Paul Hyde Bonner

Paul Hyde Bonner (born February 14, 1893 in Brooklyn , New York City , New York , † December 14, 1968 in Charleston , South Carolina ) was an American writer and diplomat .

Life

Bonner was the son of Paul Edward and Theodora Bonner, née Hall. In 1911 he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and in 1915 he graduated from Harvard University . In 1917 he married Lilly Stehli, whose father was president of the Stehli Silks Corporation in New York City. This marriage resulted in four sons, of whom John Tyler Bonner (1920-2019) was a well-known evolutionary biologist . His son Paul Hyde Bonner, Jr. (1918–1989) later became a literary agent. From 1917 to 1919 Bonner did his military service in the United States Army Air Corps , which he finished with the rank of Second Lieutenant . From 1919 to 1931 Bonner was first a senior executive and later Vice President of the Stehli Silks Corporation in New York City. During his military service in World War II, he was promoted to colonel . From 1946 to 1952 he worked in the diplomatic service of the State Department of the United States , first in Paris and then in Rome, where he was an economic advisor to the US Ambassador in dealing with war damage.

Before Bonner established himself as a writer in 1953, he wrote essays and articles on hunting and fishing in magazines such as The New Yorker , Vogue , North American Review, and Esquire . His first novel SPQR (1953), about a US diplomat in Rome, was published in German in 1956 under the title Roman Summer . His book Excelsior (1955) was published in German in 1959 under the title Der Bankier! .

Bonner's best-known novels include Hotel Talleyrand (1954), The Art of Llewellyn Jones (1960) and Ambassador Extraordinary (1962). They are mostly about international political intrigues. In Hotel Talleyrand is about Walter Haines, who has a tragic affair with a communist agent. The main character in The Art of Llewellyn Jones is F. Townsend Britton, a wealthy married ambassador who gives up his wife and demanding life to assume the identity of Llewellyn Jones. Under this name he traveled to Paris, where he finally had a romance and found success as a painter. The novel Ambassador Extraordinary takes place in a fictional Caribbean republic called Antilla, in which the American ambassador Sherman Biggs gets involved with the beautiful wife of a powerful general. The woman, Juanita, works as a spy not only for the dictator of the country, but also for the rebels who are hiding in the mountains, waiting to overthrow the government. For the illustration of his book Aged in the Woods (1959), a volume with 16 partly autobiographical and partly fictional short stories, Bonner was able to win the bird illustrator Don Richard Eckelberry .

Lilly Stehli Bonner died at the end of 1961 at the age of 63. In January 1963 Paul Bonner married Elizabeth McGowan.

Works

Novels

• SPQR , Scribner , New York, 1953 (German: Römischer Sommer , 1956)
• Hotel Talleyrand , Scribner, New York, 1954. (German: Hotel Talleyrand , 1954)
• Excelsior! , Scribner, New York, 1955. (German: Der Bankier!, 1959)
• With Both Eyes Open , Scribner, New York, 1956.
• Amanda , Scribner, New York, 1958.
• The Art of Llewellyn Jones , Scribner, New York, 1960.
• Ambassador Extraordinary , Scribner, New York, 1962.

Short stories

• The Glorious Mornings - Stories Of Shooting And Fishing , Scribner, New York, 1956.
• Aged in the Woods , Scribner, New York, 1959.

literature

• Who's Who in America. A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Men and Women. Marquis Who's Who, Volume 32, 1962-1963, p. 314
• Obituary: Paul Hyde Bonner, novelist, ex-diplomat. Asbury Park Press (Asbury Park, New Jersey), December 16, 1968, p. 2, accessed October 5, 2019 from newspapers.com
• Paul Hyde Bonner. Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003. Gale In Context: Biography, accessed October 5, 2019

Web links

• Paul Hyde Bonner in the WNYC archives (sound recording from 1962)
• Literature by and about Paul Hyde Bonner in the bibliographic database WorldCat