In the year when Saudi Arabia was founded — 1932 — oil sold for 75 US cents a barrel — less than the cost of the steel barrel that held it. This week as Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, celebrates its 75th anniversary, crude oil prices are well above $125 a barrel. How times have changed!
What hasn’t changed is the struggle and sweat to extract this precious resource from deep within the earth. Even now in the Kingdom, the oil business needs men willing to go out into the desert and drill. Work only stops when the temperature reaches 50 degrees C. While the price of oil is published every day, not much has been written about the early days in the quest for Saudi crude and the beginnings of Saudi Aramco.
“Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil” by Wallace Stegner provides insight into those events. Stegner is better known as the Pulitzer Prize winning author of “Angle of Repose.” However, he wrote more than 30 other books over a 50-year career, and one of them was “Discovery!” Unlike his other titles, Stegner didn’t write “Discovery” as a passionate endeavor. Rather, the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) commissioned Stegner to pen an “approved” history of oil exploration in the Kingdom, including the role played by Aramco in the quest for crude.
Stegner traveled to Saudi Arabia to do his research and then he returned to the US to write the book. He completed the assignment quickly and sent a draft of “Discovery!” to Aramco’s New York office in March 1956. It was not well received. In his manuscript Stegner highlighted some points that made Aramco very uncomfortable and the company insisted on changes. After years of haggling over the revisions, in March 1959, with the concurrence of other executives, Thomas C. Barger, already a senior executive in Aramco and eventually Aramco’s CEO, decided to shelve the project.
And so the manuscript sat for years until it was published in installments with Stegner’s agreement — first in Aramco World magazine and later the installments were grouped as chapters in a paperback printed in Beirut. In the published volume, Aramco removed the commentary it found to be painful and Stegner wrote a new introduction for the book. The publication was not widely distributed and faded from notice until Timothy J. Barger, publisher, Selwa Press, began to push for its resurrection.
“Successfully publishing a book depends on content, design and distribution,” said Barger. “Since 1999 when my late wife, Sydney, and I established Selwa Press, we had considered trying to publish “Discovery!” someday. Finally in 2005 I approached Saudi Aramco for permission to license the book for a US edition. Since this was a rather unusual request for the company, the complete licensing process took more than a year. Meanwhile, over the years I had been in touch with Tom Dreyfus whose father, Felix, was one of the first 10 oilmen in the Kingdom and an avid photographer, and I redoubled my efforts to see his pictures from the mid-1930s. When this collection arrived, I knew that I had the makings of a terrific book.”
The American edition of “Discovery!” is a hard cover book that contains all the text published in the Beirut edition plus a foreword by Thomas W. Lippman, 16 pages of black-and-white photographs from the era and a complete index. From the King and his royal court, to the desert guides, scientists and mechanics who built the original Saudi oil company, the difficult circumstances in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s and 1940s are brought vividly to life through Stegner’s words.
“Wallace Stegner was a great American author with a devoted following and great name recognition. In “Discovery!” I saw a rare opportunity to reach a very large segment of readers who wouldn’t necessarily want to read about Saudi Arabia, but would definitely want to read a hitherto unknown book by Stegner — and in the process they would learn about the Kingdom and the birth of Aramco,”commented Barger. “Thankfully with the help of Stegner’s reputation and the PMA, a national organization of small press publishers, I was able to obtain an excellent distributor and the book is now available in bookstores across the USA and on-line. “Discovery!” has even made it to the Kingdom in Jarir Bookstores.”
What would Barger’s father, Thomas, have thought about the publication of the US-edition of the book?
“I’m certain that my dad would be pleased with this new edition of the book, especially with the addition of the photographs. More importantly, I think he would have been especially delighted that now this history of those early days is available in America,” said Barger. “My father met King Abdul Aziz on many occasions beginning in Ma’aqala in April 1939 and personally knew almost all of the other Saudis and the Americans written about in “Discovery!” He enthusiastically provided Stegner with dozens of letters that he had written to his own father, for background material. When the project was finished, Stegner wrote to my grandfather, ‘These letters have proved to be the richest and most detailed sets of documents from the early days in Arabia, and I should have been lost without them.’”
According to Barger, who has read Stegner’s original manuscript, the US-edition of “Discovery!” contains about 95 percent of what Stegner initially wrote in 1956. Barger observed that the material which was removed by Aramco has actually been presented in other books — not commissioned by the company.
“Ultimately, “Discovery!” is a historical account of people from two very different societies working together across cultures for their mutual benefit — and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams,” the publisher remarked. “It is an example that may well be worth emulating in these troubled times.”
