Background

Christopher La Farge was born in New York City, the son of the architect C. Grant La Farge and Florence Bayard Lockwood. His grandfather was the painter and glass designer John La Farge, and his younger brother Oliver was the novelist and student of American Indians. Christopher grew up on the family farm near Saunderstown, Rhode Island. Secure in its New England tradition, it was a remarkably energetic and stimulating family.

Education

Christopher attended St. Bernard's School in New York and Groton (Massachussets) School and entered Harvard in 1915. His studies were mainly literary and architectural. He graduated from Harvard with the B. A. in 1920 and took a B. S. from the School of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1923.

Career

During the First World War La Farge took reserve officer's training at Plattsburg, New York, in 1916 and again in 1918, when he was commissioned second lieutenant in the cavalry. After four months he was discharged (December 1918).

La Farge began his career as a designer with the noted New York City firm of McKim, Mead, and White, where he remained from 1924 to 1931. He became a skillful watercolorist, exhibiting his work in New York at the Ferargil Gallery in 1930 and the Wildenstein Gallery in 1931. After his younger brother Oliver became famous for his studies of the Navajo Indians and his novel Laughing Boy (1929), Christopher and his father helped to conceive and set up exhibits at the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts at the Brooklyn Museum in 1931.

That same year he joined his father at La Farge, Warren, and Clark, but the Great Depression soon deprived the firm (now La Farge and Son) of business, and his career as an architect was over. He decided to become a writer.

In 1932 he packed up his family and went to Kent, England, where he began Hoxie Sells His Acres (1934), a novel in verse about a man who upsets his community by planning to cut up his Rhode Island farmland and sell it to summer people for building lots. La Farge explained that his purpose was to "make this a comprehensible form as interesting as the novel in prose and more moving. " He was quickly recognized as an adept chronicler of his region.

He took up residences again in Saunderstown and New York in 1934 and began contributing stories and poems to such magazines as the American, Harper's, and the Saturday Review of Literature. His second novel in verse, Each to the Other (1939), concerned the marital problems of a father and son.

In 1940 he issued a volume of verse, Poems and Portraits, which reviewers found slight. A group of stories about one family published serially in the New Yorker became The Wilsons (1941). His first work of conventional prose fiction, it was described as a "wicked and graceful study of American snobbism. " During World War II, La Farge was active on the War Writers' Board. In 1943 Harper's magazine sent him to the South Pacific as a war correspondent. "His intention, " wrote Newsweek, "was to report the war not with named and dated facts, but deliberately in the form of fiction. " The ten stories of this series became East by Southwest (1944).

His play, Mesa Verde (1945), was conceived and written as an opera libretto. In it La Farge faithfully reproduces Navajo speech and customs, acknowledging a debt "to my brother Oliver, who first in American literature succeeded in writing of the Indian as a human being instead of an inaccurate symbol. "

La Farge's most successful work was The Sudden Guest (1946), another novel in verse. A Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, it sold more than half a million copies. It concerned another Rhode Island landowner, a selfish old woman who recalled the hurricane of 1938 during a similar one in 1944. The "sudden guest" of the title, borrowed from a line in Pushkin, is her awakened conscience.

La Farge published seventeen of his best short stories, with prefatory comments, in All Sorts and Kinds (1949). His last verse novel, Beauty for Ashes (1953), dramatized the effect of a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl on the lives of three men in rural Rhode Island: an architect, a novelist, and a young navy veteran down from Harvard. It was more successful as a narrative than a poem. One reviewer pointed out that its male characters "were but different ages and aspects of the same personality. " That personality was essentially the author's own. He died in Providence.

Achievements

• La Farge was known for writing verse novels that chronicled life in Rhode Island. His work was always autobiographical, but that was not a flaw. Widely admired for his careful craftsmanship and convincing dialogue, frequently criticized for conventionality and lack of a dramatic creative energy, La Farge remains a valuable and interesting writer. He was a subtle analyst of the mores of his Rhode Island world, and from first to last his moral theme remained the responsibility of the single individual to his community. His novel in verse, "Each to the Other" was awarded the Benson Silver medal by the Royal Society of Literature, London. In 2017 he was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Each to the Other: A Novel in Verse (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Each to the Other: A Novel in Verse But th...)

  • Beauty For Ashes

    (A novel in verse the story of four families in in a small...)

  • American Indian Life

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Mesa Verde.

    (Very good hardcover with DJ. THIS IS ONE OF A LIMITED EDI...)

  • FATIGUE A STORY

    (NY 1943. Short Story in Harpers Magazine, October 1943, N...)

  • The Wilsons

    (NY 1941. 8vo., 246pp. VG in Good DJ, minor soiling, a bit...)

  • East By Southwest
  • Poems and portraits.

  • book

  • Hoxie Sells His Acres

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Reviewer William Rose Benét, a friend, said about his novel "Each to the Other": "He wrote it out of the compulsion of his own life. . In the fundamentals, it is his own story. "

Connections

In June, 1923 La Farge married Louisa Ruth Hoar, daughter of Congressman Rockwood Hoar of Massachusetts. They had two children. She died in 1945, and on September 2, 1946, he married Violet Amory Loomis, daughter of Boston stockbroker John Austin Amory. They had one son.

Father:

C. Grant La Farge

Architect

Mother:

Florence Bayard Lockwood

Spouse:

Violet Amory Loomis

Spouse:

Louisa Ruth Hoar

Brother:

Oliver La Farge

Anthropologist, novelist

Grandfather:

John La Farge

Painter, glass designer

Friend:

William Rose Benét

Poet, writer, editor