Background

John Phillips Marquand was born on November 10, 1893 in Wilmington, Delaware. He was the son of Philip Marquand, a civil engineer, and Margaret Fuller, the great-niece and namesake of the renowned transcendentalist. At the turn of the century the family moved to New York City, where Philip Marquand was set up in the bond business by his Newburyport, Massachussets, banker father, but was wiped out in the panic of 1907. In this crisis, Philip took an engineering job on the Panama Canal, while John was sent to Curzon's Mill, the family homestead outside of Newburyport to be brought up, as a poor relation, by two unmarried Marquand aunts.

Education

He attended Newburyport High School and entered Harvard College with the class of 1915. Because of financial pressure he earned the A. B. in only three years.

Career

After his graduation he became a reporter on the Boston Evening Transcript. Having joined the Massachusetts National Guard, he spent three months as a private on the Mexican border in 1916 and the following year went to training camp at Plattsburg, N. Y. , where he was commissioned a first lieutenant. After serving creditably in France as an artilleryman, he worked on the New York Tribune in 1919-1920 and as a copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency before turning to fiction in 1921. Marquand's first effort was a cloak-and-dagger novel, The Unspeakable Gentleman, set in early nineteenth-century Newburyport. In 1921 it was bought for serialization by the Ladies' Home Journal for $2, 000, a sum that seemed immense after his weekly paycheck of $60 from advertising. A year later the book was published by Scribner's. The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan were soon competing for Marquand's short stories. He aimed at the popular market, which he captured over the next fifteen years with highly successful stories and half a dozen novels. Mr. Moto, the inscrutable Japanese detective of his spy thriller series, is the best remembered character.

Having achieved great popularity in writing for magazines of national circulation, Marquand in his forties found even greater success in serious literary creation. In the twenty-fifth report of the Harvard class of 1915 he wrote: "In 1936 I wrote a novel called The Late George Apley. When I showed it to my literary agent, his manner became sad and gentle. He passed it without comment to the lady who was his novel expert, and a day later she called me into her early American pine sanctum. She said she had always thought I might write a 'serious novel' some day, and now after all these years, what had I produced? A humorless fantasy. All that she could suggest, she said, was to put it away and to forget it as quickly as possible. It was published in 1937. In 1938 it won the Pulitzer Prize. " The instant success of this subtle, half-affectionate satire of the Boston he had known paved the way for some dozen novels, which would satirize other aspects of American life in the next twenty years. Apart from his highly accurate recollection of speech and choice of details, Marquand's most noteworthy literary device was his use of the flashback. The whole of his last book, Timothy Dexter Revisited, consists of a flashback to the Newburyport eccentric whose life had, thirty-five years earlier, inspired Marquand's only venture in biography, Lord Timothy Dexter of Newburyport, Massachussets (1925). Next to The Late George Apley, Point of No Return (1949), Melville Goodwin, USA (1951), Thirty Years (1954), and Sincerely, Willis Wayde (1955) are considered to be some of his strongest works. The trade sales of most of Marquand's later novels ran into six figures, while Philip Hamburger calculated in 1952 that book club and cheap editions had accounted for nearly four million copies. Unfortunately Marquand had greater success in shaping the lives of his characters than his own.

Achievements

• John Phillips Marquand is best known for his satirical novels. He won a Pulitzer Prize for The Late George Apley in 1938. One of his abiding themes was the confining nature of life in America's upper class and among those who aspired to join it. Marquand treated those whose lives were bound by these unwritten codes with a characteristic mix of respect and satire.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Unspeakable Gentleman

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • The Black Cargo

    (One of Marquand's earliest novels about Charles Jervaile,...)

  • El general Goodwin

    (Buenos Aires. 20 cm. 512 p., 1 h. Encuadernación en tapa ...)

  • El difunto George Apley

    (Barcelona. 20 cm. 284 p., 2 h. Encuadernación en tapa dur...)

  • Objetivo: Tokio

    (Barcelona. 1964. Planeta. 19x14. 328p.)

  • La rebelde

    (Barcelona. 20 cm. 366 p., 3 h. grab. Encuadernación en ta...)

  • Las mujeres y Thomas Harrow

    (Barcelona. 20 cm. 507 p., 2 h. Encuadernación en tapa dur...)

  • Thank you, Mister Moto

    (245pages. poche. Broché.)

  • El tiempo vuela

    (Madrid. 16 cm. 587 p., 2 h., 1 lam. Encuadernación en tap...)

  • Sankyu misuta moto.
  • Sincerely, Willis Wayde Signed by Author
  • Federalist Newburyport or Can Historical Fiction Remove a Fly from Amber?
  • Polly Fulton

Personality

In 1935 Marquand bought an old house on Kent's Island, a peninsula jutting into the marshes of the Parker River in Newbury. This he regarded as home for the rest of his life. Marquand's power of mimicry, his gift for reproducing characteristic turns of speech with literal exactness, made him in conversation a superlative storyteller. With The Late George Apley, he clearly demonstrated his ability to transpose the spoken word to paper. He was thus able to abandon his commercial adventure stories for studies of places and people in which plot was subordinated to the presentation of human foibles. Also, in spite of his phenomenal success, the memory of his childhood as a poor relation in Newburyport haunted Marquand; this type of preoccupation was shared by many of his characters. Although he lived for long periods in Boston and New York, traveled extensively around the world, and dearly loved China, John Marquand nearly always set off in a novel from his Newburyport doorstep. The original doorstep not having been as high as his heart's desire, what a springboard he made of it! It was one of the paradoxes of his being that, having labored conscientiously and achieved a nationwide reputation, Marquand remained an Essex County man to the last and rather an uneasy one at that. He was so diffident and delicately sensitive that at one moment his friends would marvel at his insight into them and their kind, and at the next instant they would be moved to wonder that John Marquand could seem so little at home with himself. But Essex County by tradition and experience and long-gathered affection was the true end of his journeys. It was there, at his home on Kent's Island, Newbury, that he died in his sleep of a heart attack.

Connections

On September 8, 1922, Marquand married Christina D. Sedgwick in Stockbridge, Massachussets They had two children and lived in Boston until their divorce in 1935. He married Adelaide F. Hooker in New York on April 17, 1937. They had two children but were divorced in 1958.

Father:

Philip Marquand

1867 - 14 February 1954

Mother:

Margaret Fuller Marquand

27 January 1867 - 7 May 1932

Wife:

Christina D. Sedgwick

Wife:

Adelaide Hooker Marquand

1903 - 1963

References

• John P. Marquand (Twayne's United States Authors Series, No. 4533)
• J.P. Marquand, Esquire