Linden on the Saugus Branch
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Those who recall The Last Time I saw Paris know that Elliot Paul is incapable of being banal or tiresome. Thus there is nothing of the diary-like march of events in this record of his early years in the Boston suburb where he was born. Instead you will find a series of neatly dovetailed stories, anecdotes, character sketches, comedies, tragedies and singularly embellished observations all set out for your allurement like gems in a jewelerโs window.
Some of Mr. Paulโs tales of the people who lived out their lives in Linden will make you laugh, some may even tempt a tear. There are a fewโsuch as the story of Alice Townsend, the schoolteacher who found that her name had been written in snow with a stylus of strange originโthat may inspire the sincerest suggestion of a blush.
Linden on the Saugus Branch, a volume complete in itself, is another segment in what will ultimately be Elliot Paulโs life story: Items on the Grand Account. Both The Last Time I Saw Paris and The Life and Death of a Spanish Town are other books in this group.
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Elliot Harold Paul (1891-1958) was an American journalist and author. Born on February 10, 1891 in Linden, a part of Malden, Massachusetts, Paul graduated from Malden High School. He then worked in the U.S. West on the government Reclamation projects until 1914, when he returned home and took a job as a reporter covering legislative events at the State House in Boston. In 1917, he joined the U.S. Army Signals Corps to fight in WWI; he served in France where he fought in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel and in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. At war end he returned home and to a job as a journalist and began writing books, inspired by his military experiences. Three novels were published by 1925, when he left America to join many of his literary compatriots in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France. There, he worked for a time at the Chicago Tribuneโs International Edition (so-called Paris Edition), before joining Eugene and Maria Jolas as co-editor of the literary journal, transition. He eventually returned to the newspaper business, to the Paris Herald, and wrote further novels in his spare time. Owing to ill health, he moved to the Spanish village of Santa Eulalia on the island of Ibiza. Caught in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, he was inspired to write the well-received Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937). Returning to Paris, he produced detective fiction, featuring the amateur sleuth Homer Evans, and wrote one of his best works, The Last Time I Saw Paris (1942). Following the outbreak of WWII, Paul turned to Hollywood screenwriting, participating in the writing of ten Hollywood screenplays between 1941-53, the most remembered of which is the 1945 production, Rhapsody in Blue. He also wrote the screenplay for the Poverty Row production of New Orleans, a fictional history of Storyville jazz featuring Billie Holiday in her only acting role. Elliot Paul died on April 7, 1958 in Providence, Rhode Island.
