Rude at Rowing

R. Bacon Whitney is a professional writer of prehistory about the earliest Greeks, whose nation race emerged shortly after the Early and Late Helladic Periods of the Late Aegean Bronze Age, from the early fifteenth century BC onward. He writes his serializations and individual protohistories under the pseudonym of Saltonstall Weld Bardot—an author/translator of his contemporary master of oldest Greek by syllabic writ. Eight books in keeping with the New Greek Mythology have been published, or are pending release, under “S. W. Bardot, in Translation.”

Whitney is formally the author/publisher of Bardot Books (2008); since 2010, he’s been in collaboration with Small Batch Books of Amherst, Massachusetts. 

His four Rude books, including this title, are fictionalized accounts of his life, written in four genres. The first, Rude at Rowing: 1964’s US8s, a faux memoir about Harvard’s Class of 1965, describes the college’s 1964 Varsity Crew under Harvard’s famous coach Harry Parker. It was followed by Rude at Rowing: In Reverse of Decline, an annal and “loose” sports history about the comeback of Harvard Heavyweight Rowing from 1961 to 1963, which presents the author most fictionally and least autobiographically, notwithstanding his true-blue undergraduate forays into two Olympic sports. The third book, Rude at Olympics, merges the first, now retired, into a bildungsroman, that venerable coming-of-age genre, about his ascendancy to a dual Olympic sports star of the 1964 Olympiads—both of them! This fourth book, Rude at Rowing: A Final Annal, is a genuine historical-fiction novel that effects Whitney’s apogee as a sport-AmPro out of the kingdom of Rude. His peak autobiographical year, 1965, has him seated in the strong 7-Man aboard “the World’s Best Crew,” a moniker accorded by the loathsome liars in a 1965 Sports Illustrated.

For past readers Whitney remains the Downhill Skier, “the Klütch,” of great fame and infamy howsoever restricted to his small sized European and Asian fans­—Niblicks and Niblungs all.