Edmund Pearson

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Edmund Lester Pearson (1880-1937) was an American librarian and author. He was an writer of the "true crime" literary genre. He is best-known for his account of the notorious Lizzie Borden murder case.

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[edit] Biography

Pearson was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on February 11, 1880. He graduated from Harvard College in 1902.[1] In 1904, he graduated with a B.L.S. from the New York State Library School at Albany, a forerunner of the Columbia School of Library Service.[2]

After graduation he first worked as a librarian at the Washington D.C. Public Library. From 1906 to 1920 he wrote a weekly column, The Librarian, for the newspaper, the Boston Evening Transcript. The column consisted of humorous essays and stories. The stories often featured the fictional Ezra Beesly Free Public Library of the town of Baxter, as well as other fictional persons and places. In a column from 1907, Pearson printed a paragraph supposedly from an old librarian's almanac. Response from colleagues and friends lead him to expand it to a 34 page pamphlet that was published in 1909 as The Old Librarian's Almanack. On the title page the Almanack is described as "a very rare pamphlet first published in New Haven Connecticut in 1773 and now reprinted for the first time." The pamphlet was reviewed seriously by the New York Sun, the Nation, the New York Times, and several other publications, before the hoax was generally known. Even today, a humorous faux-medieval Curse Against Book Stealers from the pamphlet continues to be portrayed as real.[1][3]

From 1909 to 1914, Pearson lived in Newburyport and wrote several books. He wrote stories based on his childhood in The Believing Years and The Voyage of the Hoppergrass. He published some of his columns from the Librarian in The Library and the Librarian, The Librarian at Play, and The Secret Book. From 1914 to 1927 he worked at the New York Public Library as the Editor of Publications. [4]

In 1924 he published his best-known work, Studies in Murder, with its signature essay on Lizzie Borden of Fall River. In the years to follow, Pearson published other studies on American criminal cases, including Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders and Five Murders although these had limited popularity in comparison to his first landmark work on American crime. He maintained an extensive personal correspondence with the Scottish crime writer, William Roughead, the two writers offering support and encouragement to each other in their chosen field of "matters criminous". In 1934 Pearson went to Hollywood to serve as an uncredited writer for the film The Bride of Frankenstein.

Pearson died on August 8, 1937 at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City of bronchial pneumonia. He was buried in the family plot in the Oak Hill Cemetery, in the city of his birth, Newburyport.[4]

[edit] Books

  • The Old Librarian's Almanack (1909)
  • The Library and the Librarian (1910)
  • The Librarian at Play (1911)
  • The Believing Years (1912) (autobiography)
  • The Voyage of the Hoppergrass (1913) (autobiography)
  • The Secret Book (1914)
  • Theodore Roosevelt (1920)
  • Books in Black or Red (1923)
  • Studies in Murder (1924)
  • Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders (1926)
  • Five Murders, with a final note on the Borden case (1928)
  • Queer Books (1928)
  • Dime novels; or, Following an old trail in popular literature (1929)
  • Instigation of the Devil (1930)
  • More Studies in Murder (1936)
  • Trial of Lizzie Borden, edited, with a history of the case (1937)
  • Masterpieces of murder (1963)
  • Murders that Baffled the Experts (1967)
  • The Adventure of the Lost Manuscripts & One Other (1974)
  • The Librarian: selections from the column of that name (1976)

[edit] References

  1. ^ A. Lawrence, ed., Who's who among North American authors, vol. 2, 1925
  2. ^ American Council of Learned Societies, Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940, 1944-1958
  3. ^ W. A. Wiegand, The History of a Hoax: Edmund Lester Pearson, John Contton Dana, and the Old Librarian's Almanack, 1979
  4. ^ a b J. Durnell, & N. D. Stevens, ed., The Librarian: Selections from the Column of that Name, 1976

[edit] External links