#York ycal 0028 series#
In the late 1930s, Marquand began producing a series of novels on the dilemmas of class. Marquand had abandoned “costume fiction” by the mid-1930s. These would later be characterized by Marquand as “costume fiction”, of which he stated that an author “can only approximate (his characters) provided he has been steeped in the (relevant) tradition”. Some of these short stories were of an historical nature as had been Marquand's first two novels ( The Unspeakable Gentleman and The Black Cargo). In 1925, Marquand published his first important book, Lord Timothy Dexter, an exploration of the life and legend of eighteenth-century Newburyport eccentric Timothy Dexter (1763–1806).īy the mid-1930s he was a prolific and successful writer of fiction for slick magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. In 1922, he married Christina Sedgwick, niece of The Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick. Being rebuffed by fashionable Harvard did not discourage his social aspirations. Marquand's life and work reflected his ambivalence about American society - and, in particular, the power of its old-line elites. Alexander Sedgwick and Daughter Christina, 1902, by Cecilia Beaux Later, like many of his classmates, he served in the First World War, seeing action in France. In July 1916, Marquand was sent to the Mexican border. While he was a student at Harvard, Marquand joined Battery A of the Massachusetts National Guard, which, in 1916, was activated. After graduating in 1915, Marquand was hired by The Boston Evening Transcript, working initially as a reporter and later on the Transcript's bi-weekly magazine section. Though turned down by the college newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, Marquand succeeded in being elected to the editorial board of the humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon. As an impecunious public school graduate in the heyday of Harvard's Gold Coast, he was an unclubbable outsider. Marquand attended Newburyport High School, where he won a scholarship that enabled him to attend Harvard College. (Marquand's ancestors had been successful merchants in the Revolutionary period Margaret Fuller and other aunts had been actively involved with the Transcendentalist and abolitionist movements.) When financial reverses broke up the family's comfortable household, he was sent to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he was raised by his eccentric aunts, who lived in a crumbling Federal Period mansion surrounded by remnants of the family's vanished glory. Marquand was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and grew up in the New York suburbs. He was a great-nephew of 19th-century writer Margaret Fuller and a cousin of Buckminster Fuller, who gained fame in the 20th century as the inventor of the geodesic dome. Marquand was the son of Philip Marquand and his wife Margaret née Fuller, he was a scion of the Hoxies, an old Newburyport, Massachusetts, family.
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