Haniel Long

Haniel Long (born March 9, 1888, Rangoon, Burma [now Yangon, Myanmar]—died Oct. 17, 1956, Minnesota, U.S.) was an American poet and writer best known for his book Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca: His Relation of the Journey from Florida to the Pacific (1936, republished in 1944 as The Power Within Us).

The son of Methodist missionaries to Asia, Long was born in Burma but returned with his parents to the United States in 1891. He and his family lived in Pittsburgh, Pa., and in Duluth and Minneapolis, Minn., before he entered Harvard University in 1907. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in literature in 1910 and began teaching English at Carnegie Technology School (now the Carnegie Institute of Technology) in Pittsburgh. He published the poetry collections Poems (1920) and Notes for a New Mythology (1926) before retiring from Carnegie to move with his wife to Sante Fe, N.M., in 1929.

Long’s retirement from full-time teaching allowed him to devote himself to writing. In 1933 he helped to establish a local publishing house, Writers’ Editions, Inc., and he served as its executive director from 1935 to 1939. In the mid-1930s he published some of his best-regarded works, among them Atlantides (1933), Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935), and Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca. The latter, a historical novella and Long’s most successful work, traced the 16th-century journey of Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca from Florida to the Pacific Ocean. Long followed that work with Malinche (Doña Marina) (1939), a fictional account of the (probably) Nahua princess who became the mistress of Hernán Cortés.

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Long’s later works include The Grist Mill (1945), A Letter to St. Augustine after Re-reading His Confessions (1950), and the posthumously published If He Can Make Her So (1968).