Marcia Davenport
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 step-daughter 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 step-father to the classical music world and particularly to the heady opera world of Europe and America in the first half of the twentieth 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 and
bestseller, which was published at a length of 788 pages.
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.
In 1967 appeared her memoir
Too Strong For Fantasy, which 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 on
January 15,
1996, in
Monterey, California at the age of ninety-two.
*
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)
