John P. Marquand

John Phillips Marquand (November 10, 1893 – July 16, 1960) was an American writer.

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.

While he was a student at Harvard, Marquand joined Battery A of the Massachusetts National Guard, which, in 1916, was activated.

In July 1916, Marquand was sent to the Mexican border.

Later, like many of his classmates, he served in the First World War, seeing action in France.

Marquand's life and work reflected his ambivalence about American society — and, in particular, the power of its old-line elites.

Being rebuffed by fashionable Harvard did not discourage his social aspirations.

In 1922, he married Christina Sedgwick, niece of The Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick.

He married Christina Sedgwick in 1922, and they had two children: son John Jr and a daughter Christina Jr. Marquand and Sedgwick divorced in 1935.

The following year, Marquand married Adelaide Ferry Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker.

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).

By the mid-1930s he was a prolific and successful writer of fiction for slick magazines like the Saturday Evening Post.

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).

These would later be characterized by Marquand as "costume fiction", to which he stated that an author "can only approximate provided he has been steeped in the tradition".

Marquand had abandoned "costume fiction" by the mid-1930s.

In the late 1930s, Marquand began producing a series of novels on the dilemmas of class.

Most centered on New England, and some were at least partially set in Clyde, Massachusetts, a fictional seaside community based strongly on Marquand's Newburyport.

The first of these novels, The Late George Apley (1937), a satire of Boston's upper class, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1938.

Originally best known for his Mr. Moto spy stories, he achieved popular success and critical respect for his satirical novels, winning 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.

Marquand was the son of Philip Marquand and his wife Margaret née Fuller.

Other Marquand novels exploring New England and class themes include Wickford Point (1939), H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), and Point of No Return (1949).

The last is especially notable for its satirical portrayal of Harvard anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, whose Yankee City study attempted (and in Marquand's view, dismally failed) to describe and analyze the manners and mores of Newburyport.

Marquand was a part-time war correspondent during World War II.

The war's huge effect on American individuals and families is often an element in his later novels.

Several characters in these novels are motivated by a sense of duty to aid the war effort, though they are past draft age and even unsure of the value of their contribution.

For all of his ambivalence about America's elite, Marquand ultimately succeeded not only in joining it, but in embodying its characteristics.

He forgave the upper crust classmates who had snubbed him in college (relationships he satirized in H.M. Pulham, Esq and The Late George Apley).

He was invited to join all the right social clubs in Boston (Tavern, Somerset) and New York (Century Association, University).

Through his second marriage to Adelaide Ferry Hooker, he became linked to the Rockefeller family (her sister, Blanchette, was married to John D. Rockefeller III).

He maintained luxury homes in Newburyport and in the Caribbean.

Marquand was married twice and had five children.

His mother was a great-niece of 19th-century transcendentalist and feminist Margaret Fuller.

Marquand was also a cousin of Buckminster Fuller.

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, he grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where his forebears had lived.

There he was raised by his three maiden aunts, while his parents lived in a number of other cities as his father pursued his career.

Marquand attended Newburyport High School where he won a scholarship that enabled him to attend Harvard College.

His family had a long Harvard tradition, but as an impecunious public school graduate in the heyday of Harvard's Gold Coast, he was an unclubbable outsider.

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.