Elliot Paul

Elliot Paul was born in Linden, Massachusetts. He graduated from Malden High School then worked in the west on the government Reclamation projects for several years, pausing to study Engineering at the University of Maine for a year. In 1914 he returned home and worked as a reporter covering legislative events at the State House in Boston. In 1917, he joined the U.S. Army to fight in World War I, and he served in France. After the war, he returned home, married his first wife, resumed working as a journalist, and began writing novels. His first novel, Indelible, was published in 1922. In 1925 he left the U.S. to join the writing community in Paris. He worked for the International Herald Tribune and then became co-editor of the literary journal transition. He left the journal a year to return journalism and to write more novels. He had completed three more books when he suffered a nervous breakdown and left Paris to recuperate in the Spanish village of Santa Eulalia on Ibiza. When the Spanish Civil War forced him to flee Spain, he returned to Paris and continued to write. When World War II began, he returned to the U.S., and in 1952 he moved to Hollywood, California, where he started screen-writing in addition to novel-writing. In 1957 he returned to Providence, Rhode Island, where he died in 1958.