John P. Marquand

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. 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 born in Wilmington, Delaware, and grew up in the New York suburbs. 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'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.)

Marquand attended Newburyport High School, where he won a scholarship that enabled him to attend Harvard College. 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. 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.[2]

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

Mrs. Alexander Sedgwick and Daughter Christina, 1902, by Cecilia Beaux

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. 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”, of which he stated that an author “can only approximate (his characters) provided he has been steeped in the (relevant) tradition”.[3] 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. 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. He married Christina Sedgwick in 1922 with whom he had two children: son John Jr and a daughter Christina Jr. Marquand and Sedgwick divorced in 1935.[4] The following year, Marquand married Adelaide Ferry Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker.[5] They had three children together, two sons and a daughter, before divorcing in 1958.[6]

On July 16, 1960, Marquand died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, of a heart attack in his sleep at the age of 66.[6] He is buried in Sawyer Hill Burying Ground in Newburyport.[7]

Before gaining acclaim for his serious novels, Marquand achieved great popular and commercial success with a series of formulaic spy novels about a Japanese undercover operative called Mr. Moto. Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of the Charlie Chan series of books, died in 1933. The Chan books were serialized in the Saturday Evening Post magazine. The magazine's editors wanted a new Asian sleuth to replace Charlie Chan and offered "a number of authors the chance to go to China in order to soak up atmosphere and learn about the mysterious East firsthand. J. P. Marquand took the trip. The result was the Mr. Moto series."[8]

The first, Your Turn, Mr. Moto appeared in 1935; the last, Right You Are, Mr. Moto, in 1957. The series inspired eight films in the 1930s starring Peter Lorre, but these movies are only very loosely based on the novels.

James S. Koga states that Moto is not a proper Japanese surname (an observation also made by some characters in the Moto novels, who suspect that the name is an alias). Koga notes that "[Mr. Moto] is never the protagonist of the story — rather he appears at strategic points in the story, a catalyst for action." "The typical storyline", he says, "involves an American male, somewhat tarnished by past experiences in the U.S., who finds himself in the Orient ... overwhelmed by the foreignness of Asia. This protagonist gets involved in some international intrigue by happenstance, usually coinciding with meeting Mr. Moto ... falls deeper into the plot and then finds himself in deadly peril. Along the way, he meets an attractive American woman who also becomes entangled, and by resourcefulness (and not a little help from Mr. Moto) overcomes the peril and then gets the girl."

Numerous Marquand novels became Hollywood films, but several bore little resemblance to the books. Mr. Moto, an often ruthless spy in Marquand's novels, became a genial police agent in the Peter Lorre films of the 1930s. The final Mr. Moto novel, in the 1950s, was filmed as a spy story, but Moto's character was eliminated.

Marquand's 1951 novel, Melville Goodwin, USA, was adapted into the 1957 film Top-Secret Affair, starring Susan Hayward and Kirk Douglas. The book was a satire about publicists trying to cover up a general's adultery, but the movie writers transformed the general into a bachelor. According to Marquand's biographers, he took such Hollywood liberties in stride.

In his later years, Marquand contributed an occasional satiric short story to Sports Illustrated. A collection was later published as a book, with the title Life at Happy Knoll. The stories humorously dealt with the problems of an "old-line" country club as it tried to adjust to changing times and a competing "upstart" country club nearby.

John Phillips Marquand, Jr. (1924 - 1995) followed in his father's footsteps, using the pseudonym John Phillips, with the best-selling 1953 novel The Second Happiest Day.[9] [10]

Mr Moto novels

• No Hero. Boston, Little Brown, 1935; as Mr. Moto Takes a Hand, London, Hale, 1940; as Your Turn, Mr. Moto, New York, Berkley, 1963.
• Thank You, Mr. Moto. Boston, Little Brown, 1936; London, Jenkins, 1937.
• Think Fast, Mr. Moto. Boston, Little Brown, 1937; London, Hale, 1938.
• Mr. Moto Is So Sorry. Boston, Little Brown, 1938; London, Hale, 1939.
• Last Laugh, Mr. Moto. Boston, Little Brown, 1942; London, Hale, 1943.
• Stopover Tokyo. Boston, Little Brown, and London, Collins, 1957; as The Last of Mr. Moto, New York, Berkley, 1963; as Right You Are, Mr. Moto, New York, Popular Library, 1977.

Other crime novels

• Ming Yellow. Boston, Little Brown, and London, Lovat Dickson, 1935.
• Don't Ask Questions. London, Hale, 1941.
• It's Loaded, Mr. Bauer. London, Hale, 1949.

Literary novels

• The Unspeakable Gentleman. New York, Scribner, and London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1922.
• The Black Cargo. New York, Scribner, and London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1925.
• Warning Hill. Boston, Little Brown, 1930.
• The Late George Apley. Boston, Little Brown, 1937.
• Wickford Point. Boston, Little Brown, 1939.
• H.M. Pulham, Esquire. Boston, Little Brown, and London, Hale, 1942.
• So Little Time. Boston, Little Brown, 1943; London, Hale, 1944.
• Repent in Haste. Boston, Little Brown, 1945.
• B.F.'s Daughter. Boston, Little Brown, 1946; as Polly Fulton, London, Hale, 1947.
• Point of No Return. Boston, Little Brown, and London, Hale, 1949.
• Melville Goodwin, USA. Boston, Little Brown, 1951; London, Hale, 1952.
• Sincerely, Willis Wayde. Boston, Little Brown, and London, Hale, 1955.
• Women and Thomas Harrow. Boston, Little Brown, 1958 ; London, Collins, 1959.

The Late George Apley, Wickford Point; H.M. Pulham, Esquire; So Little Time; Repent in Haste and B.F.'s Daughter were published as Armed Services Editions during WWII.

Collections of short stories[11]

• Four of a Kind, 1923.
• Haven's End. Boston, Little Brown, 1933; London, Hale, 1938.
• Thirty Years, 1954.
• Life at Happy Knoll, 1957.

• Stephen Birmingham, The Late John Marquand: A Biography, J. B. Lippincott Company 1972.
• Millicent Bell, Marquand: An American Life, Little, Brown and Company, 1979.

• Works by John Phillips Marquand at Project Gutenberg
• Works by John P. Marquand at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about John P. Marquand at Internet Archive
• The Mr. Moto novels of John P. Marquand, website by James S. Koga.
• Extensive biography on Marquand
• Photos of the first edition of The Late George Apley
• Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of American Literature, Copyright 1996-2007 by the Yale University Library. Guide to the John P. Marquand Collection, YCAL MSS 48, by T. Michael Womack, May 1990, Revised: 2010-02-10