The Atlantic Bookshelf: A Guide to Good Books

BORN in Springfield, Missouri, Marquis James served his apprenticeship, first as reporter, then as city editor, on metropolitan newspapers of Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, and New York. The war occupied him for nineteen months as an infantry lieutenant in the A.E.F. Then in the early twenties he turned to the writing of biography. His second book, The raven, a biography of Sam Houston, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 1930.