Seager, Allan, 1906-1968

American author, editor, and teacher; b. John Braithwaite Allan Seager.

Biography

Born in Adrian, Michigan on February 5, 1906, Allan Seager, author and biographer of the poet Theodore Roethke, moved with his family at the age of eleven to Memphis, Tennessee where he lived until his college days. He was graduated from the University of Michigan in 1930, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He then won a Rhodes Scholarship and went to Oriel College. Oxford in the fall of 1930. While at Oxford he contracted tuberculosis and subsequently returned to America for treatment. He later resumed his studies in England, after which he became editor of the magazine Vanity Fair until it ceased publication. He then commenced his teaching career in English Department at the University of Michigan, a post he retained until he died of cancer on May 10, 1968, with the exception of the academic year 1944-1945 when he was a visiting professor at Bennington.

Seager was the author of numerous short stories published in Esquire, Colliers. Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping and other magazines. Some of these stories were collected into two books - The Old Man of the Mountain and A Frieze of Girls. His novels, among them Equinox (1943), The Inheritance (1948), Amos Berry (1953) and Death of Anger (1960), received mixed critical acclaim.

In 1965 Theodore Roethke's widow, Beatrice, commissioned Seager to write a biography of her husband. Seager's friendship with Roethke had been of long duration, and with the financial assistance of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he interviewed acquaintances of the poet from various periods of his life, his travels taking him as far as Dublin. The biography, The Glass House went through many revisions and was considerably altered before its publication in October 1968 after Seager's death.