Elliot Paul
Eliott Paul was an American writer and musician born on February 13, 1891, in Malden, Massachusetts. After graduating from high school, he worked as a civil engineer before transitioning into journalism and music. His early career included stints as a political journalist and a saloon piano player, reflecting his diverse talents. Paul served in the U.S. Army during World War I, which influenced his subsequent literary work.
He moved to Paris in the 1920s, becoming part of the expatriate community of American writers and co-founding the influential arts magazine *transition*. Throughout his life, Paul published several novels, many of which drew from his personal experiences, and he contributed to various newspapers, including the *Chicago Tribune* and the *New York Herald*. His interests in music persisted, and he even toured with Lionel Hampton's jazz band in the 1950s.
Despite his prolific output, including crime novels and personal histories, Paul faced financial struggles later in life and ultimately passed away on April 7, 1958, in Rhode Island. His legacy encompasses a wide range of creative pursuits, illustrating the life of a passionate and multifaceted artist.
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Subject Terms
Elliot Paul
Author
- Born: February 13, 1891
- Birthplace: Malden, Massachusetts
- Died: April 7, 1958
- Place of death: Providence, Rhode Island
Biography
Eliott Harold Paul was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on February 13, 1891, to Howard Henry Paul, a businessman, and Lucy Greenleaf Doucette. Paul’s father died in a mental institution shortly before he was four. Paul graduated from Malden High School in 1907 and went to work for the U.S. Reclamation Service in Montana as a civil engineer. He attended the University of Maine for one year (1908-1909), studying engineering, and then moved to Louisville, Kentucky, to spend a year working as the city engineer. In 1910, Paul traveled west and spent several years in Idaho and Wyoming at times working as a saloon piano player, using his talent in music. By 1913, he was employed as a political journalist on several Boston-area newspapers. He joined the army and served overseas with the 317th Field Signal Battalion during World War I.
He returned to Boston after the war, taking up journalism once again. Paul’s first novel, Indelible: A Story of Life, Love, and Music in Five Movements, was published in 1922, to be followed in quick succession by two more, Impromptu: A Novel in Four Movements and Imperturbe: A Novel of Peace without Victory. All three drew on his personal experiences. He relocated to Paris in 1923, where he joined the expatriate generation of American writers and wrote for the European edition of the Chicago Tribune, reviewing music and literature. In 1927, with Eugene Jolas, he founded a little magazine of the arts, transition, which published many of the avant-garde writers of the period. Leaving his editorial post at transition in 1929, he went to work for the international edition of the New York Herald. In 1929 and 1930, he published three more novels. From1931 to 1936, he lived in Santa Eulalia, Ibiza, an island off the Spanish coast, where he pursued his musical interests. When the village was destroyed during the Spanish civil war, he returned to Paris to write a book about the destruction of the village, The Life and Death of a Spanish Town. In the late 1930’s, he wrote the last two of his conventional novels.
Paul came back to the United States at the beginning of World War II and began a series of fairly well-received personal histories, five in all, from The Last Time I Saw Paris (1942) to Desperate Scenery (1954). He also wrote a series of nine humorous crime novels featuring the detective Homer Evans and during the same period several screenplays.
Eliot Paul lived life intensely. He traveled much, wrote widely as a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and memorialist, promoted the avant-garde through his editorial work with transition, and married five times, fathering one son. Paul also pursued his active interest in music throughout his life, even touring with the jazz band of Lionel Hampton in the mid-1950’s, and his last book was That Crazy Music: The Story of North American Jazz (1957). Broke and suffering from heart disease, Eliott Paul moved to Rhode Island in 1977, and died in the Veterans Administration Hospital in Providence on April 7, 1958.