it did not necessarily show Savannah at its best.

An excerpt follows : "...above the votive fires of the azaleas. Row upon row of them pile along the lanes. Pink, magenta, salmon, cerise and white, ragged exultant hedges, flaunting their carnal vividness in the celibate glooms. Their profligacy was gloriously obscene. It mocked the dreary prophecies of vaults and tombs. They were eternal flowering out of the groin of the earth -- they were flames out of skulls. Zelda felt awed by this pagan exaltation in the midst of orthodox seclusion." -- "The Damned Don't Cry.

Hervey would write fourteen books and fifteen screenplays.Hervey was one of the most highly sought screenplay writers of the first half of the 20th century and was praised by critics of literature, stage and screen. His screenplay the Road to Singapore was the first of a series of road movies in which Bing Crosby and Bob Hope would star. Other actors who would star in his movies included Tallullah Bankhead, Marlene Deitrich, Joseph Cotton, Claudette Colbert, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr..
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 In 1938 Hervey moved back to Savannah where he would live for the rest of his life with Carleton. In 1951 Hervey’s star and health had faded. He would die on August 12, 1951, from throat cancer. Hildreth died on March 12, 1977, and is buried at Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah, Georgia, with Hervey. Theirs is one of Savannah’s great love stories. Hervey is one of Savannah’s renowned forgotten writers.  

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Hervey wrote the screenplay for this the first of the 'road movies' of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby