Kenneth Church Lamott (1923-1979) was an American author of novels and nonfiction and a contributor of many articles to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yo...lihat lebih banyakKenneth Church Lamott (1923-1979) was an American author of novels and nonfiction and a contributor of many articles to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Horizon, Yale Review, Harper’s, Newsweek and Contact magazine, of which he was editor in the early 1960’s.
He was born on April 8, 1923 in Tokyo, the son of a Presbyterian missionary teaching at a mission college there. The family returned to the United States in 1938. Lamott took up engineering studies at Yale two years later. After the war broke out in the Pacific, he joined the Navy, which sent him to its language school and on to the Pacific theater to interrogate Japanese prisoners of war.
He returned to Yale and earned a degree in English, and then went to Washington to serve as information officer of the State Department’s Far Eastern Commission until 1951.
For his first novel, The Stockade (1952), Lamott drew on his Pacific experiences, recounting tales of a group of Navy men and Marines guarding a group of natives confined within a stockade on an Island in the Pacific as the war ends. More successful novels soon followed, including: The White Sands of Shirahama (1954), in which the serene life of vacationing missionaries at a Japanese sea resort is disrupted by the arrival of a sophisticated American couple from China and a young schoolteacher; Who Killed Mr. Crittenden (1963), a carefully researched account of a classic San Francisco murder case; The Moneymakers (1969), a profile of the superrich; and Anti‐California (1971), a series of vignettes harshly critical of some life styles he observed around him.
Lamott was also was the author of television scripts, including Science in Action, produced by the California Academy of Sciences.
He was married to Dorothy Wyles, and they had three children, including American novelist and non-fiction writer Anne Lamott.
He died of cancer in Bolinas, California on August 18, 1979, aged 56.lihat lebih sedikit