wfn.org | 'Prince of Egypt' author still working for social justice

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Feb. 24, 1999  Contact: Tim Tanton*(615)742-5470*Nashville, Tenn.
10-21-71BP{100}

NOTE: A photograph is available with this story.  

A UMNS News Feature
By Judy Harrison*

Moses stands above the Red Sea, his staff raised toward heaven. His long,
white beard billows in the salty breeze. His simple robe is torn and
tattered by the suffering he and his people have endured at the hands of the
Pharaoh.

Huddled behind Moses are his followers. A frightened, doubting horde, they
anxiously await the miracle that will save them from Ramses'
fast-approaching army. Suddenly, the breeze becomes a gale, dark clouds are
swept away, and the waves of the Red Sea part. They stand aside like walls,
creating a wide corridor that the Israelites scurry through. As the
Pharaoh's army follows them, the walls come crashing down upon the soldiers,
drowning Moses' mortal enemy.

That's how Cecil B. DeMille filmed it in his 1956 film, "The Ten
Commandments." That is how DreamWorks SKG studios animated it in the recent
film, "The Prince of Egypt." That is not how Dorothy Clarke Wilson wrote it
in her 1949 novel about the Exodus, also titled Prince of Egypt. Yet, that
is how most Americans, except for those who have attended theological
school, envision the parting of the Red Sea as described in Exodus 14:21-31.

Wilson's Moses is hardly the Moses of popular culture. He is, however, a
symbol of the philosophy to which Wilson and her late husband, a United
Methodist minister, devoted their lives. Now 94 and living in a Maine
nursing home, she still works for social justice from a Christian
perspective.
	
For her third novel, Wilson chose to write about the "origins of the
Christian concept of democracy." In Moses, she found "a personality of
towering proportions, a man who, more than 12 centuries before Jesus,
recognized the supreme value of the individual, who not only conceived but
enforced both a document of human rights and an emancipation proclamation
over 3,000 years before Jefferson and Lincoln."
	
Wilson, the daughter of a Baptist farmer and minister, received a
fundamentalist Christian education. As a college student during the 1920s,
she began her journey toward social activism and pacifism that would become
her life's work. During her senior year, she did extensive research for her
essay titled "Arbitration Instead of War," which won a $50 prize.

She was "persuaded" to Methodism by an older, fellow student, Elwin L.
Wilson, who had served in France during World War I. He told her on one of
their first dates that he planned to become a Methodist minister. They were
married in 1925, and he was ordained two years later. 

In her memoir, Union in Diversity: The Story of Our Marriage, published in
1993, Wilson wrote of their early years together:  " ... [W]e felt we were
proceeding at a mutual pace. Only on one subject, opposition to war and full
support of military service, did we have differences. He was still inured to
the glamour of his 18 months in France."
	
That would change a few years later, when he attended a conference on world
peace co-sponsored by the Methodist Church and the Society of Friends.
There, he became convinced "that a pacifist position was the only one that
is consistent with the spirit and teachings of Jesus."
	
During the late 1920s and '30s, the couple moved from parish to parish as
the young pastor's ministerial assignments changed. In 1935, he angered
parishioners when he preached a sermon in support of workers striking the
nearby Warren Paper Co. Meanwhile, his wife began writing plays to be
performed by her Sunday school students, and she sold her work to religious
education publishers. Her pageants were presented at the United Methodist
Church's annual (regional) conference gatherings during the 1950s and '60s.
	
At the outbreak of World War II, Wilson expressed her anger and
disappointment over the conflict in verse. In the 1941 poem "War Speaks,"
she wrote, "I move you, gentlemen, that we declare a moratorium of one year
-- two -- or ten  -- it doesn't really matter, on all those human values
which mankind has through the ages patiently achieved. ..."
	
However, for the couple and their adopted children, Harold and Joan, life
was peaceful. While her husband served as district superintendent of the
Methodist churches in southern Maine, Wilson was busy writing. In 1944, her
first biblical novel, The Brother, was published by Westminster Press. The
Herdsman followed two years later, but it was the
publication of Prince of Egypt that made it possible for the couple to
financially support the causes so important to them.
	
Prince of Egypt sold more than 500,000 copies in paperback. In 1952,
Paramount Pictures Corp. purchased "all the motion picture rights, forever
and throughout the world, in and to and in connection with a certain story
entitled 'Prince of Egypt' ... as well as the radio and television rights,
for DeMille's 'The Ten Commandments.' "
	
While Wilson's book was used as a source for that movie, it is not known
whether DreamWorks SKG used Prince of Egypt as a source for its film, said
Theodore S. Curtis Jr., the author's lawyer of more than 20 years. Curtis is
checking into whether Wilson is entitled to compensation but said Paramount
probably still owns the rights to the book.
Wilson earned about $3,500 from the sale to Paramount.

With funds from that sale and an award for religious fiction, Wilson and her
husband bought a house on the edge of the University of Maine's Orono campus
and turned the basement into a student center for the Maine Christian
Association. Her husband headed the Protestant campus ministry for five
years, before serving as superintendent of the Methodist Church's vast
northern Maine district.
	
While she continued to write biblical fiction, a 1950 tour of missions in
India sponsored by the Methodist Church's Board of Missions set her on a new
path: writing biographies. On that trip, she lunched with Jawaharlal Nehru
and his daughter Indira Gandhi. She visited India three more times, as well
as England and the Middle East. 
	
What Wilson called "my India novel," titled House of Earth, was based on
what she observed during that first visit. At the 1956 General Conference,
the top lawmaking gathering of the United Methodist Church, her pageant
celebrating 100 years of Methodism in India was performed, and she was
presented with a silver tea service by the Indian delegation.
	
In all, Wilson wrote more than 30 books. The last one, Alice and Edith, a
biographical novel about Theodore Roosevelt's wives, was published in 1989.
Today, they line the bookshelves in her room. She points to them from her
bed, saying she liked to spend a year on research and a year writing each
book. 
	
"I can't remember things anymore," she stated matter-of-factly. "But I take
part in all the activities here. I read, usually the large-print version,
and play the piano and organ for our weekly worship services. I don't need
to practice. I remember all the hymns."
	
Today, the Protestant student center at the University of Maine in Orono
receives half of its $60,000 annual budget from the money Wilson made from
her book sales. It is named for her husband, who died in 1993. A $500 prize
for an essay on peace is awarded in her name each year. Over the years,
other recipients have included the Vellore Medical Teaching College in
Madras, India; Americans for Middle East Understanding; Common Cause; the
American Civil Liberties Union; Bates College; the War Resistance League;
Church Women United; the Environmental Task Force; the Maine Nuclear Freeze
Campaigns; the National Council of Churches; the American Field Service;
Clergy and Laity Concerned; and the United Methodist Committee on Relief.

	
Although most of her books are out of print, the inspirational publisher
Guideposts is reprinting several of her novels, according to Curtis. Jezebel
was reprinted last year, and Lady Washington is scheduled for 1999. Demand
for Union in Diversity has been so great that it, too, is being reprinted.
	
"Knowing Dorothy has given me a greater appreciation of the power one person
has to influence others," Curtis said. "In her case, she did it through her
writing. She came from rural Maine and managed to affect the lives of people
in India, China and Palestine (the Middle East)."
	
Wilson is humble about the influence she has had, and gives her husband
credit for leading the United Methodist Church in the area of social
justice. "I have an idea that we, in particular Elwin, were responsible for
a lot of progress as far as the Methodist Church in Maine goes," she said. "
... Not all of our problems have been solved. We've made a lot of advances
in the area of social justice, but we still have a long way to go."
	
Like most of the paths she has taken, Wilson chose the one not traveled by
the majority, even in her fiction. She wrote in Prince of Egypt the minority
opinion of biblical scholars -- that Moses led his people across the Sea of
Reeds, not the Red Sea. And he did not part the waters with the wave of his
staff, but waited for low tide.
	
Her Moses may not have parted the waters with one dramatic gesture, but the
work Wilson and her husband devoted their lives to often kept love, mercy
and brotherhood from drowning in an unjust sea. 
 
# # #

*Harrison is a free-lance writer in Bangor, Maine. A version of this story
originally appeared in the Bangor Daily News.

  

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