George Shively: South Bend's Forgotten Novelist

The son of a U.S. Senator chased his bookish dreams all the way to New York, where he published two novels and became an esteemed literary editor.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED DECEMBER 30, 2025

I happened upon George Shively only by accident. I hadn't meant to discover his century-old novels, and I had never intended to spend $85 on a rare and unread copy of his 1926 book Sabbatical Year.

But that's exactly what happened.

I stumbled onto a newspaper review of Sabbatical Year in the South Bend Tribune: October 17, 1926. The review noted that the author was a local kid, the son of a Senator, and that the novel was his second. I tracked down copies of both and read more than 400 pages of 100-year-old text between the two books. I was maybe the first person in several decades to open either of them.

I hope I won't be the last.

George Shively was born to minor American royalty with a homebase in South Bend, Indiana. His father was Benjamin Shively, a South Bend lawyer who became a two-term Democratic Senator. His mother was Laura Jenks, daughter of George Jenks, Solicitor General of the United States under President Grover Cleveland. In South Bend, he grew up in a house at the northeast corner of Michigan and Madison Streets.

Other than the biographies of his more famous parents, there aren't too many mentions of George Shively out there in the ether. Ben Shively's Wikipedia page only mentions George as one of the three Shively children, alongside John and Mary.

There's not much out there on George's life, and this article will serve as the most significant examination of the author's life that's ever really been written. In brief, George Shively was raised in South Bend and attended Indiana University. He starred as a pitcher on IU's baseball team and received offers to pitch in the major leagues, but he chose instead to study law at Yale.

Shively's time at Yale was interrupted twice. First, when his Senator father died in office. Second, when he enlisted to fight in World War I. When the war ended, Shively returned with American and French medals. If he ever finished his legal studies, I couldn't find record of it. Instead, he moved to New York and chased a different dream.

He wanted to write the Great American Novel.

It was 1925 when Shively released his first novel, Initiation. Out of print for at least 70 years, Initiation is a difficult book to track down. I found it in the Local History section of the downtown library. It's a reference-only book. That means you have to sit there and read it. You can't take it home.

I read the entire thing.

Initiation is a work of fiction, but significant chunks of the story are reflective of George Shively's life. The book's main character, John Malleson, lives at the corner of Michigan and Madison Streets. That's exactly where Shively grew up too, and when the novel tells of the courters strolling through nearby Leeper Park, it feels like a captured memory more than inventive storytelling.

It's difficult to separate Shively from Malleson. Both were excellent students. Both had lawyers for fathers. Both attended Indiana University. Both were pitchers. Both were stuck choosing between law, baseball, and literature. Both went to Europe during the Great War and returned with injuries and medals.

And that's where the story begins to deviate from the reality. Malleson returns to South Bend and pursues a career in law. Shively, of course, moved to become a writer in New York. In some ways, Initiation almost feels like Shively is reimagining what his own life might have been like if he'd made different choices along the way. You know, like in the Nicolas Cage film, "The Family Man".

Critics were split on Initiation, and I was too. The book starts strong and beautifully. It captures interest and attention, but it might try to do too much. It is, at different times, a coming-of-age story, a love story, a questioning of religious faith, a war story, and a rambling philosophical rumination. Shively manages to hold all of it together until the novel's midpoint. That's when the reader gets the impression that maybe the author was writing under a tight deadline.

The last third of the book is an unsatisfying race to the finish. Characters and plotlines are abandoned. Questions are left unanswered. Deaths are left insufficiently mourned.

Newspaper reviews told that Initiation was not nearly perfect, but that it had some wonderful moments, and that its author showed plenty of promise.

There was plenty of excitement in national literary circles about what was going to come next, and already George Shively was finishing his next book, set to come out in fall 1926.

There's nothing inherently wrong with Shively's second book. Titled Sabbatical Year, the story follows a New England family with a long legacy that has become something like a yoke around the necks of the newest generation. Its characters wrestle with their responsibility to the family legacy against their own desires to live their own lives. It's a fine book, even a good book.

Problem is, it came out the same day as The Sun Also Rises.

The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway's first novel, and its publication marked a stark and bold line in American literature. There had been everything that came before Hemingway, and from now on, there would be everything after. Hemingway's writing was stark and raw and honest. He didn't give everything away, didn't tell you what his characters were thinking, didn't waste paragraphs explaining the motivations behind every action.

George Shively was a lot of things, but he wasn't Ernest Hemingway. Shivel's nouns were buried beneath the weight of too many adjectives. Shively dived inside the minds of all of his characters and knew nothing about the tips of Hemingway's icebergs.

Shively described very well the horrors of war. Then he told you that the character thought that war was horrible. Then he told you that you should think war is horrible too.

Hemingway painted the scene and let the reader figure it out.

Compared to Ernest Hemingway, George Shively's novels seem to ramble. In the literary world, rambling is akin to the kiss of death.

In the end, maybe it was just bad timing. Maybe things would have gone differently for him if he'd been a year or two ahead of himself. As it was, George Shively would not publish another book the rest of his career, but that didn't mean he was done with literature.

George Shively spent the rest of his life ushering books into print for dozens of renowned authors. By the time he published Sabbatical Year, he was already working as an editor with Harcourt, Brace, and Howe. He joined Doubleday in 1944. For the next four decades he worked with plenty of authors you might have heard of before, even if you've never heard of their editor:

W. Somerset Maugham, Bruce Lancaster, Frank Slaughter, Neil Swanson, Emily Hahn, Cedric Hardwicke, William Barrett, Clifford Dowdet, Margaret Widdemer, and Carl Cramer to name a few.

George Shively died in New York in 1980. He was 87 years old.