Paul Alexander Bartlett (1909-1990) was both a writer and an artist, born in Moberly, Missouri, and educated at Oberlin College, the University of Arizona, the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, and the Instituto de Bellas Artes in Guadalajara. His work can be divided into three categories: He is the author of many novels, short stories, and poems; second, as a fine artist, his drawings, illustrations, and paintings have been exhibited in more than 40 one-man shows in leading galleries, including the Los Angeles County Museum, the Atlanta Art Museum, the Bancroft Library, the Richmond Art Institute, the Brooks Museum, the Instituto-Mexicano-Norteamericano in Mexico City, and many other galleries; and, third, he devoted much of his life to the most comprehensive study of the haciendas of Mexico that has been undertaken.
Three hundred and fifty of his pen-and-ink illustrations of the haciendas and more than one thousand hacienda photographs make up the Paul Alexander Bartlett Collection held by the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas, and form part of a second diversified collection held by the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming, which also includes an extensive archive of Bartlett's literary work, fine art, and letters. A third archive consisting primarily of Bartlett's literary work is held by the Department of Special Collections at UCLA. Bartlett's book about the history and life on the haciendas, including a selection of his illustrations and photographs, was published by the University Press of Colorado in 1990 under the title The Haciendas of Mexico: An Artist's Record.
Paul Alexander Bartlett's fiction has been commended by many authors, among them Pearl Buck, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, James Michener, Upton Sinclair, Evelyn Eaton, and many others. He was the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, from such organizations as the Leopold Schepp Foundation, the Edward MacDowell Association, the New School for Social Research, the Huntington Hartford Foundation, the Montalvo Foundation, Yaddo, and the Carnegie Foundation. His novel When the Owl Cries received national acclaim; his fine art has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Mexico; his poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies and has been published in individual volumes of his collected poetry. Bartlett was very prolific and left to the archives of his work many as yet unpublished manuscripts, including poetry, short stories, and novels, as well as more than a thousand paintings and illustrations.
His wife, Elizabeth Bartlett, a widely published and internationally recognized poet, is the author of seventeen published books of poetry, more than one thousand individually published poems, numerous short stories and essays in leading literary quarterlies and anthologies, and, as the founder of Literary Olympics, Inc., served as the editor of a series of multi-language volumes of international poetry to honor the work of outstanding contemporary poets.
The author of this Introduction (Paul and Elizabeth Bartlett's only child)] apparently inherited their writer's gene and has published books and articles in the fields of philosophy and psychology.
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Forward, Children!
PORTRAIT
Orville Dennison was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. He had the body of an athlete, the body of a crewman and a tennis player.
His eyes were brown with flecks of grey in them. He had brown hair and combed it straight back and when it was long it bulged out on the sides and had waves that crossed from ear to ear, waves that were sun bleached on the top.