Millicent Bell has written widely acclaimed literary and biographical studies of nineteenth-and twentieth-century English and American novelists. Her major works include a study of Nathaniel Hawthorne's view of the artist's vocation and a detailed account of the twelve-year personal and literary friendship of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Bell's most impressive work is her definitive biography of John P. Marquand, the immensely successful American fiction writer of the mid twentieth century. It is a meticulously researched and penetrating analysis of the relationship between Marquand's personal life and his novels. Bell's scrupulous biographical method and graceful narrative style make her works valuable and readable both for the general audience and for specialists in American biographical and cultural studies.

Born on 14 October 1919 in New York City, Millicent Lang Bell graduated with an A.B. in English from New York University in 1942 and earned her M.A. in 1951 and her Ph...