- Oliver La Farge
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Oliver La Farge Born Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge
December 19, 1901
New York City, New York, U.S.Died August 2, 1963 (aged 61)
Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.Occupation Novelist, anthropologist Nationality American Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge (December 19, 1901 - August 2, 1963) was an American writer and anthropologist, best known for his 1930 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Laughing Boy.
Named for his uncle, Oliver H.P. La Farge, he was the grandson of the artist and stained-glass pioneer John La Farge, and his wife Margaret Mason Perry. Her father was Christopher Grant Perry, the son of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry and Elizabeth Champlin Mason. He was a descendant of Gov. Thomas Prence (1599 - March 29, 1673) a co-founder of Eastham, Massachusetts, a political leader in both the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, and governor of Plymouth (1634, 1638, and 1657–1673); and Elder William Brewster (pilgrim), (c. 1567 - April 10, 1644), the Pilgrim leader and spiritual elder of the Plymouth Colony and a passenger on the Mayflower.
His great-grandmother was Frances Sergeant who was the daughter of Chief Justice Thomas Sergeant and Sarah Bache, the daughter of Sarah Franklin Bache and Richard Bache. Frances was a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America and Deborah Read.
He was the son of the noted Beaux-Arts architect Christopher Grant La Farge, and father of the folksinger and painter Peter La Farge.
La Farge's short stories were published in The New Yorker and Esquire magazines. His more notable works, fiction and non-fiction, concern Native American culture.
Personal life
La Farge was born in New York City the son of Christopher Grant La Farge and Florence Bayard Lockwood, the niece of Senator Thomas F. Bayard. He was named for his ancestor Oliver Hazard Perry and his uncle, architect Oliver H.P. La Farge I. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University during 1924 and a Master's Degree from the same university in 1929. A member of the university rowing team, he rowed as captain of a men's eight-oared shell.
La Farge, a Newport, Rhode Island New Englander whose grandfather was of French descent and whose other ancestors included English colonists and (allegedly) Narragansett American Indians, was an anthropologist who discovered two previously unknown languages while on scientific expeditions to Central America and the American Southwest. He is well-known for his pioneering visit, with Frans Blom during 1925, to Mexico and what has since become known as the Olmec heartland, (re)discovering San Martin Pajapan Monument 1 and, most importantly, the ruins of La Venta, one of the major Olmec centers.
La Farge also spent much of his adult life championing American Indian rights and was president of the Association on American Indian Affairs for several years.
His published work included several scientific papers and non-fiction books, as well as several novels and a column for the Santa Fe newspaper The New Mexican. Some of his columns were released in book form under the title The Man With the Calabash Pipe.
La Farge had two children by his first wife, heiress Wanden Matthews: a son, Oliver Albee La Farge, and a daughter, Povy; and another son, John Pendaries "Pen" La Farge, by his second wife, Consuelo Baca de La Farge. His 1956 book Behind the Mountains was based on the reminiscences of Consuelo's family, who were ranchers in northern New Mexico. After La Farge and Matthews divorced in 1935, Oliver Albee changed his name to Peter La Farge and became a Greenwich Village folksinger with five Folkways Records albums.
La Farge died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1963.
Works
- Tribes and Temples (with Frans Blom) 1926-27
- Laughing Boy (1929), novel, the basis for the 1934 motion picture of the same name.
- The Year Bearer's People (with Douglas Byers) 1931
- Introduction to American Indian Art (with John Sloan) 1931
- Sparks Fly Upward (1931), novel.
- Long Pennant, 1933
- All the Young Men (1935), collection of short stories.
- The Enemy Gods (1937), novel.
- An Alphabet for Writing the Navajo Language, 1940
- The Changing Indian (editor) 1942
- The Copper Pot, 1942
- War Below Zero (with Corey Ford and Bernt Balchen) 1944
- Raw Material (1945), a memoir.
- Santa Eulalia: The Religion of a Cuchumatan Indian Town (1947), non-fiction.
- The Eagle in the Egg, 1949
- Cochise of Arizona, 1953
- The Mother Ditch, 1954
- A Pictorial History of the American Indian (1956), non-fiction.
- Behind the Mountains (1956), non-fiction.
- A Pause in the Desert (1957), collection of short stories.
- Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town (with Arthur N. Morgan) 1959
- The Door in the Wall, 1965
- The Man With the Calabash Pipe (edited by Winfield Townley Scott) 1966
External links
- An Inventory of the Oliver La Farge Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas
- Excerpts from Tribes and Temples at Mesoweb.
- Oliver La Farge at Find a Grave
Categories:- 1901 births
- 1963 deaths
- 20th-century Mesoamericanists
- 20th-century novelists
- American anthropologists
- American columnists
- American Mesoamericanists
- American novelists
- American short story writers
- Harvard University alumni
- Mesoamerican anthropologists
- Olmec scholars
- People from Newport, Rhode Island
- Perry family
- Pulitzer Prize for the Novel winners
- Writers from New York City
- Writers from Rhode Island
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