Women and Thomas Harrow: A Novel

John P. Marquand

Jul 2015 · Open Road Media

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“Women and Thomas Harrow is Grade A Marquand, spellbindingly readable, smooth as cream in its polished technical craftsmanship, sardonically witty and filled with a special sort of wry and melancholy worldly wisdom.” —The New York Times

Playwright Thomas Harrow followed his first Broadway smash with Hollywood celebrity and became the toast of theaters from coast to coast. But the road to riches and fame has been anything but smooth. Now in his fifties, Thomas’s three unhappy marriages have caused significant emotional and financial damage, and the disastrous failure of his musical Porthos of Paris will now force him to sell the beloved Federalist house he bought in his hometown of Clyde, Massachusetts.

Tom’s search for the causes of his current distress takes him back to his youth and through each decisive moment of his life: the literary successes, the hack work, the love affairs that turned sour. He married three charming, vivacious women—Rhoda, Laura, and Emily—yet never figured out how to share his thoughts and feelings with them. Partly the work was to blame, as the demands of his artistic life often ran counter to domestic arrangements. But with the wisdom of experience, Tom can also see that his character judgments were often mistaken, and that, despite his wit, charm, and intelligence, there is a fundamental part of himself that remains shrouded in mystery. Is there still time to unlock his heart, or has the window for love closed to him?
 
An honest and moving portrait of a successful man’s never-ending quest for happiness, Women and Thomas Harrow is one of John P. Marquand’s most autobiographical novels.

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John P. Marquand (1893–1960) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, proclaimed “the most successful novelist in the United States” by Life magazine in 1944. A descendant of governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, shipping magnates Daniel Marquand and Samuel Curzon, and famed nineteenth-century writer Margaret Fuller, Marquand always had one foot inside the blue-blooded New England establishment, the focus of his social satire. But he grew up on the outside, sent to live with maiden aunts in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the setting of many of his novels, after his father lost the once-considerable family fortune in the crash of 1907. From this dual perspective, Marquand crafted stories and novels that were applauded for their keen observation of cultural detail and social mores.

By the 1930s, Marquand was a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, where he debuted the character of Mr. Moto, a Japanese secret agent. No Hero, the first in a series of bestselling spy novels featuring Mr. Moto, was published in 1935. Three years later, Marquand won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Late George Apley, a subtle lampoon of Boston’s upper classes. The novels that followed, including H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), So Little Time (1943), B.F.’s Daughter (1946), Point of No Return (1949), Melvin Goodwin, USA (1952), Sincerely, Willis Wayde (1955), and Women and Thomas Harrow (1959), cemented his reputation as the preeminent chronicler of contemporary New England society and one of America’s finest writers.