American Author
Here’s an excerpt from Jim Harford’s book “Merton & Friends” in which Alexander Eliot writes to Robert Lax in 1962 about how important it is that his poetry gets a wider readership because, in his words: “[Your poems] are the finest crystals of enlightenment now being formed anywhere within my ken.”
“One of (Kevin Brine’s) family friends was Time art critic Alexander Eliot, a passionate Hellenophile who had worked with Brine’s mother, Ruth Brine, the magazine’s first and, for many years, only female senior editor.
Another Time colleague had been Robert Lax, who went on to become an acclaimed poet and settled on the island in the early 1960s and whose niece happened to be a friend of Brine’s.”
Read the full article here:
Fifty-three years after New American Library published the US English edition of Alexander Eliot’s novel Love Play in 1966, publisher Rowohlt Repertoire releases a new German language edition.
As Alexander described it, this “… big, fat, lewd, philosophic work of fiction, pure and impure; a free-for-all, with Rabelais as a referee.” is now available to delight our German speaking friends.
Read more about Love Play Here
Author Alexander Eliot is featured in a new book, Pieces of Glass: An Artoire, by award-winning Hollywood screenwriter & author, John Sacret Young. Mr. Young devotes an entire chapter, A Rainy Night, to a chance encounter with Alex. Their talk is mostly about artists Alex met over the years during his tenure as Art Editor of Time magazine and later, in particular, artist Charles Burchfield.
“I took delight in American painting.” Alexander Eliot told me. “And it amazed me nobody cared. Art was very low on the totem pole in America. When Harry Truman jeered at ‘ham-and-egg art’, millions cheered and senators looked under the bed and saw Communists in what these artists were doing. I felt I had a mission to put American art on the map.”
A mission certainly made more difficult due to the political leanings of Time owner, Henry Luce.
Tomorrow Alex would have been 97 years old … and we are delighted to let you know that the memoir he worked on for the last decade of his life is now published! It’s called “Because it was Beautiful” and now available on Amazon.
For those of you who don’t know, Alex spent many years writing and rewriting the story of his amazing, engaging, and deeply inspiring life. As he writes: “I lived through eighty-one percent of the twentieth century. My career as an art journalist, novelist, foreign correspondent on the cultural beat, eager lover, and comparative mythologist, was lucky indeed.”
Alex had the great good fortune to encounter an extraordinary wealth of people during his life, artists like Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, musicians like Benny Goodman, spiritual leaders like Masao Abe, the photographer Diane Arbus, and many others, some famous and some not, some he knew intimately, and some who were passing acquaintances. He writes about them with wit and wisdom and that marvelous story-telling gift that those of you who knew him personally will remember well.
During this past year, since Alex’s death last April, many people have asked me about his memoir and wondered when it would be published.
We are so glad to be able to announce this publication as a marvelous birthday celebration, a gift to all of us, one that shares the story of the life of an extraordinary human being.
If you’d like to keep in touch with updates and information, please let us know. We do intend to publish this in e-book format soon and can let you know when that will be available if you wish. We welcome your comments, feedback, and friendship, for Alex’s sake as well as our own.
