Background
Ben Ray Redman was born on Feburary 21, 1896 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Walter Herman Redman, a lumber importer-exporter, and of Violet Platt.
https://www.amazon.com/Selected-Western-Stories-Poems-Harte/dp/1258278111?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1258278111
Ben Ray Redman was born on Feburary 21, 1896 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Walter Herman Redman, a lumber importer-exporter, and of Violet Platt.
He was educated at the New York Military Academy and the Pawling School before entering Columbia University in 1914. In 1915 Redman abandoned his studies to enlist in the British army. He received training in Desoranto, Canada, and in Scotland.
Commissioned in 1917 as first lieutenant, he served until 1919 with the Royal Flying Corps as a scout pilot attached to the Seventy-ninth Squadron of the British Expeditionary Forces assigned to Ypres, Belgium. On one mission behind the German lines, Redman's plane was damaged by enemy fire. He made it back and crash-landed but not without some injury: he retained a scar above his lip. Redman's air exploits formed the basis for one of his earliest fictional works, Down in Flames (1930), a set of war stories. After the war Redman returned to New York City to begin his career.
From the start Redman was involved in all aspects of the writer's trade. From 1922 to 1929, he was literary editor of the Spur. In 1923, he was the managing editor of Travel and from 1924 to 1926 was editorial and advertising manager for G. P. Putnam and Sons.
The mainstay of his output always lay in his reviews, which represent a substantial body of work. The first ones appeared in "Old Wine in New Bottles, " a regular column edited by Redman, 1926-1937, in the Sunday edition of the New York Herald Tribune, which reviewed new editions of established literary works. Redman's most noteworthy association was with the Saturday Review of Literature.
He was close to the magazine's founders, who began publishing his reviews in 1925, shortly after the magazine's inception. The last one appeared only two months before his death. In the mid-1930's Redman moved to Los Angeles. The move enabled his wife to pursue her acting career in motion pictures.
For a time, he also worked with the cinema, from 1936 to 1938 as executive assistant to Charles R. Rogers of Universal Pictures, and again in 1942 as a scenario writer for 20th Century-Fox. One script from this period was School for Saboteurs, written in collaboration with Michael Jacoby. But Redman's association with the movie industry was not very satisfactory.
He felt unhappy, according to his sister, because of the low level of work demanded of him. Besides his reviews and relatively unsuccessful script writing, Redman engaged in practically every conceivable form of free-lance writing. He composed short stories, a volume of poetry entitled Masquerade (1923), as well as a number of poems for magazines and anthologies. He also wrote several book-length mysteries, including The Bannerman Case (1935) and Sixty-Nine Diamonds (1940).
For these books he assumed the pen name Jeremy Lord. Redman wrote much of his fiction for the general reader. He directed his nonfiction works toward a relatively more discriminating audience and at times toward a very specialized one. His several translations, primarily from French but also from Italian, reveal an affinity for European authors.
His book reviews also reflect his interest in continental writers, as does his anthology The Portable Voltaire (1949).
Redman's death was sudden. He suffered in his last years from periods of severe depression. In Hollywood, he became depressed one evening over world problems and took sleeping pills, ending his life.
Redman's greatest contribution was as a reviewer. He was witness to many of the major writers of the first half of the twentieth century, such as T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. That so many of his reviews appeared in the influential Saturday Review, and over a period of more than thirty-five years, suggests the extensive and persistent influence that he exerted on American literary taste. Throughout his life Redman was a prolific and diverse free-lance writer. One of Redman's most ambitious works was his biography of the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1926). Redman's nonfiction, which includes articles published in College English, a small academic journal, suggests that, although he wrote to earn a living, he could be motivated by purely intellectual as well as commercial interests.
Cousins described him as "elegantly mannered and attired, born for a part in a Noel Coward play. "
Norman Cousins, a companion at the Saturday Review, noted that Redman "was in every sense an authentic book man" who "was in the old literary tradition, which is to say, at home most of all in the field of belles lettres. " Redman's dress and deportment were those of a sophisticated literary man.
On March 7, 1923, he married Amabel Jenks. They had no children.
While with Putnam, Redman met Frieda Inescourt, an actress working as publicity director for the house. In 1926 he divorced his wife and on January 31, 1926, married Inescourt. They had no children.
