William Fifield

William Fifield (1916-1987) was an American novelist and nonfiction writer. He published several works on Jean Cocteau and recorded He also recorded a conversation with the mime Marcel Marceau.
A short story writer, he won an O. Henry Award in 1943. He was awarded a Huntington Hartford Fellowship in 1960.
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William Fifield (1916-1987) was an American novelist, nonfiction writer, essayist, and author of short stories. He published several works on Jean Cocteau and recorded He also recorded a conversation with the mime Marcel Marceau.
He won an O. Henry Award for one of his short stories in 1943. The O. Henry prizes are "widely regarded as the nation's most prestigious awards for short fiction," according to the Atlantic Monthly. He was awarded a Huntington Hartford Fellowship for creative writing in 1960.
==Early life and education==
William Fifield was the older of two sons born to the Reverend L. (Lawrence) Wendell Fifield and Juanita “Nita,” maiden name Sloan.
William Fifield was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 5, 1916. He was the nephew of the Rev. James W. Fifield, Jr., the brother of Wendell Fifield. Their father was also a Congregational minister.
William Fifield grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Seattle, Washington. He attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, graduating magna cum laude as the student body president in 1937.
==Radio career==
Immediately after graduating, he went to work as a radio announcer, first for CBS and later for NBC. In addition to announcing, he became a program director and wrote scripts for “Suspense,” “Lights Out,” “The Whistler,” and other shows from the golden age of American radio. He also wrote for Orson Welles’ radio programs. While working in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, he began publishing short stories in national magazines, winning an O. Henry Award in 1943 for his story “The Fishermen of Pátzcuaro.” 
==Wartime service==
Fifield was a conscientious objector during World War II, working as a C.O. at three Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps. The first was in Big Flats, New York. It was an experimental farm, using trees and grasses to control soil erosion; they were grown on site and shipped out to states in the Northeast. The C.O.s worked the land.
His second camp was at Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island) in New York, where a number of the C.O.s were given rations, subjected to a starvation experiment meant to replicate the conditions on a life raft. According to the CPS Web site for his C.O. worker number, 2819:The project may have taken place at Metropolitan Research Unit, New York Medical College (?) and ran from February 1945 through January 1946. The American Friends Service Committee served as the oversight agency. Over a dozen men were assigned as volunteers.
The experiment sought to find the kind of rations to stock on life boats, the effects of drinking salt water, and ways to replace evaporation of body liquids while on a life raft. Several CPS men drank salt water; some ate the official navy rations.
One of the findings of the life raft ration studies was that a simple ration of candy and water was best for lifeboat diets.The third camp was a mental hospital, the Philadelphia State Hospital, known as Byberry, which had staff shortages during the war. The C.O.s served as orderlies and ward attendants, some on wards with violent patients. They brought their pacifist beliefs to the handling and restraint of the patients, igniting a reform of how the mentally ill were treated.
He published an account of C.O.s in Harper's Magazine in 1945, "Report from a Conscientious Objector."
In the meantime, his younger brother, Robert Edwin, went to war on the Pacific front, joining the U.S. Army Air Forces. He became a sergeant. He died at the age of 20 as a tail gunner over Kyushu, Japan, in July of 1945, two weeks before Victory over Japan Day, or V-J Day.
==Writing Career==
The author of several novels, he also wrote essays, a biography of Modigliani, and the Encyclopedia of Wines & Spirits, a classic reference work. He was its co-author with the wine promoter Alexis Lichine.
His novel The Devil’s Marchioness was about the notorious seventeenth-century poisoner, the Marquise de Brinvilliers.
He received a Huntington Hartford Foundation Award in 1960 for creative writing. The fellowship funded a stay of one to six months at an artists' colony in Rustic Canyon, a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles, California. It ran from 1951 to 1965 and was supported by Huntington Hartford, a philanthropist and A&P supermarket heir.
During the nearly forty years he lived in Europe, he met and developed friendships with many of the most talented creators of the twentieth century. His book In Search of Genius includes his conversations on the creative process with writers and artists he considered geniuses: Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Jean Giono, Jean Lurçat, Roberto Rossellini, Robert Graves, and Marcel Marceau.
The Paris Review published his interviews with Picasso, Cocteau, and Graves, reprinting the last two in the literary magazine’s Writers at Work book series. Caedmon Records (now Caedmon Audio) released two of his recorded conversations: Marcel Marceau Speaks (recorded in English), as well as Jean Cocteau: A Self-Portrait, A Conversation with William Fifield in French. In 1973, Editions Stock in Paris published a full-length version of the Cocteau interview, Jean Cocteau par Jean Cocteau. The following year, a monograph Fifield wrote about Cocteau’s life and works, Jean Cocteau, appeared in the Columbia Essays on Modern Writers series, Columbia University Press.
Fifield’s Cocteau works are part of a bilingual series, La série Cocteau / The Cocteau Series, reissued by the Times Two Publishing Company.
William Fifield returned to the United States in 1985 and spent the last two years of his life in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. At the time of his death, on December 14, 1987, he was working on the publication of a long novel about the Renaissance, Bull Borgia.
==Family life==
He married his first wife, the Oscar-winning actress Mercedes McCambridge in 1939. They had a son, John Lawrence Fifield, born in 1941. He was later adopted by McCambridge’s second husband, Fletcher Markle, a Canadian television producer, and took the last name Markle. He was a highly regarded futures trader, educated as an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Fifield’s second wife, also an actress, was Donna Hamilton (now Donna Shor). She had become a starlet at Twentieth Century Fox in 1946 at the same time as Marilyn Monroe, with whom she shared a dressing room. The studio later chose her over Monroe, releasing Monroe from her contract. During her time at Fox, Hamilton was a protégée of Joan Crawford. She had the lead female role in Gunmen of Abilene. It starred Alan "Rocky" Lane, later the voice of the talking horse "Mister Ed," and is on YouTube 
Fifield and his second wife had a twin boy and girl in 1954: Brian Robert, a real estate agent and computer consultant near Charlotte, North Carolina, and Donnali, a writer and editor in San Francisco, California. She translated and adapted the U.S. version of the companion book for the movie March of the Penguins (2005), originally published in France, and is the author of the family memoir William & Wendell: A Family Remembered.
His third wife, Aaltje Guyt (now Aaltje Verhille), was a Dutch model. Their daughter, Edwina, born in 1968, owns and operates a freight service in Asunción, Paraguay.
==Legacy==
The papers of William Fifield and other members of his family are stored at Archives West, Orbis Cascade Alliance, William Fifield Papers.
Category:1916 births
Category:People from Chicago, Illinois
Category:American novelists
Category:Non-fiction writers
Category:Essayists
Category:Author