UAF honorary Alaska writer Dan O’Neill finds inspiration where science and literature meet

Alaska is large in its expanse of spruce swamps and spongy tundra, but small in the number of writers who have described this place with both meticulous accuracy and lyrical readability.

Dan O’Neill is on that short list. The Fairbanks author of controversial and poetic books was honored by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. At the recent UAF opening ceremony, he received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters.

The 70-year-old author said the honor felt vindicated for someone who had never had a traditional university job.

“I am very grateful for the faculty support and letters from academics and literature,” he said.

O’Neill is perhaps best known for his 1994 book The Firecracker Boys. It’s the strange but true story about how Atomic Energy Commission officials gathered by boosters in Alaska and elsewhere proposed that a saltwater port be blown up off the coast of northwest Alaska with atomic bombs.

He is also the author of David Hopkins’ biography, “The Last Giant of Beringia,” an extensive research paper on a scientist and the concept that Alaska was linked to Asia during the last Ice Age.

In a recent interview at a picnic table on the UAF campus, O’Neill said he began his writing experience as a poet. This sensitivity compromises his descriptions of thermonuclear devices and plate tectonics, making him a reliable human filter made of dense material.

“I want to make (my books) a literary work,” he said. “I have two masters that I have to satisfy – the scientific side and the general reader, whom I have to pull off with a narrative.”

In “The Firecracker Boys,” O’Neill explored “a piece of university history that most people were happy to move on from.” He explained a UAF president’s support for a 1950s Atomic Energy Commission proposal to create a nuclear detonation port near the village of Point Hope.

A diagram of the Atomic Energy Commission’s plan to use five thermonuclear explosions to build an artificial harbor near Cape Thompson, Alaska in 1958. Dan O’Neill wrote about the proposed project in The Firecracker Boys. (Courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Two biologists from the university were fired for rejecting the project on the grounds that it would be an environmental disaster. O’Neill saw it as an injustice that was never actually rectified, long after the project was abandoned.

“I am outraged by injustice,” he said of his motivation to write this book. “If (something that is not true) is the official record, I want to get it straight. (Biologists) Les Viereck and William Pruitt have been fired, and the positions of (University President) William Wood and the Atomic Energy Commission have prevailed. “

The project did not take place but was never officially canceled. People across the country noticed O’Neill’s science book (which has 1,500 footnotes). Viereck and Pruitt were eventually awarded honorary degrees at the university.

My favorite O’Neill book is A Land Gone Lonesome, his 2006 work on the changing human presence along the Yukon River, from Dawson City, Canada to Circle, Alaska. In it, O’Neill takes the reader with him in his canoe on warm summer days and nights. He describes what he sees and the river landscape as it was when the country was more populous a century ago.

O’Neill is also the author of the 2015 children’s book, Stubborn Gal: The True Story of an Undefeated Dog Sled Racer.

One of O’Neill’s writing routine – and mine too – is to allow experts to review his designs.

“I don’t suppose I know (everything scientists do) and it’s easy to go wrong,” he said.

O’Neill worked for the Oral History Program at the university for a decade. In this job he interviewed people like those living on the Yukon and archived their experiences on the Internet.

He also started his own radio show with Robert Hannon, wrote a regular opinion column for the Fairbanks Daily News miner, built log cabins, and worked on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline during construction in the late 1970s.

Through all of these experiences, the former Californian came to know Fairbanks and Alaska as a rewarding place for the curious, a virtue he believes still exists.

“It really is the land of opportunity for the outlier,” he said.