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EVELYN EATON

One of the twentieth century’s most remarkable authors, Evelyn Eaton was born in Switzerland in 1902. Her parents were staunchly Anglophile Canadian, and she was brought up and educated in England and France, her rather proper Edwardian upbringing culminating in presentation at court in 1923, around the same time as her first volume of poems was published. She spent the years until 1936 mostly in France, and the war years as a war correspondent in China, Burma and India. At the age of forty-two she became an American citizen. From 1949 to 1951 she lectured at Columbia University, and from 1951 to 1960 at Sweet Briar College. In ten different years she was a fellow of the MacDowell Colony. Other creative writing posts took her to Mary Washington University in Virginia, The University of Ohio, Pershing College, and Deep Springs College in Nevada.

In later life she turned increasingly towards Native American culture, with a particular “homecoming” within the ceremonial and mystical aspects. She was, through her soldier father, related to the Algonquians of New Brunswick, but in 1960 moved to the Owens Valley of California, where she made strong ties with the Paiute and Arapaho peoples, out of which came perhaps her best known work, I Send a Voice.

She spent her final years in the small community of Independence, California, dying in 1983. Her papers and manuscripts are permanently housed in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University.

She was the author of some thirteen novels, five volumes of poetry, two short story collections, works of nonfiction and works for children. She was a regular contributor of short fiction to The New Yorker—twenty-five of her short stories appeared in that magazine between 1949 and 1960, making Evelyn Eaton one of the leading writers of the mid-twentieth century.