Background

Gibbs was born on March 9, 1888 in London, England, the son of Henry James Gibbs, a departmental chief of the board of education, and Helen Hamilton.

Education

The youngest member of a large family, Gibbs was sent in 1901 to the College de St. Malo in Brittany. He acquired a command of the language and a knowledge of French life that later served him well as an author. From 1907 to 1909 he studied at St. Johns College, Oxford, where he had been sent by his brother Cosmo Hamilton (Gibbs), playwright and novelist. At Oxford Gibbs wrote for Isis, the varsity paper, and helped start the Tuesday Review, a successful weekly that occasionally printed special articles by well-known contributors. He also rowed on the college crew and was an amateur boxer.

Career

After returning to England in 1905, Gibbs worked with a firm of assayers and refiners of precious metals. Gibbs contributed a series of light satirical sketches that made up his first book, The Compleat Oxford Man (1911). After publishing his first novel, Cheadle and Son (1912), Gibbs came to the United States and Canada to play a small role in his brother Cosmo's play The Blindness of Virtue. He left the play in Chicago and returned to New York City to join his brother, who urged him to resume writing. Gibbs wrote two more novels before World War I - The Hour of Conflict (1913) and The Persistent Lovers (1914). When the war began, Gibbs returned to England, joined the Twenty-first Lancers as a trooper, and fought in Flanders before transferring to the Royal Field Artillery. He was trained in gunnery and then served in the abortive Serbian campaign and in Egypt. He next fought in France, where he was gassed. In 1918 he was discharged with the rank of major. His war experiences were described in Gun Fodder (1919), a realistic, revealing memoir, permeated with bitterness and disillusionment as to the motives for which the war was fought. After the war, Gibbs returned to the United States and married. He became a United States citizen in 1931. He published at least four best-sellers: Soundings (1925), Labels (1926), Harness (1928), and Chances (1930). But scant attention was given to his work by literary critics. Labels, a dramatic story of life in a middle-class English home after World War I, was well wrought and interesting, but was viewed by some as "mediocre. " This reaction was fairly typical of serious critics. Gibbs nevertheless had an easy, rapid, and highly readable style, and he drew effectively, if often with undiluted sentimentality, upon his war experiences and his familiarity with France and French customs. In the novel Way of Life (1947) he sympathetically dealt with the problems of a young American paratrooper and an English girl in World War II. One of his last works, One Touch of France (1953), a creditable book of verse, was a moving memoir of his life in France as student and soldier. His last novel, Obedience to the Moon (1956), was a somewhat tired but warm and fanciful love story. Gibbs's pretensions to lasting literary recognition probably rest more substantially upon his book of World War I memoirs, Gun Fodder, than upon his numerous novels, popular as they were. To the end of his life he was active physically. He was giving a golf lesson at a Lakeville club when he collapsed of a heart attack. He died shortly thereafter in a Boston hospital.

Achievements

• Gibbs wrote 16 novels and two books of poetry, including Soundings (1925), the best-selling book in the United States that year.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Way of Life (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Way of Life He stood still' now in the midd...)

  • Bluebottles

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Labels

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • The Compleat Oxford Man (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Compleat Oxford Man Maiden efforts. Nev...)

  • Rowlandson's Oxford

    (HardPress Classic Books Series)

  • Obedience to the moon

    (Novel set in post-war France.)

  • Harness

    (Clean cover and pages.)

  • Gun Fodder: The diary of four years of war (New Intro, Annotated)

    (He was a born solider. His superiors said so. Men followe...)

  • Soundings

    (Clean, 1926 A. L. Burt Publishing, Hardback, No DJ, Blue ...)

  • One touch of France;: With decorations,

    (A. Hamilton Gibbs may not be much read these days but in ...)

  • The young prince: A fantastic story perhaps
  • The Persistent Lovers
  • Cheadle & Son
  • Rivers glide on,
  • A Half Inch Of Candle
  • Chances,: A novel,
  • Undertow

Personality

Gibbs had a dry British humor, was swarthy, handsome, and of athletic build.

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  Gibbs was an accomplished swimmer, golfer, and tennis player.

Connections

On April 12, 1919 Gibbs married Jeannette Phillips, a lawyer and writer. They had no children. The couple moved to a farm near Lakeville, Massachussets Gibbs liked being a country gentleman and resided for the rest of his life at Lakeville, although he and his wife traveled extensively.

Father:

Henry James Gibbs

Mother:

Helen Hamilton

Spouse:

Jeannette Phillips

Brother:

Sir Philip Armand Hamilton Gibbs

He was an English journalist and prolific author of books who served as one of five official British reporters during the First World War.

Brother:

Henry Charles Hamilton Gibbs

He was an English playwright and novelist.

References

• People worth talking about
• Unwritten history
• Adventures in journalism,