Eric Wollencott Barnes
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(Frank) Eric Wollencott Barnes (b. May 7, 1907, Little Rock, Arkansas; d. December 31, 1962, Boston, Massachusetts) was an American educator, diplomat, actor, and author. He grew up and attended school in Little Rock. He enrolled in the University of California Los Angeles in 1925, but after a year he went to study at L'École des Sciences Politiques in Paris, France, from which he graduated in 1930. He received a diplome d'études superieures from the University of Paris in 1931, followed by a fellowship in the Sorbonne, before returning to teach at the University of Paris in 1932.
In 1930 Barnes enlisted in the United States Foreign Service and was appointed Vice Consul at Bucharest, Romania, and then in Sofia, Bulgaria. Returning to the U.S. in the mid-1930s he pursued an acting career in New York, where he appeared in several plays under the stage name Eric Wollencott.
In 1938, he took a position at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York, where he quickly rose to become an associate professor and chair of the English department. In 1940, he received his doctor of letters degree from the University of Paris. On March 29, 1941, he married Margaret Ingalls Marvin. Barnes became a full professor in 1945. In World War II he served as a civilian consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as a military information officer with the O.S.S. in Algiers.
After the war, Barnes began his career at Dickinson College as the Thomas Beaver Professor of English Literature and chair of the department in the fall of 1946.
Barnes left Dickinson officially in 1953 to head the Institution of American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, where he had been since 1951. He remained there with his wife and his two sons, Eric Marvin (1942-67) and Charles, until 1957, whereupon he returned to the U.S. to teach at the Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut. He was the author of many academic works in both French and English, including a series of histories for grade-school students.
[edit] Works
- Lady of Fashion: The Life and the Theatre of Anna Cora Mowatt (1954), biography of the Victorian actress and playwright
- The Man Who Lived Twice (1956), biography of Edward Sheldon, playwright
- The War Between the States (1959)
- Free Men Must Stand: The American War of Independence (1962)
- Free Men Must Stand: The War That Made a Nation (1964)
