Grover C. Amen Papers

Grover Cleveland Amen was born in New York City on June 23, 1932 to John Harlan Amen, who made his name as a racket-buster during the 1920s and 1930s, and Marion Cleveland, daughter of President Grover Cleveland. He attended St. Bernard’s and Philips Exeter Academy in New York, where his grandfather Harlan Page Amen had previously been headmaster. He left the Academy before completing his degree and traveled to New Orleans, where he hoped to focus his energy on writing.

His early departure from the Academy did not prevent his admission to Oberlin College in 1950, and Amen moved to Ohio and studied English, graduating in 1954. While attending Oberlin, he served as both writer and editor for the “Yeoman,” a literary publication. He also participated in the 1951 Mock United Nations convention. Upon graduating, he moved back to the east coast to pursue journalism, starting his journalistic career as a reporter for the Waterbury Republican of Waterbury, Connecticut. He left this position in 1956 for an editorial post at Dun’s Review in New York City, and in 1957 became a writer and reporter for The New Yorker magazine, working primarily on the “Talk of the Town” section. He remained in New York, making his home in Brooklyn, for the rest of his life. Amen continued to pursue his personal writing ambitions and several of his poems and stories were published in The New Yorker.

Grover Amen married Barbara Sassoon Lyons in 1963. Three years later, in 1966, they had a son, John, who would be Amen’s only child. Grover Amen continued in his post at The New Yorker until 1962. Oberlin College awarded him the Haskell Fellowship for 1963–64, enabling him to move to France in order to write poetry and fiction. After the fellowship position, Amen worked as a free-lance writer and published a book entitled Daytop: Three Addicts & Their Cure (co-author, Daniel Casriel, M.D.; Hill & Wang, 1971) as well as writing and editing for publications such as Arts Magazine and The New Yorker, and publishing houses such as Macmillan and McGraw-Hill. Amen’s poems and short stories continued to be published in a variety of publications, including Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Grand Street, the New England Review, and Poetry: London.

Grover Amen’s writing began to grow in magnitude as his free-lance career allowed him to devote his energy to these projects. A short story entitled “The Scholar of Bourbon Street,” originally published in a 1965 edition of The New Yorker, expanded into a full-length novel that he worked on until the time of his death. Likewise, Amen began to write longer works of poetry; he completed a full-length book of poems, F-Train Ramble, and established the Reluctant Buddha Press in 1982 in order to print it. A second book of poetry, The Spouse Whose Address was the Sea, was completed in the mid-1980s, and excerpts from it appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review and Grand Street, though it was never published in its entirety.

Amen also widened the scope of his writing to embrace translations: his work on Baudelaire’s poem, “Une Charogne,” appeared in the publication Translation, and his translation of “The Seafarer” along with scholarly notes earned him a Master’s degree in Liberal Arts from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York in 1990. He held other positions of employment after leaving The New Yorker, in addition to his free-lance writing and editing. In particular, he worked as Managing Editor of a newsletter for the CETA Artists Project at the Cultural Council Foundation in New York. Here, he coordinated other artists and writers to report on their work with inner-city neighborhoods.

His creative work took another new shape when he began painting in the 1970s. Grover Amen’s paintings appeared in both solo and group shows dating from 1975 until 1990 at a wide variety of galleries, including the Atlantic Gallery in New York, Jorgenson Gallery in Connecticut, Pleiades Gallery in New York, Arthur Houghton Gallery at the Cooper Union School of Art, Newhouse Gallery in Staten Island, Brooklyn Arts & Culture Association Downtown Cultural Center, One World Trade Center, and neighborhood schools and cultural centers in Brooklyn. The neighborhood and home of Brooklyn influenced Grover Amen’s life, as is illustrated by his poetry.

>Barbara Sassoon died in 1971, leaving Amen to remarry Maye Critzas on July 12, 1975. The couple separated in 1983. Amen met the playwright Elizabeth Albrecht in 1986, and their relationship spanned eleven years until Amen’s death on June 13, 1997.

Sources Consulted

Student file of Grover C. Amen, RG 28/2.

Biography written by Elizabeth Albrecht, included in the Grover C. Amen Papers, Series I. Biographical File, OCA.