Owen Johnson

American novelist and playwright Owen Johnson was born in New York City in 1878. The literary world was in his blood--his father was a magazine editor--and when Owen was six years old he had his first story published (he was paid the grand sum of $1.00). At age 12 he and a friend put out their own newspaper. He attended the private Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where he founded and edited the "Lawrenceville Literary Magazine" (he later used Lawrenceville as the setting for quite a few of his novels, with many of the characters based on his schoolmates and friends). He attended Yale University and was chairman of the "Yale Literary Magazine". He graduated Yale with the class of 1900, receiving his B.A. in 1901 (in 1910 he attracted attention--and scandal--with his novel "Stover at Yale", which attacked the pretentiousness and inane rituals of the "senior societies" that predominated at the university, and also excoriated what he saw as the lack of curiosity and indolence of the younger undergraduates). After graduation he published a novel about the American Civil War, "Arrows of the Almighty", and married the first of his five wives. He fought in France with the US Army during World War I, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French government. In 1929 he and his fifth wife moved to New York City. He died in Tisbury, MA, in 1952.