Titles by the Author East Side, West Side

Marcia Davenport

Marcia Davenport was the daughter of the famous soprano Alma Gluck and spent much of her childhood in the opera houses of Europe and America. Except for her books, it was a lonely existence for a little girl. She was educated in the United States, attended Wellesley College, and received her bachelor's degree from the University of Grenoble in France.

After a brief marriage and a stint as an advertising copywriter, she joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1928. The following year she married Russell Davenport, managing editor of Fortune magazine. During the Thirties Mrs. Davenport wrote her first book, a biography of Mozart, was music critic for Stage magazine, and was a commentator on the Metropolitan Opera Satuday afternoon boradcasts. In 1936 her first novel, Of Lena Geyer, was published. The Valley of Decision came out in 1942 and was on the best seller lists for some time.

During World War II she worked for Czechoslovakia, to which she had formed a great attachment during her girlhood travels, and then lived in Prague from 1945 until the Communist coup d'etat in 1948. She then went to Lake Como in Northern Italy, where she lived for part of every year, returning frequently to her New York apartment. East Side, West Side appeared in 1947 and, like The Valley of Decision, was made into a motion picture. My Brother's Keeper, a novel based on the famous case of the mysterious Collyer brothers, was published in 1954. The Constant Image, published in 1960, never achieved the popularity of her earlier novels.