Whitmore, Edward

Whitmore was born May 26, 1933 in Manchester , New Hampshire . In the family was the youngest child among five children. He was twice married, married to his first wife, he had two daughters.

After graduating from the Deering High School in Portland , Maine in June 1951, he enrolled at Yale , where he studied history. While studying, he worked in a local newspaper. He joined the Zeta Psi fraternity at the university; in his last year he was elected to one of the most influential societies of undergraduate students - Scroll and Key ^[4] . In 1955, he headed the editorial board of Yale News.

After studying, Whitmore served as a marine , rose to the rank of officer, and in 1958, the CIA was recruited in Japan . He completed a crash course in the Japanese language and for almost 10 years worked undercover as a reporter for The Japan Times . He visited many countries of Europe , Crete , Jerusalem , the Far and Middle East . Having left the service, he returned to the USA. For some time he worked in the administration of New York Mayor John Lindsey .

For fifteen years, the writer lived in Jerusalem - there he created his most famous works - four novels of the Jerusalem Quartet. After 1981, the writer often came to New York , where he lived in the Lexington Avenue area , and then on Third Avenue , continuing to work hard.

After Whitmore completed the last tetralogy novel Jericho Mosaic, he returned to live in the United States. After living for six months in New York, the writer moved to a family mansion in Dorset, Vermont . His friend Thomas S. Wallace notes that Edward Whitmore “in his novels shows a thorough knowledge of the intelligence craft, love for the Middle East, devotion to the Holy City and a passionate desire for peace and understanding between Arabs, Jews (and Christians)” ^[5] .

He ended his life in poverty, working as a copyist in a law office. The writer died on August 3, 1995 of prostate cancer , leaving incomplete his last novel, Sister Sally and Billy the Kid.

In 1974, Whitmore's first novel, The Quinn Shanghai Circus, was released, which critics immediately began to compare with Thomas Pincher's books. Reviews of the novel were benevolent, Jerome Charin in The New York Review of Books noted that the novel is "a truly crazy book full of puzzles, truths, untruths, mentally retarded geniuses, necrophiles, magicians, dwarfs, circus artists, secret agents ... a wonderful rethinking of the history of our century ” ^[6] . Nation noted that Whitmore is a deceptively clear stylist. If its syntax was as pretentious as Pinchon’s , or as frankly grandiose as Nabokov’s or Fuentes’s , his novels that went almost unnoticed could have attracted the attention they certainly deserve ” ^[7] . Although overall sales were small, one literary critic called the Jerusalem Quartet "the best intelligence metaphor in American prose in recent years." According to Publishers Weekly magazine ", Whitmore is" America's best unknown novelist ", and the Nile Shadows novel is" one of the most ambitious espionage novels in the history of literature " ^[8] .

Novels:

• Quin's Shanghai Circus - The Shanghai Quin Circus (1974)

Tetralogy The Jerusalem Quartet:

• Sinai Tapestry - The Sinai Tapestry (1977)
• Jerusalem Poker - Jerusalem Poker (1978)
• Nile Shadows - Nile Shadows (1983)
• Jericho Mosaic - “The Jericho Mosaic” (1987)

• Whitmore E. Jerusalem Poker. - M .: Eksmo, 2005 .-- S. 560. - ISBN 5-699-11731-8 .
• Whitmore E. Sinai tapestry. - M .: Eksmo, 2004 .-- S. 368. - ISBN 5-699-05520-7 .
• Whitmore E. Shanghai Quinn Circus. - M .: Eksmo, 2006 .-- S. 368. - ISBN 5-699-14178-2 .

Magical realism

Edward Whitmore