The re-release of George Washington Carver: An American Biography was made possible on its 80th anniversary because one woman found an aged, battered copy many years ago and fell in love with both Carver and author Rackham Holt’s beautiful writing. Sandra Knauf is a Colorado Springs writer and publisher who holds a deep fascination with gardening, genetic engineering and environmental concerns. She’s passed along her knowledge in articles, a YA novel (Zera and the Green Man), a memoir (Please Don’t Piss on the Petunias), Greenwoman Magazine, the literary periodical she created, and Greenwoman Substack.

This fascination with all things green (and beyond) is something Knauf has in common with the fascinating historical figure George Washington Carver. Knauf is offering the Carver biography e-book at no charge via Amazon Kindle from February 20 to 24, because she believes so much in this book. (In addition, she highly recommends the documentary Common Ground, which features a segment about George Washington Carver, and will be streaming on Amazon Prime starting April 22, Earth Day.)

I was intrigued with how the re-release of George Washington Carver: An American Biography  came to be, and asked Sandra to meet me to talk about the book, Carver, Holt and this project that took years to come to fruition. We got together at a café, sipping our warm drinks as fluffy flakes of snow fell outside the window, thickening on the pavement. There, we proceeded to geek out about Dr. Carver.

SL: Getting Carver’s authorized biography out was a long-term labor of love for you. What drew you to the book originally, and what drove you to get it republished?

SK: I picked it up, because I’d just graduated [college] with an English major, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I was in love with gardening and garden writing, so I was trying to read everything I could get my hands on. I didn’t have a lot of money, so I’d go to the used bookstore, The Bookman, and I saw this book in the agricultural section. It was just $3, so I picked it up. I thought it would be really boring, because it was a worn-out blue book, very plain, but I started reading it and almost every single page had a sticky note on it, and I fell in love. I fell in love with her voice, the author. She made it very much come alive. I just thought this is such a special book, and why don’t we know all these things about Carver? This is incredible. I knew maybe one-percent .

SL: How long did it take you to decide to republish it after you read it and how did you make that happen?

SK: I wanted to right after I read it.

It took me years and years. You know, I’d look into it for a while, and then I’d give up. Then a few years later, I’d decide to look around on the internet again. I just kept digging and looking at [Rackham Holt’s]  two brothers. One died, but the other didn’t, so I kept looking at where he might have been and who he might have married and their kids and their kids. Finally, I got on LinkedIn and contacted [Holt’s] great-great-niece, and asked “Was your great-great-aunt author Rackham Holt?” And yes, she was!

Even then, I never knew if I was going to be able to do it. Amazon hung me up on it by saying [the book] was in the public domain, but it wasn’t. I did my research. It was kind of a nightmare.

   He was teaching [about regenerative agriculture] 100 years ago. We could be living in a paradise if we were following his methods. We wouldn’t be so sick.

SL: Was there anything in the text you modified or was everything as originally published?

SK: The text was the same, but I added some of the photos, including the one of Rackham Holt with Carver. I added the index at the end, because it was recommended, and I added my introduction.

SL: Carver had a fascinating life. Did anything stand out about him?

SK: The main thing that intrigued me was what happened to his mother? I wanted to know more, but that information just wasn’t available. There was talk about her having had other children [than George and his older brother], like a set of twin girls that were buried on the property. Something sinister could have happened to her or she just might have run away during that time period when the war was about to be over.

People are pretty sure Moses Carver was his father. A lot of people have looked at pictures of the two and they look a lot alike. They both had long fingers, and the brow and high cheekbones.

SL:Do you have a favorite scene?

SK: My favorite scene is probably when he goes to the senate about the peanut tariff and they’re giving him a hard time, laughing at him, telling him he only has ten minutes. And then he charms them and gets to keep talking. I loved that.

SL: What emotions did you experience while reading it for the first time?

SK: I felt a lot of happiness. He accomplished so much. I was a little sad he didn’t get to pursue his art. I wanted him to go to Paris, to be the toast of the city. It kind of broke my heart. I’ve seen some of his paintings in museums.

SL: Why do you think so much of his work faded into obscurity?

SK: I think the biggest roadblock was actually economics. That it was about, “We can make money doing this, but we can’t make money by teaching people how to feed themselves, to preserve food and forage.” He was really at the forefront of dried food, like dried sweet potato.

SL: Rackham Holt seems like an interesting enigma herself. What about her stuck out to you?

SK: There’s a lot. She had an extremely tragic life. She was married to a New York editor, and he died at a World’s Fair in the 1930s, I think it was in Chicago. They had an outbreak where the waste water got into the water sources, and he died around the age of 42 of a heart attack. In typical mainstream fashion, they didn’t tell the people about the outbreak.

She lost her daughter at age twenty-two. Her only child. She got pneumonia, and it was right before antibiotics were available.

Holt had an issue with alcoholism later in life. She kept falling and breaking things. She struggled a lot. They even fired her at Doubleday while she was writing [a book] about Mary McLeod Bethune, but she got the job back and finished it. It wasn’t very good, though. It wasn’t like her Carver biography; it was missing her voice.

It was sad, but I wanted to do her justice. Her work was important. She was a tremendous writer. We need to have her book on Carver out there.

SL: How did she find out about Carver, and what made her want to write a book about him?

SK: She was recommended. Teddy Roosevelt’s son was a managing editor at Doubleday. He and the NAACP wrote to Carver and recommended Rackham Holt as a good writer, and the one who could write his biography. They pushed him until he said okay, and then he was a bit of a pain once she got to the Institute. It took her a long time to get him to warm up to her, because he had been lied about in the press a lot. The New York Times had written about him and made him out to be pretty nutty. He wrote them a big letter saying what the truth was, but they didn’t print it.

Holt had ghostwritten books for Doubleday before, and she’d written for magazines, so she was established already. Because of her using her nickname, which she wrote under, a lot of people thought the book was written by a man. I even read some reviews that referred to the author as Mr. Rackham Holt.

SL: What is something you want people to take away from this book when they read it?

SK: Regenerative agriculture. We should have been doing this the whole time. He was teaching about this 100 years ago. We could be living in a paradise if we were following his methods. We wouldn’t be so sick.

He was really inspirational. I don’t want to put him on too much of a pedestal, but a lot of times when you dig into someone’s personal life you find something unseemly, but there was nothing like that about him. The book is inspirational, and a lot of people can benefit from it.