Allan Seager

Allan Seager (1906–1968) was a novelist and short-story writer. Seager published more than 80 short stories in publications including Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Sports Illustrated. E.J. O'Brien, editor of the yearly Best American Short Stories series, once stated that the "apostolic succession of the American short story" ran from Sherwood Anderson to Ernest Hemingway to Seager. Poet and novelist James Dickey credited Seager's novel Amos Berry as a principal reason that he chose to pursue poetry.

As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Seager was a member of two national championship swimming teams. He subsequently earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, but his studies were interrupted by a bout of tuberculosis. He spent a year "curing" at the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York; his experiences there and in Ann Arbor and Oxford led to the semi-autobiographical short stories published in the collection A Frieze of Girls.^[1] Subsequent to his Rhodes Scholarship, Seager worked for Vanity Fair magazine as an assistant editor. He returned to Ann Arbor in 1935, where he taught creative writing at the University of Michigan until 1968.

Seager died of lung cancer in Tecumseh, Michigan, in 1968.

Bibliography

Novels

• Equinox. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943.
• The Inheritance. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948
• Amos Berry. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953.
• Hilda Manning. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956
• Death of Anger. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1960.

Short Stories

• A Frieze of Girls: Memoirs as Fiction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964
• The Old Man of the Mountain. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950

Nonfiction

• The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968 (First Edition)
• The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991 (Reprint Edition including introduction by Donald Hall)
• They Worked for a Better World. New York: Macmillan, 1939.

Translation

• Stendhal. Memoirs of a Tourist. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962.

References

Research resources

• Charles Baxter (25 March 2004). "Reintroducing Allan Seager". McSweeney's Internet Tendency. 
• Charles Baxter (2004). A Frieze of Girls: Memoirs as Fiction (Foreword). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-08957-9. 
• Allan Seager. "This Town and Salamanca". McSweeney's Internet Tendency.  Part 1, Part 2
• John Warner (writer/editor) (2001). "This Town and Salamanca (Foreword)". McSweeney's Quarterly. 7: i–iv. 
• John Warner (12 July 2011). "The man behind the window". The Morning News. 

External links

• Reintroducing Allan Seager: an essay by Charles Baxter and selected chapter from A Frieze of Girls
• Guide to the Allan Seager Papers at The Bancroft Library