While living in Pawnee, Austin and three other men formed the Pawnee Four, an improvisational musical quartet. The group performed at banquets, political events, and other events featuring speakers. Austin would quickly write poems using material from the speeches, most often lampooning them. The quartet would then sing and harmonize using Austin's lyrics. In the 1930s, the Pawnee Four performed at numerous events alongside Governor Henry Horner. At a Jackson Day event in Springfield in 1936, the quartet performed a song called "Be It Resolved" that largely praised the governor but also poked fun at his unmarried status, urging him to "pick out a handsome old maid and get himself a wife." The performance made such an impression on Horner that he declared his intention to make Austin Illinois's first poet laureate. He carried out this promise soon after, presenting Austin with the declaration on January 14, 1936. Austin continued to write poems for performance, and as he grew older, increasingly, for private purposes or circulation within his family. Many of these private poems dealt with patriotic themes and drew on his wartime experience. Other themes included his family, current events, and religious reflection. According to his family, he typically wrote these poems in the same way that he wrote his verse for performance: impromptu and rarely edited. Howard Austin never affiliated himself with literary circles and never published any of his writing. His work was "poetry of the moment" quite different from the more polished poetry for publication characteristic of his successors as Poet Laureate.
Later life and legacy
In 1962, Governor Otto Kerner named Carl Sandberg to be Illinois's new poet laureate. One month later, Austin, a lifelong cigar smoker, died of lung cancer in his home in Springfield. Governor Kerner was evidently unaware that Austin had been granted the honor years before; he believed that Sandberg was the state's first poet laureate. The Illinois State Journal published an article the next day to correct the governor and highlight Austin and his poetry. In 2000, following the death of Sandberg's successor as laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, Austin was still forgotten in press reports and the state government website, prompting another feature in the same newspaper. By 2003, when a Governor's Illinois Poet Laureate Review Committee was established to regularize the position, Austin's name was restored in official reports as the first in the state.
