The Professor of Heterodoxy is the first and only novel written by our late father, Dr. Lyle Owen. Written in the late 1950's it was sadly never published. In recognition of the innate worth of the book and as a tribute to our father we have now scanned and digitized it from his original type-written manuscript to enable its long overdue publication.
Semi-autobiographical, the book details the career of Solomon Socrates Smith, a brilliant young scholar who by luck and guile becomes the Professor Of Heterodoxy at a typical Midwestern University. There it follows his adventures as he struggles against the forces of orthodoxy, prejudice, academic stupidity and the political correctness of the times.
Voltairian in tone, full of intelligence, clever word play, multiple entendre, hidden meanings, biting sometimes dark satire, and repressed sexuality, the book is a wonderful commentary on Midwestern culture in the late 1950's that is perhaps even more relevant today.
The book is filled with profound, insightful, and humorous analyses of Christianity, Marx, college football, un-Americanism, academic politics, modern art, the advertising industry, the irrational nature of prejudice, the Socratic method, and much much more.
Throughout the book this Socratic gadfly continually forces a wide variety of people to confront their own irrational beliefs through one interesting and humorous situation after another, and in the process manages to learn a few lessons of his own.
All in all this is a wonderful novel that deserves to be read by anyone interested in the virtues of free speech, free thought, and the enduring humor of the irrational.
About the Author: Edgar Lyle Owen was born July 25, 1906 in a one room stone house in Kiowa County, Oklahoma in what was then Indian Territory. His father had earlier made the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889.
From early years in Oklahoma and Kansas, the family moved to Missouri where Lyle grew up in poverty in a little cabin on Coon Creek across the White River from Branson, which in those days was just another sleepy little Ozarks town.
Sharp of mind and determined to pull himself out of poverty by his bootstraps through education and hard work he became Valedictorian of the first four-year graduating class of Branson High School in 1923.
From there he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Southwest Missouri State Teacher's College (now Missouri State University) in Springfield in 1927. Too poor to own a car, he once ran the then 50 miles from Branson to Springfield in a single day.
Upon graduating he was admitted to the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he roomed with the future Nobel Laureate economist Theodore Schultz. Still living in poverty, he worked his way through graduate school by taking odd jobs such as firing furnaces before dawn in the Wisconsin winter, and working in a buttermilk factory where he was able to supplement his meager dietary intake. At Wisconsin he received a Master's degree, and then a Ph.D. in economics in 1937.
Upon receipt of his doctorate he took a professorship at what was then The Carnegie Institute of Technology, in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. There he met his wife Mary, with whom he would have his three children Edgar, Robert, and Judith.
For many years he lived on the 140 acres of land that is now Branson's Lakeside Forest Wilderness Area.
In 1945 Lyle took a position at the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma where he was Head of the Economics Department for many years.
Throughout his long life Lyle published many articles on a wide variety of subjects some of which are listed at the front of this book. And he was an acquaintance and correspondent with a number of notables including Erskine Caldwell, Thomas Hart Benton, John G. Neihardt, Alex Haley, Dr. Paul Samuelson, and others.
In 1973 he retired to his beloved Ozarks property, living there until 1998 when he went to live with his son Dr. Robert Owen in Lubbock, Texas. Dr. Lyle Owen passed away February 5, 2005 at the age of 98, and was laid to rest in Branson's Ozark Memorial Park Cemetery next to his mother, father, and youngest brother Max.
