Thirty years ago, when he first moved to the Chesapeake Bay region, he thought professional writing was something he'd like to try.
Then, as now, he crafted his prose painstakingly, using pencil and pad, scissors and tape, relying on a typist to order the final product.
One of his first efforts, a piece from hard-won experience raising his own six kids, was on "how to be a pop in the counter-culture '60s."
But slow writer that he was, "by the time I finished, the '60s were over. It was never published," says Willie Warner.
By 1966, however, he already was hard at work on the book that would change his life, though at the time he didn't suspect even the book, let alone the acclaim it would win.
He just was exploring the bay's nether, marshy regions in a little ketch during time away from his job at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
He would dock in places like Smith Island, Deal Island, Tangier, Hoopers. A sailboater putting into such places still was remarkable in those days, he recalls.
It was the types of names for the local watermen's various boats that first intrigued him -- "draketails," "Jenkins Creekers," "bar cats" -- and led to his famous inquiry into their owners' pursuit of Callinectes sapidus, literally the beautiful, savory swimmer, the Chesapeake blue crab.
By the early 1970s, William W. Warner's interest would translate into a trial essay, based on a long day spent with Grant Corbin, a Deal Island crab potter.
Consider a book, said a New York publisher who saw the piece. Warner mailed a couple more chapters. A contract came back. That was around 1974.
In 1976, full manuscript in hand, the publisher sent galley proofs to a friend on the Chesapeake for his opinion of the book.
He liked it -- thought it the best nonfiction ever published about the bay -- the writer John Barth reported back. But Barth cautioned that it would likely not have appeal outside of a narrow, regional market.
National best seller
Within a couple years of publication in 1976, of course, "Beautiful Swimmers" had become a national nonfiction best seller and had won the Pulitzer Prize and a Phi Beta Kappa award for science interpretation.
It was a rare combination: prose elegant enough to take nonfiction into the province of literature and packed with enough well-researched fact to make it a biological and historical resource on the bay.
A federal judge in Virginia once accepted it as expert testimony in a trial involving a dispute between Maryland and Virginia over crabbing rights.
With something like 270,000 copies now in print and sales still strong, "Beautiful Swimmers" is established firmly as the national classic about the bay. (James Michener's fictional "Chesapeake" has sold far more copies, but could, I suspect, have been titled "Patapsco" and sold about as well.)
Meanwhile, Willie Warner personally has had less of the regional celebrity than one might have supposed, given the huge growth of interest in the bay that has occurred in the past two decades.
It is not that he is reclusive, having served as a trustee of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and testified before the Maryland legislature on behalf of restoring the bay to health.
But he is a cosmopolitan man of varied career interests -- Princeton graduate, foreign service officer in Latin America, executive secretary of John Kennedy's Peace Corps -- and as private as he is gracious.
After "Beautiful Swimmers," he sought larger waters, immersing himself for close to six years in a book that never came close to repeating his first success. Many people, I among them, thought Warner's "Distant Water" was fully as good an effort as "Beautiful Swimmers," though it is now out of print, having sold about 35,000 copies.
It was a riveting story, told from the decks of the global, high-tech fishing fleet that by the early 1980s threatened even the farthest oceans with over-harvest.
Warner, writing full time by then from his home in the Foxhall Road section of Washington, would embark next on a lengthy project, whose publication this fall marks a departure from his previous themes.
Around 1982 the author, raised "nominally Episcopalian," converted to Catholicism. (Asked why, he demurs: "Oh, no one is interested in my personal odysseys.")
A couple years later, he talked with his pastor at Holy Trinity Church about doing a small history for the parish's bicentennial.
Warner's favor to his church soon expanded into a book that would occupy him "full blast" for eight years. He began to come across names in his research of Washington's early Catholic community -- Brooke, Semmes, Sewell, Lee -- that dated back to the Ark and the Dove.
These were prominent families. They owned large tracts of land where the District of Columbia lies now. They were architects, builders, financiers.
Catholics helped shape D.C.
And so the book, "At Peace With All Their Neighbors," grew into a full-fledged historical account of the large and largely undocumented role of Catholics in the shaping of the nation's capital.
Not surprising to anyone who has savored his earlier two works, this latest effort is getting critical acclaim for its prose style and research.
So at age 74, what now?
He tries to write every morning for four or five hours. The short nature essays he's doing now seem like therapy after his excursion into historical research, he says.
A piece on barrier islands is to be published this year in an anthology of nature writing; a piece on dinosaur digs is in the works; and a longer piece, maybe a book, on the ecology and history of the Dry Tortugas has beckoned to him for a long time.
As for the Chesapeake, "I pretty much felt [with "Beautiful Swimmers"] I'd done what I wanted to do there," he says. He still keeps in touch, exchanging Christmas cards and phone calls with the watermen he wrote about, such as Lester Lee and
Morris Goodwin Marsh. He still sails, but on other people's boats -- "much more affordable."
In a new Afterword, published in the latest (1994) reprint of "Beautiful Swimmers," Warner sees danger signs aplenty for the fate of Chesapeake watermen -- oysters down, shad scarce, the blue crab stressed to its limit and the bottom grasses far below historical abundance.
The problem, he writes, is people. The 1988 population density of coastal counties in the lower 48 states was more than four times the density for the nation as a whole.
Good, bad signs
People love the water's edge. Flocking there, they often pressure out all the creatures that also find the living best there.
But striped bass are back, conservation seems to have gained a foothold in the crabbing industry and farmers are moving toward controlling their pollution. He is not naive about the problems, Warner says. Yet he remains impressed by the bay's natural resilience.
But the time has long passed, he adds, when the bay can come back without a lot of help from the people around it. Their numbers, and their potential for both helping and harming, grow every day.