Marian Brown St. Onge

Marian Brown St. Onge, BIO member and member of the Boston Biographers Group (BBG), poet, and women’s studies leader at Boston College, died August 18. She was 77.  

Marian Fullerton Brown was born on August 17, 1944, in Montclair, New Jersey. Marian’s educational odyssey soared from there on to Agnes Scott College (a women’s college in Decatur, Georgia), and later to The University of Colorado Boulder, where her fascination with the French language and passionate wanderlust led her to the University of Bordeaux in France for her senior year. She graduated with a degree in European History and French in 1966, followed by a two-year residence in London, where she worked in the fashion department at the Sunday Observer. She published her first book, Try Glasgow: An Uncommon Living Guide to the City (Heatherbank Press), coauthored by her friend Susan Hight, in 1976. Marian went on to graduate studies at Boston College, earning an M.A. (1975) and a doctorate (1984) in French literature, all while teaching at the college and raising her sons. Before her death, she was finalizing the manuscript of a major historical project (for which she received a Norman Mailer Fellowship Award)—a biography of Louis Favre, French World War II Resistance leader and Catholic priest. Fellow BIO member and BBG member Bernice Lerner said of St. Onge:

“I am shocked and so sad. Marian was one of the greats. I loved hearing about Rev. Favre; I loved her passion for her project. I appreciated her generosity, her helpfulness, her support. I’ve missed her presence at our virtual meetings this past year . . . I will miss her going forward.”

 

Phillip Herring

Phillip Herring, former U.S. Navy Officer, academic, and biographer of Djuna Barnes, died September 28. He was 83.  

Phillip F. Herring passed away among family. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas in 1958, Herring served as an officer in the U.S. Navy in West Germany. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1966 with a Ph.D. from the Department of English. He received an appointment at the University of Virginia, and by 1970 was invited to join the faculty of the English Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with tenure. Herring was a popular teacher of Modernist literature, but in addition had a long career as a scholarly writer and biographer, producing important works on James Joyce and Djuna Barnes. He first made his name as a Joyce scholar with the groundbreaking Joyce’s Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum (The University Press of Virginia, 1972). This book and its follow-up volume from 1977 established Herring as a leading researcher in Joyce studies. In 1987, Herring’s critical analysis, Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle (Princeton University Press, 1987), appeared to admiring reviews. Herring later shifted the focus of his writing and produced the 1995 biography Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (Viking). 

 

Donald Bacon

Donald Bacon, a Washington, D.C. journalist and biographer of former Speakers of the House Sam Rayburn and Nicholas Longworth, died July 11. He was 86.  

Donald Bacon’s political and government writings included cover stories and reports for the Washington Star as a Washington, D.C. staff writer (1962–1963). He was also a journalist for Newhouse News Service in Washington, D.C., first as a congressional correspondent and then as  White House senior correspondent and columnist (1962–1975). He joined U.S. News and World Report in Washington, D.C., serving as an associate editor (1975–1979), senior editor (1979–1981), and assistant managing editor (1981–1988). He was senior editor of Nation’s Business (1988–1989) and became project director and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the U.S. Congress (1989). Donald’s publications included: The New Millionaires (1961); Congress and You (1969); Rayburn: A Biography (with D. B. Hardeman) (1987); and most recently, the biographical volume Nicholas Longworth: The Aristocrat Speaker (with Anthony M. Champagne) (2021). 

Dick Leonard

Dick Leonard, journalist and historian of British prime ministers, died June 24. He was 90.  

Dick Leonard was a journalist, a historian, and a short-lived politician, serving as Labour MP in the 1970s. His career in news saw him cover Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro at the U.N. General Assembly (1960), and he was part of the press corps on John F. Kennedy’s presidential election jet (1961). Back in the United Kingdom, he was in charge of BBC’s televised coverage of the general elections of 1964 and 1966. In 2014, he published A History of British Prime Ministers: Walpole to Cameron (Palgrave Macmillan).