Marcia Davenport

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American author and music critic Marcia Davenport was born Marcia Glick in New York City on June 9, 1903, the daughter of opera singer Alma Gluck and Bernard Glick, and she became the stepdaughter of violinist Efrem Zimbalist when Gluck remarried.

Davenport traveled extensively with her parents and was educated intermittently at the Friends School in Philadelphia and the Shipley School at Bryn Mawr. She began at Wellesley College, but eloped to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in April 1923 and married Fred D. Clarke. Eventually she earned her B.A. at the University of Grenoble. Her first child was born in 1924, but in 1925 she divorced from Clarke.

She took an advertising copywriting job to support herself and her daughter. In 1928 she began her writing career on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, where she worked until 1931. On May 13, 1929 she married Russell Davenport, who soon after became editor of Fortune magazine. Davenport's second daughter was born in 1934. That same year she began as the music critic of Stage magazine.

Marcia Davenport, naturally, had close ties through her mother and stepfather to the classical music world and particularly to the heady opera world of Europe and America in the first half of the 20th Century. She was first celebrated as a writer for her first book, Mozart, the first published American biography of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

She also wrote many popular novels, most notably The Valley of Decision. It is a saga which traces the Scott family, prototypical owners of an iron works in Pittsburgh, from 1873 to the events of Pearl Harbor. Davenport lived in Pittsburgh for two years researching the steel industry for this, her magnum opus, published at a length of 788 pages. It became a bestseller.

Two of Davenport's novels were made into films: The Valley of Decision and East Side, West Side. The Valley of Decision movie stars Greer Garson, Gregory Peck, Donald Crisp, Lionel Barrymore, Preston Foster, Marsha Hunt, Gladys Cooper, Reginald Owen, Dan Duryea and Jessica Tandy. The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Greer Garson) and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.

The marriage of Marcia and Russell Davenport ended in 1944.

Her memoir Too Strong For Fantasy (1967) describes the people, the music, the places and the political forces which shaped her life. Of particular interest is her telling of the events leading up to the tragic death of the Czech diplomat Jan Masaryk in 1948 and of her close relationship with Masaryk over many years.

Marcia Davenport died January 15, 1996, in Monterey, California, at the age of 92.

[edit] Works

Mozart, a biography (New York: Scribner, 1931)
Of Lena Geyer, a novel (New York: Scribner, 1936)
The Valley of Decision, a novel (New York: Scribner, 1942)
East Side, West Side, a novel (New York: Scribner, 1947)
My Brother's Keeper, a novel (New York: Scribner, 1954)
Garibaldi: Father of Modern Italy, a juvenile biography (New York: Random House, 1956)
The Constant Image, a novel (New York: Scribner, 1960)
Too Strong for Fantasy, an autobiography (New York: Scribner, 1967)
Jan Masaryk: Posledni Portret, a memoir (Czechoslovakia: 1990)