Arthur Meeker Jr.

Arthur Meeker Jr. (November 3, 1902 – October 22, 1971) was an American novelist and journalist.

Early life

Meeker was born in Chicago to a prominent, wealthy family on November 3, 1902. He had three sisters. His father retired from his position as an executive with Armour & Co. in 1928 and died in 1946.^[1] His mother Grace Murray Meeker died in 1948.^[2] The family lived on Prairie Avenue and also owned Arcady Farm near Lake Forest.^[3] Meeker studied play-writing at Harvard and Princeton, but left without graduating.

Career

He wrote society and travel articles for the Chicago American, the Chicago Daily News, and the Chicago Herald. He achieved critical acclaim as the author of several historical novels, notably The Ivory Mischief, which was a Book of the Month Club selection.^[4] Time said "It seems another of those long (840-page), thickly upholstered Jumbos of period fiction.... But unlike most books of the type, its re-creation is solid, convincing and intimate, its characterizations are shrewd, its style adult, and even the upholstery is interesting."^[5] He wrote two novels set in contemporary Chicago, The Far Away Music and Prairie Avenue, which the New York Times called a "light and colorful entertainment."^[6]

At the start of his career as a novelist, one report of literary events said:^[7]

Quite a formidable person is Arthur Meeker Jr., whose first novel...has just been published....According to his publishers, he has been dubbed "the embryo boy-king of Chicago society" and is "in a fair way to become the Ward McAllister of the West." We are informed further that "hostesses tremble at his epigrams, and the fact that his father was host to Queen Marie and his Royal Highness, David Windsor, is forgotten in dread of the son's gift for putting into words the amusement he finds in watching the pranks of his own 'set'. In brief, a lift of the Meeker eyebrow holds somewhat the same terror that once inhered in the late Mrs. Potter Palmer's frown." Somebody ought to write a book about Mr. Meeker.

Meeker spent part of each year in Europe, became fluent in French, and purchased a chalet in Switzerland on the Bürgenstock above Lucerne.^[8] He often accompanied the Chicago socialite-journalist Fanny Butcher and her husband on tours of Europe.^[9] He gave up his Chicago home in 1951 for an apartment at 4 Gramercy Park in New York City.^[8] Meeker served as president of the Society of Midland Authors^[8][10] and with Butcher co-founded the Chicago chapter of P.E.N. about 1931, serving initially as its secretary.^[11]

Personal life

Meeker's grave at Graceland Cemetery

Letters he wrote to his family from Europe in the 1930s suggest he was homosexual.^[12] He had a thirty-year relationship with Robert Molnar, with whom he lived from at least 1940 until Meeker's death in their New York City home on October 22, 1971.^[12] Meeker named Molnar his heir.^[12]

Works

Novels:

• American Beauty (Covici-Friede, 1929)^[7]
• Strange Capers (Covici-Friede, 1931)^[13]
• Vestal Virgin (NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1934)^[14]
• Sacrifice to the Graces (NY: D. Appleton-Century, 1937)^[15]
• The Ivory Mischief (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942)
• The Far Away Music (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945)^[16]
• Prairie Avenue (NY: Knopf, 1949)
• The Silver Plume (NY: Knopf, 1952)

Memoir:

• Chicago, With Love: A Polite and Personal History (NY: Knopf, 1955)^[17]

Notes

1. New York Times: "Arthur Meeker," February 6, 1946, accessed September 2, 2011
2. New York Times: "Mrs. Arthur Meeker," November 21, 1948, accessed September 2, 2011
3. Clive Aslet, The American Country House (Yale University Press, 2005), 63, 112, 143; Kim Coventry, Daniel Meyer, Arthur H. Miller, Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest: Architecture and Landscape Design, 1856-1940 (NY: W.W. Norton, 2003), 108
4. New York Times: John Chamberlain, "Books of the Times," January 2, 1942, accessed September 2, 2011: "Mr. Meeker has a fine talent for historical re-creation, but the two shallow-brained sisters...can hardly sustain him for 800-odd pages even though their beauty lasted well into middle age."
5. TIME: "Books: Tale of Two Sisters," January 1, 1942, accessed September 2, 2011
6. New York Times: "The New Fiction: Five Titles of Interest," May 1, 1949, accessed September 2, 2011
7. New York Times: "Books and Authors," February 17, 1929, accessed September 2, 2011. Queen Marie of Romania visited Chicago in 1926. New York Times: "Communists Jeer Marie at Chicago," November 14, 1926, accessed September, 2011. David Windsor is better known as the Duke of Windsor. Mrs. Potter Palmer was a figure in Chicago society in the late 19th century. Ward McAllister was the self-appointed arbiter of New York society from the 1860s to the early 1890s.
8. John Clubbe, Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture (Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 26-31
9. Fanny Butcher, Many Lives–One Love (NY, Harper & Row, 1972), 81, 276-7, 300
10. Society of Midland Authors: "Presidents" Archived 2012-03-31 at the Wayback Machine, accessed September 2, 2011
11. Butcher, 81-2, 305, 380
12. Newberry Library: Arthur Meeker, Jr. Papers, accessed September 2, 2011. Correspondence indicates he supported a young man named Allen.
13. New York Times: "Arthur Meeker Jr. Writes Novel," May 9, 1931, accessed September 2, 2011
14. New York Times: "The World of Music," March 4, 1934, accessed September 2, 2011: a "picture of operatic life in per-war Germany"
15. New York Times: "Books Published Today," January 29, 1937, accessed September 2, 2011: "A novel of Americans in Europe in Victorian Days."
16. New York Times: "Books Published Today," November 1, 1945, accessed September 2, 2011: "A novel of Chicago in 1850". The Rotarian, February 1946: "The fine recreation of mid-19th-Century Chicago, joined with an absorbing story and fully rounded and memorable characters, will delight every discerning reader."
17. New York Times: Frederick Babcock, "People to Talk About," October 16, 1955, accessed September 2, 2011

External links

• Arthur Meeker, Jr. Papers at the Newberry Library