Hula Moons

by Don Blanding

Presumed first edition, 1930.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1936

About the author

Donald Benson Blanding was an American poet who sentimentalized warm climates and was sometimes described as "poet laureate of Hawaii". He was also known as a journalist, author of prose, artist, and speaker. Born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, he later grew up alongside a young Lucille "Billie" Cassin (later known as Joan Crawford), later assisting her after she cut her foot on a broken milk bottle. Blanding would make this incident the focus of a poem he wrote when the two met years later. He trained between 1913 and 1915 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Blanding pursued further art studies in 1920, in Paris and London, traveled in Central America and the Yucatan, and resumed living in Honolulu in 1921. Finding work as an artist in an advertising agency, he happened into two years of writing poems published daily in the Honolulu Star Bulletin for an advertiser.

The popularity of these ad-poems led Blanding to follow the advice of newspaper colleagues by publishing a collection of his poetry in 1923. When his privately published 2000 copies quickly sold out, he followed it with a commercially published edition the same year, and with additional verse and prose books. For his fifth book in 1928, he no longer used a local or West Coast publisher, but the New York publisher Dodd, Mead & Company. The result, Vagabond's House, was reviewed promptly by the New York Times, and was a great commercial success. By 1948 it went through nearly fifty printings in several editions that together sold over 150,000 copies.

In 1927, he suggested and founded the annual holiday, Lei Day, in Hawaii. While he remained strongly attached to Hawaii, his connections to the world of celebrities drew him often to the mainland, and his income made hotel life and multiple residences feasible. Blanding married Dorothy Binney Putnam, on June 13, 1940, and they lived in Fort Pierce, Florida. He died without issue on June 9, 1957.

For more information about the life and art of this artist and poet, see the website link referenced above.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book the first time I read it in 1977, while I was married to a part-Hawaiian man and living on Oahu. I no longer am married to my kanaka, and no longer live in Hawaii, but I visit Kauai once a year. Why? Because Hawaii calls me back. (just like this author says). I relate to Don Blanding, a man from the Mainland who fell in love with the sweet smell, tastes and beauty of the Islands. I just finished reading this book a 2nd time and now I can't wait to visit the beautiful Garden Island again. I'll never forget when I stepped off the United Airlines flight from LAX to HNL the very first time in 1977. The air smelled like plumeria! And like Mr. Blanding writes: I knew I had found paradise. In this book, Mr. Blanding shares his beautiful drawings also. If you know and love Hawaii, this book will carry you back to the Islands. This is the book I will read as I die.

[kaylee phillippi · Rating 4 out of 5]

endearing.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This author visited Hawaii early in the twentieth century and his account reflects the writing style and attitudes of a haole malihini, which are, sadly, not much changed today. Aside from that, it was worth reading for the descriptions of Halema'uma'u crater of Kilauea volcano on The Big Island where I live.

"Hawaii! Say the word...slowly. Taste the following syrup of its vowels. Enjoy the lingering pleasure that flavors its smooth, floating loveliness."

"I am not beglamored by Hawaii, nor deceived by its ten thousand joys. I know that the green plush of moss overlies the white skeletons of corral and the black bones of dead lava."

"After the first minutes of adjustment, I began to grasp the hideous beauty of the pit. If Haleakala, the dead crater of Maui, was a great scar, Kilauea was a suppurating wound oozing the fluids of new worlds from sources deep in the earth."