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Paul Horgan: A Biographical Note

Paul Horgan was born in Buffalo, New York, on August 1, 1903, the son of Edward Daniel and Rose Marie (Rohr) Horgan. In 1915, when he was twelve years old, he and the rest of his family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. For most of his life, New Mexico—Albuquerque, Roswell, and Santa Fe—was his home territory, until in 1962 he was called to Wesleyan University to become director of its then active Center for Advanced Studies, a post he filled for five years. Following that assignment he became an adjunct professor of English at Wesleyan, and later professor emeritus and author-in-residence.

He was educated at the Nardin Academy in Buffalo, the Albuquerque public schools, the New Mexico Military Institute, and the Eastman School of Music and the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York.

In 1926, in order to pursue his work as a writer, he accepted the post of librarian at the New Mexico Military Institute, which gave him daily time for writing. In 1942 he entered the army and served until 1946 (captain to lieutenant-colonel) in the General Staff Corps, becoming chief of the Army Information Branch in the Information and Education Division, for which he received the Legion of Merit.

Following his military service he returned to New Mexico, and soon was able to give his whole time to writing. He is the author of seventeen novels, of which the most recent, Mexico Bay, was published in his seventy-ninth year, on February 25, 1982, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. For his first novel, The Fault of Angels, he received the Harper Prize in 1933. His total of some two-score books includes also four volumes of short stories, and works in history, biography, and literature. For works in history he twice received the Pulitzer Prize (Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, 1955) (Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times, 1975), and, also, a Bancroft Prize and the Robert Kirsch Award. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships, and he held twenty honorary doctorates of letters, the first from Wesleyan University in 1956, the last from Yale in 1977. In 1976 he was awarded the Laetare Medal of the University of Notre Dame, and in 1981 the Baldwin Medal of Wesleyan University. He taught at Wesleyan, the University of Iowa, and Yale. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. An associate fellow of Saybrook College, Yale, he was also a life fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library and an honorary trustee of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. Upon the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he was appointed by President Johnson to a six-year term as a member of the Endowment’s National Council. His writing has appeared in seventeen foreign countries. Paul Horgan lived in Middletown, Connecticut, until his death in 1995.