With many titles, a descriptive superlative is but a hopeful publisher’s disappointing exaggeration. This is not so with Dr. Ethelene Whitmire, a University of Wisconsin School of Library and Information Studies professor, and her new biography. From start to finish, “The Remarkable Life Of Reed Peggram: The Man Who Stared Down World War II in the Name of Love,” is nothing but remarkable, in every sense.
Appearing earlier this year, from Viking, it’s already commanded considerable notice. Covered on NPR and in People, praised by Publishers Weekly and in Essence Magazine, it has even given rise to a docudrama, “The Final Letter,” premiering Saturday, June 20, 2026 at the Roxbury (Boston) International Film Festival. A TV series, or Hollywood film, are surely soon to come?
Dr. Whitmire skillfully presents yet another fact-filled, but stranger-than-fiction life of astounding achievement and heroic perseverance. Peggram’s journey puts the lie to the stereotype of the unqualified DEI candidate. In her compelling book, a young gifted Black and queer boy born in 1914 in Dorchester, Massachusetts progresses undaunted by obstacles. Once his father is institutionalized after suffering mental collapse during World War I, his parents divorce and his mother remarries. Poorly educated and disabled, Peggram’s stepfather was sufficiently antagonized by Peggram’s “effeminate intellectualism,” and so he went to live with his devoted grandmother. It is this steadfast woman with just a third-grade education to whom Dr. Whitmire dedicates her book.
A school custodian, her faith in Peggram’s abilities knew no bounds and her faithfulness was amply rewarded because her grandson excelled in all he did. First shining at Boston Latin School, he went on to enter Harvard, living off campus (at home), as Black undergraduates were obliged to. Initially homesick and unimpressed by New York, he was at first disappointed by Columbia University. There, he studied romance languages, Peggram, completing a master’s degree in comparative literature and graduating with a Phi Beta Kappa key, magna cum laude in 1935. He also met a particular friend, pioneering Lesbian sexologist Jan Gay (nee Helen Reitman). Taking up Peggram as her “little brother,” she once memorably took him out dancing at Harlem’s celebrated Savoy Ballroom.
He returned to Harvard for his doctoral studies but underwent trauma from the rebuffed crush he developed for a younger fellow student, Leonard Bernstein.
If heartache might not have been avoidable, his second stint in Cambridge might have been. A member of seemingly every extracurricular club he could join — be it devoted to poetry, German, or Spanish — he aspired to become a professor. But for the “help” of Harvard Dean A. Chester Hanford, the road to this goal might have taken him through England. Indeed, Peggram’s quest to become the second Black person to earn a Rhodes Scholarship might have changed his story entirely.
Even today, many African Americans know the experience of the tryingly passive-aggressive recommendation letter. Miraculously, an unimpeachable authority agrees to write one, and it could hardly be more glowing. But it is the author’s face-saving qualification — alerting the recipient that this otherwise inestimable candidate is Black — that proves fatal.
Just a courtesy, meant to avoid any potential embarrassment, sometimes it’s a concluding sentence or an innocuous postscript. In this case, it followed in another letter — one not shared with Peggram — the alert, warning the admissions committee that Peggram was a “negro.”
Contending for Rhodes scholarships twenty years later, in 1955, Fisk University students David Levering Lewis, Preston Theodore King, and Richard Paul Thornell, were also unable to circumvent such “unintended” bias. Among 32 scholars selected that year, their Blackness overwhelmed their otherwise outstanding qualifications. Not until 1963, when John Edgar Wideman and John Stanley Sanders were selected, did an African American succeed Alain Locke’s appointment as a Rhodes Scholar in 1906.
Instead of heading to Oxford in September 1938, having received Julius Rosenwald and John Harvard fellowships, Peggram moved to Paris. Primed to study decadence in 19th century French literature at the Sorbonne, in the artistic past of the City of Light, he was alive to the possibility of discovering his true self.
On the eve of horrific World War II, in what really was Dickens’ “best and worst of times,” Peggram embraced the possibility afforded by travel, culture and prejudice-free encouragement — the kind he’d seldom encountered in the sustained way he did abroad. In pursuit of cultivation, intellectual engagement, love and adventure, he found all he’d ever desired and more. Is it any wonder he ignored warnings of disaster ahead?
In May of the following year, Peggram met the man he came to consider his soulmate. A painter, born in 1916, Arne Gurdahn Hauptmann was slender, handsome, and Danish. With all that was happening politically, why were they not more afraid? Dr. Whitmire explains that their determination to know love, despite the odds, had to do with the joy of having your dreams come true. She says that Peggram insisted, “I’m going to stay until the first bombs start falling.”
“When I was reading the letters to his grandmother,” she said, “you could tell Reed was kind of obsessed with Arne. And at some point, he starts talking about ‘we’ instead of just ‘me.’ Arne was just like Reed. He wanted to travel and be free. They both loved music and art, and they just fell for each other very hard and had a wonderful time in Europe.”
Exhibiting a certain fatalism, they were hardly blind to risks inherent to their relationship. Caution is inherent in the zigzagging travels they undertook. Moving from Paris, with both studying in Copenhagen, they enjoyed relative safety. After seven months, heeding the likelihood of German invasion, circuitously they found their way to Florence.
Alternately unable to obtain either documentation or funds to leave Europe together, the pair suffered ever greater privation and peril. Unable to access it, even an inheritance of $11,000 from Peggram’s Harvard friend Montfort Schley Variell ’36 was to no avail.
Suffering seasonally from the heat or the cold, from hunger, boredom, frustration and physiological angst, both experienced nervous breakdowns. Interred by the Italians and then by the Nazis, they suffered most during the months when, on top of their isolation, they were temporarily parted. Even after escaping captivity, they remained unsafe and exposed.
Only devotion preserved them. As a distraction from their misery, they repeatedly discussed where they would live after the war, fantasizing about an idyllic future, envisioned working and living together in the contentment of a better world.
Raggedly dressed dandies, thin men, thinner than ever following months of hiding and wandering in the wilderness, their improbable liberation seems as ironic as a Mel Brooks musical. On the verge of despair in December 1944, the two were intercepted by an all-Black advance patrol led by Lieutenant James Young of the 370th Regiment of the 92nd Division near a town on the Fifth Army front. It was a miracle.
One would like to report that after almost five years of strife and struggle to keep alive, to stay together and sane, that Peggram and Hauptmann lived long lives, happily ever after.
The warmth of their reception is surprising. Despite the universal homophobia prevailing then, the Amsterdam News’ war correspondent Max Johnson, was unmistakably impressed by the resolution this unambiguously Queer couple showed. “Boy Friends Scorn Bombs, Come Out OK: Pal Scorns Money, Freedom To Stick,” proclaimed the Howard graduate’s piece published February 3, 1945. In it, Johnson compared these men to a modern-day Damon and Pythias, referring to legendary ancient Greek ‘friends’ whose loyal devotion facing death so impressed their would-be assassin that he set them free and asked to become their friend.
Portraying the essential contribution Blacks made to America’s segregated military, this story was the most noteworthy among all Johnson’s dispatches. In Harlem, his reporting presaged the mobilization of freedom fighters embattled to win civil rights. Here Johnson surmised, “If Peggram’s story proves to be correct, it will undoubtedly become one of the greatest human-interest stories yet revealed in this war.”
Anticlimactic as it is, it is still poignant just how badly things turn out in this momentous tale — one Dr. Whitmire has wonderfully resurrected from the forgotten work of a long-dead Black journalist, augmented by nearly lost family archives. After Hauptmann returned to Denmark in August 1945, Peggram chose to return to the United States. Hospitalizations to treat his nervous breakdowns over the next four years included electroconvulsive therapy and likely, a lobotomy as well.
Not only did this seemingly inseparable couple never meet again, but with Hauptmann marrying, having two sons and then divorcing the niece of a notorious Danish Nazi, they seem never to have further communicated either. Evidently, there were other subsequent relationships with closeted white men, but none lasted. At just 67, Peggram died in 1982 — unable to teach, attending concerts, borrowing classical records from the library, singing in the choir of an Anglo-Catholic church on Beacon Hill, and smoking like every debonair movie hero of his day.
The lesson of “The Remarkable Life Of Reed Peggram?” It’s, What if? Like, what if Dr. King and Malcom X were never murdered? What if Barack Obama had successfully created health care as a single-payer entitlement, comparable to Social Security Insurance? The question boils down to, what if equal opportunity were reality?
On the eve of the Civil War, nearly four million enslaved Black people were valued at approximately $3 billion, a figure greater than the value of every bank, brokerage, manufacturer, railroad, steamship line and corporation in America combined. What if the South had remained occupied by federal forces and Reconstruction had united the working poor in common cause? This is a question that’s really no different than, “What if brilliant scholar Reed Edwin Peggram and all other worthy candidates for Rhodes Scholarships, irrespective of color, class or gender, were educated at Oxford and later taught at prestigious places like Howard or Harvard?” Think of the value of that great ignored asset, all of America’s full intellectual capital, cultivated, directed and unleashed to improve, uplift and empower the world?
