John Phillips Marquand

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Marquand, J[ohn] P[hillips] (1893–1960),Massachusetts author, born in Wilmington, Del., whose literary career began with popular romances, including The Unspeakable Gentleman (1922), The Black Cargo (1925), Warning Hill (1930), and Ming Yellow (1935), and detective stories about Mr. Moto, a Japanese sleuth. His more serious comedies of manners, often observing the struggle between inherited conformity and personal desire, include The Late George Apley (1937, Pulitzer Prize), a supposed memoir of Boston Brahmin life; Wickford Point (1939), a similar satire of a New England family; H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), about a New Englander 25 years out of college; So Little Time (1943), about a play doctor who regrets an uncreative career; B. F.'s Daughter (1946), characterizing an industrialist's daughter who tries to dominate her husband; Point of No Return (1949), about a middle‐aged banker, no longer able to turn from his path of materialism; Melville Goodwin, USA (1951), tracing the stultifying career of an army officer; Sincerely, Willis Wayde (1955), an ironic character study of an egocentric tycoon's rise to power; and Women and Thomas Harrow (1958), presenting a New Englander, once a successful dramatist, as he remembers his first wife and his happier past. Lord Timothy Dexter (1925) is the life of an 18th‐century New England eccentric, and Timothy Dexter Revisited (1960) adds autobiographical information about Dexter's and Marquand's hometown, Newburyport. Thirty Years (1954) collects stories and articles, and Life at Happy Knoll (1957) assembles sketches in epistolary form about the problems of a country club.

John Phillips Marquand , 1893–1960, American novelist, b. Wilmington, Del., grad. Harvard, 1915. Most of Marquand's gently satirical novels examine life among the rich and socially prominent of New England. Often they concern people too hidebound by money or tradition to change their lives for the better. He first won popularity with a series about a Japanese detective, "Mr. Moto," which ran in the Saturday Evening Post. His reputation as a novelist was established with The Late George Apley (1937, Pulitzer Prize) about a conservative Bostonian. Among his other novels are Wickford Point (1939), H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), So Little Time (1943), Point of No Return (1949), Melville Goodwin, U S A (1951), and Life at Happy Knoll (1957).

Bibliography: See study by J. Gross (1963).