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James Mellow

Born: Gloucester, Massachusetts
Died: 1997

Pen Name: James R. Mellow

Connection to Illinois: Mellow graduated from Northwestern University in 1950.

Biography: James R. Mellow was a writer, editor, art critic, and acclaimed biographer. He wrote a sequence of books that detailed the study of a major episode in American cultural history - ''Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company'', ''Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald'', and ''Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences''. His biography of Nathanial Hawthorne, won the National Book Award in 1983. Mellow also wrote for ''The New York Times'', ''Architectural Digest'', ''The Washington Post'', ''Gourmet'', and ''Arts'' magazine, among other publications. Before his death in 1997, James Mellow had one unfinished manuscript on the life of American photographer Walker Evans which was published posthumously.


Awards:
  • American Book Award and Guggenheim fellowship in 1983 for ''Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times''

James Mellow on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=james+mellow


Selected Titles

Charmed circle :
ISBN: 0805073515 OCLC: 52479246

Henry Holt and Co., New York : 2003.

  Charmed circle :
ISBN: 0786109041 OCLC: 34054217

Blackstone Audio, Ashland, OR : ℗1995, ©1974.

Through the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein passed the luminous talents of an era: Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse, Cocteau, Fitzgerald, Apollinaire. With her devoted friend, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein presided over a table heavy with good food and alive with sparkling conversation. In 'Charmed circle', James R. Mellow has re-created this glorious world and the fascinating woman who dominated it. His compelling narrative is rich with insight into both Stein's celebrated career as a writer and her enduring relationship with Toklas. Spanning the years from 1903, when she first went to Paris, to her last days at the close of World War II, this is a penetrating and lively picture of this literary giant and her exciting times--Container.

Hemingway :
ISBN: 0201626209 OCLC: 28414534

Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass. : 1994.

Invented lives :
ISBN: 0345329120 OCLC: 13346447

Ballantine, New York : 1986, ©1984.

Nathaniel Hawthorne in his times
ISBN: 080185900X OCLC: 38239149

Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md. : 1998.

Winner of the 1983 National Book Award, James R. Mellow's biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne places this great American writer in the midst of the literary and cultural turmoil of the early republic. Mellow draws on Hawthorne's letters and notebooks, as well as on perceptive readings of his fiction, in recreating the details of Hawthorne's life: the long apprenticeship of the reclusive young author, his romantic courtship of Sophia Peabody, and his travels to Europe at the height of his literary career. More fascinating still is Mellow's portrayal of Hawthorne's stimulating, complicated relationships with his fellow pioneers in the creation of a uniquely American literature - Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott. Hawthorne was also a life-long friend of President Franklin Pierce, and Mellow follows the fortunes of Hawthorne's political career, which brought the writer into contact with the era's great politicians - Daniel Webster, William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, Abraham Lincoln. A panorama of nineteenth-century American intellectual life, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times convincingly traces Hawthorne's literary concerns - the unspeakable secret guilt, the fall of man, the yearning for a lost paradise - to the events of his enigmatic life.--Jacket.

Nathaniel Hawthorne in his times /
ISBN: 0395276020 OCLC: 6331361

Houghton Mifflin, Boston : 1980.

Shows us America's first great writer and his contemporaries as living, breathing people.

Walker Evans
ISBN: 1903985137 OCLC: 41409127

Basic Books, New York, NY : ©1999.

With unrestricted access to all of Evans's diaries, letters, work logs and contact sheets, as well as to the diaries of Lincoln Kirstein, the author provides a biography of the photographer known for Depression Era photographs of Alabama sharecroppers, as well as a chronicle of the art of our time.--Jacket.

 

 

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