The Bullshit Artist
Plenty of writers are full of shit. Then there is James Wakefield Burke.
The unlikely tale of how J.W. and I collaborated with Johnny Cash on what became a Disney movie about Davy Crockett.
Those Elvis tapes are fake, though.
Of all the authors I have known, James Wakefield Burke (1906-1989) was the most memorable. He was not a great writer, or even a good one. But J.W., as he was known, was a quintessentially American type: the bullshit artist. I met him in 1985, when I was 23 years old and finishing graduate studies at Yale and researching what became my narrative poem, The Alamo. The only source for some of the books I needed for my research was Eakin Press, a small publishing company in Austin. During a trip to Austin to visit my family one Christmas, the founder and publisher of the press, Ed Eakin, with whom I had corresponded, arranged for me to dine at a Mexican restaurant with him and an author named J.W. Burke. “He’s a bit of a character,” Ed Eakin warned me in advance. Indeed, J.W. turned out to be a bald fellow in his seventies in a fire-engine red suit and white shoes in a style that might be described as Disco Grandpa. An able raconteur of a peculiarly Southern kind, J.W. soon filled me in on …
