Francis Russell papers

Francis Russell was born on January 12, 1910, in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended both the Roxbury Latin School and the Boston Latin School before matriculating at Harvard, where he spent two years. He then studied in Grenoble, Toulouse and Breslau before entering Bowdoin College in September of 1931. He graduated cum laude in 1933 and received a Master of Arts degree from Harvard in 1937. During World War II he was a captain in the Black Watch Royal Canadian Highlanders. After the war he stayed in Germany for several years as a political intelligence officer for the British. A historian and author, he wrote numerous articles and novels, including The Great Interlude, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, The Making of the Nation, A City in Terror, and Sacco & Vanzetti: the Case Resolved. Beginning in the 1950s, Russell contributed to American Heritage, Horizon magazine and other publications. He received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1964 and 1965, was a director of the Goethe Society of New England, and was a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. He was a member of the Black Watch Association and the Boston Authors' Club, was the recipient of the Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America in 1962, and was the recipient of the Friendship Award of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1966 he married Sharon Soong, whom he divorced in 1981 and with whom he had one daughter, Sara. On March 16, 1984, he married Rosalind Lawson. Russell died on March 20, 1989, in Falmouth, Massachusetts.