Eleanor Clark (1913 – 1996) was an American writer and "master stylist," best known for her non-fiction accounts.

Background

Eleanor Clark was born on July 6, 1913, in Los Angeles, California, but grew up in Roxbury, Connecticut. She attended Vassar College in the 1930s, where she met Mary McCarthy.

Career

Clark was involved with the literary magazine Con Spirito there, along with Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and her sister Eunice Clark. She also associated with Herbert Solow and helped translate documents for the 1937 "trial" of Leon Trotsky. During World War II, Clark worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington, DC. Clark wrote reviews, essays, children's books, and novels.

Personal life and death

In the late 1930s, Clark married Jan Frankel, a secretary of Trotsky; they divorced by the mid-1940s. In 1952, Clark married Robert Penn Warren and lived in Fairfield, Connecticut, with him and their two children, Rosanna and Gabriel. On February 16, 1996, Clark died age 82 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Awards

Works

For her book The Oysters of Locmariaquer (1964), Clark received the U.S. National Book Award in the short-lived category Arts and Letters. When Rome and the Villa was reissued, Anatole Broyard called it "perhaps the finest book ever to be written about a city." Clark wrote about her experiences with the CPUSA and Trotskyites in at least two fictionalized accounts, Bitter Box (1946) and Gloria Mundi (1979). Novels: Nonfiction: Translations: