ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Francis Russell has contributed historical and critical articles to such periodicals as American Heritage, Horizon, The Yale Review, The Antioch Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and abroad to Irish Writing, The Observer, The Countryman, Time & Tide, and others. It was while serving on a jury in Dedham, Massachusetts, thirty-two years after Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried and condemned in the same courtroom, that he began his investigation of the written and unwritten history of the case that resulted in Tragedy in Dedham.
Born in Boston in 1910, he attended the Roxbury Latin School. Following several undergraduate years in France and Germany, he returned to New England and graduated from Bowdoin in 1933. In 1937 he received an A.M. from Harvard. During World War II he served in the Canadian Army as a captain in the Intelligence Corps. After the war he was a political intelligence officer with the British 30th Corps in Hildesheim, Germany. In 1955 his volume of critical essays on Joyce, Kafka, and Gertrude Stein was published in England as Three Studies in 20th Century Obscurity. He is co-author of The American Heritage Book of the Pioneer Spirit. He lives in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts.