 Photo Credit: Jerry Bauer |
January 21 A native of Lowell, Massachusetts, Nicholas A. Basbanes graduated from Bates College in 1965, received a Master of Arts degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1968, and served as a naval officer aboard the aircraft carrier "Oriskany" in the Tonkin Gulf in 1969 and 1970. An award-winning investigative reporter during the early 1970s, Basbanes was literary editor of the Worcester "Sunday Telegram" from 1978 to 1991, and for eight years after that wrote a nationally syndicated column on books and authors. He is a former president of the Friends of the Robert H. Goddard Library of Clark University, which has established a student book collecting competition in his honor. He is the author of "A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books" which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for 1995, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. "Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture," a companion volume to his first book, prompted the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian David McCullough to write that "Nicholas Basbanes has become our leading authority of books about books and this, his latest, is a jewel." Basbanes' third book, "Among the Gently Mad: Perspectives and Strategies for the Book-Hunter of the 21st Century," was issued in November 2002 and his newest book, "A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Imperfect World," was published in December 2003. In addition to his books about books, Basbanes has written for numerous newspapers, magazines, and journals, "The New York Times," "The Washington Post," Smithsonian, Civilization, and New England Quarterly among them, and lectures widely on book-related subjects. With his wife, Constance Basbanes, he writes a monthly review of children's books for Literary Features Syndicate, which they established in 1993. They are the parents of two daughters, Barbara and Nicole, and live in North Grafton, Massachusetts. |
