John Cournos

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John Cournos (born March 6, 1881 in Zhytomyr , Russian Empire , † August 27, 1966 in New York City , USA ) was an American writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin. His birth name was Ivan Grigoryevich Korschun ( Иван Григорьевич Коршун ). The name Cournos comes from the stepfather, Bernard Cournos, whom the mother married after her divorce from John's father.

Life

John Cournos grew up in the small town of Boyarka on where the mother with her second husband and children moved. John Cournos' mother tongue was Yiddish . He did not go to school, but was taught at home and a. in Russian, Hebrew and German. Cournos was a victim of anti-Semitic agitation as a child. When he was about ten years old, his parents' house burned down, probably due to arson. The family then emigrated to Philadelphia in the USA . Cournos went to school there for the first time and learned English. At the age of 15, a job as an errand boy for the Philadelphia Record newspaper enabled him to start working as a journalist. In the following years Cournos made a career with this newspaper and became a US citizen. In 1912 he moved to London to work as a freelance writer. In addition to his work as a reporter and translator from Russian, he worked in London from 1916 on his first novel The Mask , which was the only one of his works to be translated into German. Beginning in October 1917 traveled Cournos as a member of a British government commission that after the February Revolution contact with the new provisional government wanted to record in Russia, according to Petrograd , but returned after the outbreak of the October Revolution rushed back to London. He married an American writer named Helen Kestner Satterthwaite here in 1923 and published other novels, essays and short stories. In 1931 he moved back to the USA with his wife.

Relationship with writer Dorothy L. Sayers

In 1921, in Oxford , John Cournos met Dorothy L. Sayers , one of the most prominent authors from the ranks of the "British Crime Ladies". An unfortunate love affair began between the two of them, which ended in 1922. According to his autobiography, Cournos stayed in Oxford for the whole of 1921, but he made no mention of Dorothy L. Sayers. On the other hand, there were letters from the Sayers to him from 1924 in his estate, in which she writes about her pain of separation and her bitterness about his behavior. Two of the letters are contained in the collection Farewell Letters from Women , published in 2007 by the author Sibylle Berg . John Cournos is said to have been the model for one of Sayers' fictional characters, namely for the murder victim in the novel Strong Poison . The character is alienated in the novel, there is called Philip Boyes and is a British-born writer.

Works

  • Gordon Craig and the Theater of the Future (1914)
  • The Mask (1919) ( The Mask , See-Verlag, Konstanz 1923)
  • London Under the Bolsheviks (1919)
  • The Wall (1921?)
  • Babylon (1922)
  • The Best British Short Stories of 1922 (as editor, 1922?)
  • In Exile (1923)
  • The New Candide (1924)
  • Sport of Gods (1925)
  • Miranda Masters (1926)
  • O'Flaherty the Great (1928)
  • A Modern Plutarch (1928)
  • Short Stories out of Soviet Russia (1929)
  • Grandmother Martin Is Murdered (1930)
  • Wandering Women / The Samovar (1930)
  • The Devil Is an English Gentleman (1932)
  • Autobiography , Putnam's GP, New York 1935
  • An Epistle to the Hebrews (1938)
  • An Open Letter to Jews and Christians (1938)
  • Hear, O Israel (1938)
  • Book of Prophecy from Egyptians to Hitler (1938)
  • A Boy Named John (1941)
  • A Treasury of Russian Life and Humor (1943)
  • Famous Modern American Novelists (1952)
  • Pilgrimage to Freedom (1953; written with Sybil Norton, illustrated by Rus Anderson)
  • American Short Stories of the Nineteenth Century (1955: Everyman's Library )
  • A Teasury of Classic Russian literature (1961)
  • With Hey, Ho ... and The Man with the Spats (1963)
  • The Created Legend - translation of a work by Fyodor Sologub [pseudonym] (unknown year of publication)

literature

  • Dorothy L. Sayers, letters in: Sibylle Berg (ed.): And I thought it was love. About leaving and being left. Farewell letters from women. Goldmann, Munich 2004, ISBN 9783421059208
  • James Brabazon: Dorothy L. Sayers. Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., New York 1984, ISBN 0-8044-6009-4 .
  • Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery - The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. Thomas Dunne Books, New York 2011, ISBN 9780312276553 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data on online-literature.com, accessed on December 3, 2019
  2. ↑ John Cournos, Autobiography, p 23
  3. ↑ John Cournos, Autobiography, pp. 50-54
  4. ↑ John Cournos, Autobiography, pp. 136-141
  5. ↑ John Cournos, Autobiography, p 192
  6. ↑ John Cournos, Autobiography, p 287
  7. ↑ John Cournos, Autobiography, pp. 301-316
  8. ↑ James Brabazon, Biography , pp. 92-96
  9. ^ Sibylle Berg, Farewell Letters from Women , pp. 105f.
  10. ^ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 182
personal data
SURNAME Cournos, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Korschun, Ivan Grigoryevich (maiden name); Коршун, Иван Григорьевич (birth name, Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Zhytomyr
DATE OF DEATH August 27, 1966
Place of death New York City