John P. Marquand

John Phillips Marquand (November 10, 1893 - July 16, 1960) was an outstanding twentieth century American novelist. In addition to his well-known Mr. Moto detective series, Marquand wrote a succession of meditative and satirical novels on America's upper class and those who aspired to join it.

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November 10 - 1893 - July 16 - 1960

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Scion of an old Newburyport, Massachusetts family, 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 has been successful merchants in the Revolutionary period; his aunts had been actively involved with the Transcendentalist and Abolitionist movements).

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Wilmington, Delaware - Newburyport, Massachusetts - Transcendentalist - Abolitionist

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Marquand attended Newburyport High School, where he won a scholarship that enabled him to attend Harvard. As an impecunious public school graduate in the heyday of Harvard's "Gold Coast," he was an unclubbable outsider. Though turned down by Harvard's newspaper, the Crimson, Marquand succeeded in being elected to the editorial board of the humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon. He graduated from Harvard University in 1915. Like many of his classmates, he served in the First World War.

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Harvard Lampoon - Harvard University

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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, neice of The Atlantic Monthly editor, Ellery Sedgwick. (The Sedgwicks were a prominent and well-connected family; The Atlantic Monthly was one of the country's most prestigious periodicals). In 1925, Marquand published his first important book, an exploration of the life and legend of eighteenth century Newburyport eccentric, Timothy Dexter (1763-1806).

Related Topics:
The Atlantic Monthly - Timothy Dexter

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A prolific and successful writer of fiction for slick magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, in the mid-1930s, Marquand began producing a series of novels on the dilemmas of class, most centered on New England. The first of these, "The Late George Apley," a satire of Boston's upper class, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction 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 latter 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 Marquand's Newburyport.

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Saturday Evening Post - W. Lloyd Warner

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Marquand achieved great popular and commercial success with a series of entertaining, formulaic detective novels about the fictional Mr. Moto. The first, Your Turn, Mr. Moto appeared in 1935; the last, Right You Are, Mr. Moto in 1957. The series inspired eight films, starring Peter Lorre, which are only very loosely based on the novels. James S. Koga states that Moto is not a proper Japanese surname. He notes that " is never the main 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."

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Mr. Moto - Peter Lorre

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For all of his ambivalence about America's class system, Marquand ultimately succeeded not only in joining it, but in embodying its characteristics. He became friendly with the upper crust classmates who had snubbed him in college (relationships he satirized in H.M. Pulham, Esq.]. He was invited to join all the right Boston (Tavern, Somerset) and New York (Century Association, University) clubs. Through his second marriage to Adelaide Ferry Hooker, he became linked to the Rockefeller family (her sister, Blanchette, was married to John D. Rockefeller 3rd). He maintained luxury homes in Newburyport and in the Caribbean.

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Marquand died in 1960. Although his major work is largely out-of-print, his detective fiction remains in print. Like his contemporary John O'Hara, Marquand addressed issue of privilege and inequality that make Americans generally uncomfortable and left-leaning academic literary critics (most of whom are themselves insecure socially) scornful and dismissive. Marquand's financial success and seeming veneration for the upper classes, like O'Hara's, was sufficient to cause academia to ignore him. Marquand was unsparing in his own scorn for academics, notably in "Point of No Return" (in which he lampoons anthropologist Warner) and "Wickford Point (in which he mocks a prominent member of Harvard's English Department).

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No one who really knows the region "East of Grand Central" which Marquand so powerfully and movingly evokes (as O'Hara evokes the Pennsylania coal region and New York cafe society) can fail to consider him a major literary voice. Although currently in eclipse (as was Herman Melville until literary critics rediscovered him in the 1920s), Marquand's reputation may be poised for a revival.

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Jonathan Yardley, in a 2003 Washington Post column entitled "Zinging WASPs With a Smooth Sting"http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32907-2003Feb19 says Marquand's contemporaries "found satires of that world both hilarious and accurate, and so do I. That Marquand has almost vanished from the literary landscape is to me an unfathomable mystery. From ... 1937 ... until 1960, Marquand was one of the most popular novelists in the country. The literati turned up their noses at him (as they do to this day) because he had done a fair amount of hackwork in his early career and continued to write, unashamedly, for popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post."

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2003 - Washington Post

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Critic Martha Spaulding, writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 2004, noted that "in his day Marquand was compared to Sinclair Lewis and John O'Hara, and his social portrait of twentieth-century America was likened to Balzac's Comédie Humaine, critics rarely took him very seriously. Throughout his career he believed, resentfully, that their lack of regard stemmed from his early success in the 'slicks.'" Praising his "seductive, sonorous prose" she states that he "deserves to be rediscovered."

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The Atlantic Monthly - 2004

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