Bernard Asbell, 77, Professor, Prolific Writer and Folk Singer (original) (raw)

Feb. 9, 2001

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February 9, 2001

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Bernard Asbell, a writer on politics and government, a college professor and a folk singer, died on Feb. 1 in a hospital in State College, Pa., where he lived. He was 77.

The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Prof. Jean Brenchley.

Mr. Asbell wrote 12 books, including ''When F.D.R. Died,'' which was on The New York Times best-seller list in 1962.

Other books included ''The Senate Nobody Knows'' (1978, Book on Demand), which followed the activities of Senator Edmund S. Muskie for 18 months in 1975-76; ''The Pill: A Biography of the Drug That Changed the World''; and, with Joe Paterno, the football coach at Pennsylvania State University, ''Paterno: By the Book.''

He also edited ''Mother & Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt'' (1988, Fromm International Publishing).

One of his books proved troublesome. ''Transit Point Moscow,'' which Mr. Asbell wrote with Gerald Amster, told of an escape by Mr. Amster from a Soviet prison. Former officials of the United States Embassy in Moscow characterized the story as total invention.

In an interview after questions were raised, Mr. Asbell said he had concluded after the book was published that the escape episode was ''chiefly an entertainment.'' Mr. Amster stuck by his story.

Mr. Asbell wrote hundreds of articles for magazines including Harper's and The Saturday Evening Post, and he was president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors in 1963 and 1964.

He taught writing at Yale and Clark Universities before joining the faculty at Penn State in 1984 as an associate professor of English, retiring in 1992. ''He was one of few professors without a Ph.D. to hang onto,'' Professor Brenchley said.

In fact, Mr. Asbell had no college degrees.

That was perhaps caused by a detour into folk music that he took as a youth.

''I knew him when he was a teenager and he heard Woody Guthrie and me sing,'' Pete Seeger, an old friend, said on Monday.

Mr. Seeger said that Mr. Asbell wanted to join his group in 1942 but that he had to turn him down because there were no openings and instead encouraged him to strike out on his own, which he did.

''He wrote some quite good songs,'' Mr. Seeger said.

He is survived by Professor Brenchley, a microbiologist at Penn State, and a daughter and three sons from a previous marriage to Mildred Asbell of Washington, which ended in divorce. The children are Jodi Asbell-Clarke of Halifax, Nova Scotia; Paul, of Burlington, Vt.; Larry, of Takoma Park, Md., and Jonathan, of Hamden, Conn. A sister, Sarah Jacobson of Raleigh, N.C., and six grandchildren also survive.

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