Francis Steegmuller

American novelist

Francis Steegmuller (July 3, 1906 – October 20, 1994) was an American biographer, translator and fiction writer, who was known chiefly as a Flaubert scholar.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Steegmuller graduated from Columbia University in 1927. another in 1981 for Translation for the first volume of Flaubert's selected letters (The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830 1857)—and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal. His first wife was Beatrice Stein, a painter who was a pupil and friend of Jacques Villon; she died in 1961. He married the writer Shirley Hazzard in 1963. His collected papers are held at two universities: at Yale University, the James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888) Papers and the Francis Steegmuller Collection for Jacques Villon; at Columbia University, the Francis Steegmuller Papers 1877–1979. He died in Naples, Italy.

"I’m told that when Auden died, they found his Oxford [English Dictionary] all but clawed to pieces. That is the way a poet and his dictionary should come out."

Many of the pages cited below can be read on Google Books if you click on the title of the book. Julian Barnes, Nothing to be frightened of (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), pp. 132, 166, 168
Hyman Bogen, The Luckiest Orphans: a history of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), p. 219
Barbara A. Burkhardt, William Maxwell: a literary life (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 189–190, 196, 260, 271
Richard M. Cook, Alfred Kazin: a biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 237–238, 388 389, 395
Scott Donaldson, John Cheever: a biography (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc., 2001), pp. 158, 254
Richard Greene, editor, Graham Greene: a life in letters (London: Little, Brown, 2007), pp. 330–1, 332
Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: emergence of genius (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002), pp. 369, 376, 383, 384, 413
Greg Johnson, editor, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973 1982 (New York: Ecco, 2007), p. 469
Catherine McNamara, School days remembered: oral history interview with Francis Steegmuller (Oral history project. Friends of the Greenwich Library), (Greenwich, CT: Greenwich Library , 1978)
David Marr, editor, Letters / Patrick White (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 474, 499, 528, 530, 532 3, 575, 625, 637, 643
Albert Murray, John F. Callahan, eds., Trading Twelves: the selected letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), pp. 6, 10, 23, 26, 160, 165
Graham Payn, Sheridan Morley, eds., The Noël Coward Diaries (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2000), p. 623
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: a biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 172, 212 13, 215, 216, 232, 233, 236 7, 240, 241, 242, 250, 259, 331, 332, 405
Ned Rorem, The Later Diaries 1961–1972 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2000), pp. 196, 277, 319–320, 343
Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark: the biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), pp. 271–2, 274, 276, 284, 299, 404
Diana Trilling, The Beginning of the Journey: the marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993), pp. 83, 122
Alec Wilkinson, My Mentor: a young man's friendship with William Maxwell (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), pp. 110, 126, 146
Alan Ziegler, The Writing Workshop Note Book: notes on creating and workshopping (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2008), p. 12