Marcia Davenport

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Marcia Davenport (9 June 1903—16 January 1996) was an American author and music critic. She was born Marcia Glick in New York City on June 9, 1903, the daughter of Bernard Glick and the opera singer Alma Gluck, and she became the step-daughter of violinist Efrem Zimbalist when Alma Gluck remarried.

Davenport traveled extensively with her parents and was educated intermittently at the Friends School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the Shipley School at Bryn Mawr. She began at Wellesley College, but eloped to Pittsburgh in April 1923 and married Fred D. Clarke. Eventually she earned her B.A. at the University of Grenoble. Her first child was born in 1924, but in 1925 she divorced Clarke.

She took an advertising copywriting job to support herself and her daughter. In 1928 she began her writing career on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, where she worked until 1931. On May 13, 1929 she married Russell Davenport, who soon after became editor of Fortune. Davenport's second daughter was born in 1934. That same year she began as the music critic of Stage magazine. Davenport, naturally, had close ties through her mother and step-father to the classical music world and particularly to the heady opera world of Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century. She was first celebrated as a writer for her first book, Mozart, the first published American biography of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her marriage to Russell Davenport ended in 1944.

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[edit] Novels

She also wrote several popular novels, most notably The Valley of Decision. It is a saga which traces the Scott family, prototypical owners of an iron works in Pittsburgh, from 1873 to the events of Pearl Harbor. Davenport lived in Pittsburgh for two years researching the steel industry for this, her magnum opus, published at a length of 788 pages. It became a bestseller.

Her memoir Too Strong for Fantasy (1967) describes the people, the music, the places and the political forces which shaped her life. Of particular interest is her telling of the events leading up to the tragic death of the Czech diplomat and foreign minister Jan Masaryk in the Czernin Palace in Prague in 1948 and of her close relationship with Masaryk over many years.

[edit] Films

Two of Davenport's novels were made into films: The Valley of Decision and East Side, West Side. The Valley of Decision starred Greer Garson, Gregory Peck, Donald Crisp, Lionel Barrymore, Preston Foster, Marsha Hunt, Gladys Cooper, Reginald Owen, Dan Duryea and Jessica Tandy. The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Greer Garson) and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.

My Brother's Keeper (1954) was optioned for films to various individuals over decades, but no film was ever produced.

[edit] Radio

In 1973, she was a commentator on the radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. During the 1940s, she was heard on various radio panel discussion shows, and she was a panelist with Alexander Woollcott and Rex Stout on The People's Platform program of January 23, 1943, when Woollcott had a heart attack during the broadcast and died before he arrived at Roosevelt Hospital.

Marcia Davenport died January 16, 1996, in Monterey, California, at the age of 92.

[edit] Works

  • Mozart, a biography (New York: Scribner, 1932)
  • Of Lena Geyer, a novel (New York: Scribner, 1936)
  • The Valley of Decision, a novel (New York: Scribner, 1942)
  • East Side, West Side, a novel (New York: Scribner, 1947)
  • My Brother's Keeper, a novel (New York: Scribner, 1954)
  • Garibaldi: Father of Modern Italy, a juvenile biography (New York: Random House, 1956)
  • The Constant Image, a novel (New York: Scribner, 1960)
  • Too Strong for Fantasy, an autobiography (New York: Scribner, 1967)
  • Jan Masaryk: Posledni Portret, a memoir (Czechoslovakia: 1990)

[edit] References

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