Eugene Walter
Last of the Bohemians
Alabama-born Eugene Walter was an original, a man who made up each day as it came along. Walter lived an itinerant life, running away from home at age three, living in the back room of a bookshop at ten, painting coffins in rural Mississippi in the late 1930s and serving as an Army cryptographer in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. That was before he took an ice cream freighter to France in the early 1950s, met and worked with an American-born princess who published the world famous literary journal Botteghe Oscure, helped found the Paris Review, and acted in the films of Federico Fellini, Lina Wertmuller and other filmmakers of Italy’s Golden Age. Back in his native Mobile, he was celebrated by some as a Renaissance man and scoffed at by others who thought him a deadbeat. In fact he was one of the last true Bohemians.
“While Truman Capote told lies to hurt people, Eugene Walter told lies
Gore Vidal
to make them laugh.”
Funded by the Alabama Humanities Foundation, Sybil Smith Charitable Trust, A.S. Mitchell Foundation, M.W. Smith Foundation, Ben May Foundation Charitable Trust and the Malbis Memorial Foundation.
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