biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1895–1972)
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| biography:
| Writer and editor, born in Red Bank, New Jersey, USA. He studied at Princeton (1916 BA), and served with the US Army in World War 1. In New York City he became an editor for such periodicals as Vanity Fair (1920–1) and the New Republic (1926–31), and was the regular book reviewer for the New Yorker (1944–8) and thereafter contributed occasional reviews. He wrote a novel, plays, poems, and short stories, but except for a collection of the last named, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), his creative work did not command much attention. Instead, he gained his reputation as the dean of American letters through his erudite and trenchant non-fictional works. As he became interested in various topics, he would learn whatever languages were necessary, and after immersing himself in the subject, he would produce his own original interpretations, such as To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940) and The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955). His major reputation rests on his literary criticism, exhibited in such works as Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931) and Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962). He edited the uncollected works of his Princeton classmate, F Scott Fitzgerald (1954), and wrote countless magazine articles, essays, and reviews. He published two autobiographical works, and after his death a series of memoirs were extracted from his diaries and notebooks. He was married four times, including to Mary McCarthy (1938–46). Based in New York City for much of his life, he also spent parts of each year in Wellfleet, MA and at his family home in upstate New York. |
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