John at the age of fourteen was sent to live with three maiden aunts at Curzon's Mill on Kent's Island, near Newburyport, where he attended public school rather than the prestigious private schools to which the family had been accustomed. He entered Harvard on a scholarship for the study of scientific subjects and studied chemistry, which he despised. He joined no clubs or societies; only with the
Lampoon did he have extracurricular connections; and he was graduated in 1915. From Harvard he carried away, however, a deep love of books and writing and a set of attitudes that he was to give many of his characters, who, like him, suffer from the failures of their fathers and the snubs of being public-school boys among private-school graduates.
He worked for a year on the Boston Transcript with some success. Talks with his mother's cousin, a distinguished naval officer, resulted in the first appearance of Marquand's name on the title page of a book, Prince and Boatswain: Sea Tales from the Recollections of Rear Admiral Charles E. Clark as related to James Morris Morgan and John Phillip [sic] Marquand, published in 1915. He was a private in the Massachusetts National Guard, which in 1916 was sent to Texas for duty on the Mexican border.
This is a free page. This page contains 191 words. This
biography contains 3,056 words (approx. 10 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our John P(hillips) Marquand Access Pass.
