Occupation Writer, poet Spouse Hilda S. Cole (m. 1940) Nationality American Children Freddy Medora Espy | Name Willard Espy Role Editor | |
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Genre light verse, local history Grandchildren Medora Ames Plimpton Harris, Taylor Ames Plimpton Books Oysterville, The game of words, A Children's Almanac, Say it my way, The Wordsworth Rhyming | ||
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Willard Richardson Espy (December 11, 1910 – February 20, 1999) was a US editor, philologist, writer, poet, and local historian. He was the best-known collector of and commentator on word play of his time, and is also particularly remembered for his national bestseller Oysterville: Roads to Grandpa's Village.
Biography
Espy was born in Olympia, Washington in 1910 and raised in the coastal village of Oysterville which had been founded by his grandfather, R. H. Espy, in 1854. Espy graduated from the University of Redlands in 1930, after which he spent a year abroad, enrolling at the Sorbonne in Paris. He was hired by Reader's Digest in 1941 and spent the next sixteen years working there in various positions, including as promotion director. His writing career took off in the late 1960s; he eventually authored fifteen books on language, and his poetry and articles regularly appeared in Punch, Reader's Digest, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics. His light verse has been compared to that of Lewis Carroll, W. S. Gilbert, Ogden Nash and Cole Porter.
Later in life he split his time between Manhattan and Oysterville, and wrote nationally bestselling books on local history, including Oysterville: Roads to Grandpa's Village (1977) and Skulduggery on Shoalwater Bay (1998). Two of his books on wordplay, The Game of Words and An Almanac of Words at Play, were honored at the Governor's Writers Day Awards (now the Washington State Book Awards).
Espy died aged 88 in a New York City hospital in 1999. His daughter Freddy Medora Espy was the first wife of the writer and editor George Plimpton.