SANTA FE, N.M. – Edward Daniel Horgan moved his family from Buffalo to Albuquerque in 1915. He had tuberculosis and believed he needed the dry Southwestern air for his health. His son Paul was 12 at the time. The move would prove salubrious for the boy, too.

Paul Horgan, who died 30 years ago today, is known for his nonpareil histories of, and historical fiction about, the great Southwest. He won a pair of Pulitzers – the history prize for 1954's “Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History,” and the biography prize for 1975’s “Lamy of Santa Fe,” about Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the 19th-century Archbishop of Santa Fe.

Horgan died at age 91 only weeks before my own father died at 83. They were longtime friends who shared a love of literature – and of Buffalo.

My father wrote book reviews for The Buffalo News for 50 years, including one in 1993 about Horgan's 40th (and last) book, “Tracings: A Book of Partial Portraits.” The review told of how Horgan’s first dozen years had shaped the writer he would come to be: “Before he became a world traveler in sober earnest, during the first 12 years in the city of his birth, he had become a world traveler in the world of the imagination.”

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Day 168: June 16, 2020 - A cyclist rides past the statue of Michelangelo's David in Delaware Park.

Horgan wrote in “Tracings” of visiting the Sistine Chapel in Rome and musing on Michelangelo, which reminded him of the statue of David in Delaware Park.

“A copy of the heroic Florentine David stood on the shore of the Park Lake a few blocks from our house in Buffalo,” Horgan wrote. “This was an immense bronze, in the size of the original. The huge hero stood facing away from the lake toward the Albright Art Gallery and the Museum of the Historical Society – two of my childhood haunts. On many an afternoon after school I roamed around those classical temples imagining myself their inhabitant; and then I would go down to the lake and see David, and often sit down on the granite base that supported him, and eat my apple, or read my book.”

Last year, my wife and I took a trip to Santa Fe and visited the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, begun by Lamy in 1869. We were happy to see that Horgan’s biography of the archbishop is sold in the church store, and happier still to see a stained glass rendering of St. John Neumann among the saints on the altar screen that was added to the cathedral in 1987 for the 100th anniversary of its dedication. (Neumann, in 1836, founded my own childhood parish, St. John the Baptist in the Town of Tonawanda.)

"Buffalo has always shown itself a city hospitable to the childhoods of fine writers,” my father’s review of “Tracings” posited. “To William Rose, and to Stephen Vincent Benet; to young Scott Fitzgerald. Of all the writers born in Buffalo of Buffalo lineage, however, Paul Horgan is by far the most notable.”

“He was born in Buffalo Aug. 1, 1903, the second of three children in a close-knit family of comfortable means, strong Catholic faith, and uncommon creative vitality. … The Horgan side was Irish. His adored father, Edward Daniel Horgan, was vice president of a profitable printing business run by Paul’s maternal grandfather, a stately white-haired German, Matthias Rohr, who carried a fine walking stick and went to Europe nearly every summer.”

(Buffalo’s Rohr Street is named for Matthias Rohr.)

When Horgan’s family moved to Albuquerque, his high school English teacher was Elsie Cather, sister of Willa Cather, who would later write “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” (It is a novel about Lamy that includes passages about construction of the cathedral.) Horgan’s life is replete with this sort of serendipity. He struck up a youthful friendship with one J. Robert Oppenheimer. Horgan would go on to write history – and Oppenheimer, of course, to make it.

Horgan had a way of finding famous friends, or at least acquaintances. “Tracings: A Book of Partial Portraits” is a volume of short memoirs that trace out some of these. He tells of meetings with the likes of Thornton Wilder, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, and more. Most movingly, Horgan writes of Igor Stravinsky, his longtime friend, in the composer’s final days.

“At 90, lucky fellow that he is, Horgan can look back with pleasure on his long friendship with Stravinsky and his wife, Vera,” my father wrote in that long-ago review in The News. “At 81, I can account myself equally lucky. For I and my wife, Eileen, can look back on our long friendship with that bonniest, most gracious, most enduring of our century's literary artists, Paul Horgan.”

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