Background

George Constable was born about 1941.

Career

George Constable started his career in the late 1960s. Within three years, he published three novels which were very successful. The first two, ‘All the Abandoned Children’ (1967) and ‘The Imaginocrats’ (1968) were surrealistic comedies. The stories received primary good reviews from critics.

‘All the Abandoned Children’ told about a suburban neighborhood which eccentric inhabitants heard imaginary voices, listened to clandestine radio or occupied a secret treehouse-control room. In the second one, Constable went further toward fantasy, with an adventure plot about outlandish media types who did such things as inventing televised forms of vicarious experience, and giving speaking roles to the president heads on Mount Rushmore.

Constable’s third novel, ‘What Shy Men Dream’, published in 1969, consisting of 124 pages, was his shortest. It presented John, a workaholic advertising copywriter who was radically empty of soul, and who, upon visiting his new country house, suffered a breakdown and then struggled toward an understanding of nature and of human love.

After his first three novels, George Constable spent some time working in association with Time-Life books. He provided with text a couple of juvenile picture books, ‘The Warrior Knights’ and ‘The Whale Hunters’ (both 1969), and ‘The Neanderthals’ volume of 1973 from the Emergence of Man series. His 1978 ‘The Classic Boat’ was positively reviewed by Eliot Fremont-Smith in the Village Voice. A later nonfiction book was ‘The XI, XII & XIII Olympiads: Berlin 1936, St. Moritz 1948’, which appeared in 1996.

One of the latest projects on which Constable worked on in collaboration with other authors, including Bob Somerville, Bill Gates and National Academy of Sciences, was a book ‘A Century of Innovation: Twenty Engineering Achievements that Transformed our Lives’ issued in 2003.

Achievements

• George Constable is an accomplished writer who authored eleven books featuring such topics as prehistoric humans and modern Olympic Games.
  
  Constable contributed to Time-Life Books and Discovery Books producing several volumes about spaceflight, computers, health, and the environment.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Where You Are

    (After the death of his elderly aunt, Lake Stevenson finds...)

    1997
  • A Century of Innovation: Twenty Engineering Achievements that Transformed our Lives

    (More than a simple tally of engineering achievements, the...)

    2003
  • The XI, XII & XIII Olympiads: Berlin 1936, St. Moritz 1948

    (Offers the historical and political background for three ...)

    1996
  • The Neanderthals

    (A book created by George Constable in collaboration with ...)

    1973
  • The Classic Boat

    (A book created by George Constable in collaboration with ...)

    1978
  • The Warrior Knights

    (George Constable wrote the text for this picture book by ...)

    1969
  • The Whale Hunters

    (George Constable wrote the text for this picture book by ...)

    1969
  • All the Abandoned Children 1967
  • The Imaginocrats 1968
  • What Shy Men Dream 1969

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "There is a vein of misanthropy in Mr. Constable’s dark imaginings, and a brilliantly fluid style that gives his suburban limbo the aspect of a nuttier Oz." Martin Levin, writer, critic and book reviewer
  
  "[All the Abandoned Children] fascinate ... [those] who are looking for something fresh, different, and original." Publishers Weekly reviewer
  
  "Constable’s talent is such that you never really know whether this short novel [What Shy Men Dream] is a gigantic put-on or a deadly serious melodrama of a man struggling with his cold fish of a soul." Joel Lieber, novelist