Angell, Nicholas B.

Nicholas B. Angell is a nephew of the writer Evan Shipman; he is the son of Shipman's eldest sister, Ellen. Evan Shipman was a novelist, poet and journalist, best known as an authority on horse racing and a close friend of Ernest Hemingway. Born in Plainfield, New Hampshire in 1904, Shipman was among the close circle of expatriate American artists in Paris during the 1920s who were inadvertently memorialized by Gertrude Stein's denouncement of them all as "a lost generation." At that time, Shipman was publishing poetry in a number of magazines, including Transition, Scribner's, The New Republic and The Nation, and later in The New Yorker and Esquire. By the 1930s, Shipman was focusing more on prose and writing about horse racing, and in 1935 Scribner's published his novel about the trotting track, Free For All, which was praised by critics but sold poorly. In 1937, Shipman enlisted with the Loyalists to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and later served in the United States Army during World War II. After the wars, Shipman spent much of the remainder of his life at the tracks, writing about horse racing as a featured columnist for The Morning Telegraph and Daily Racing Form until his death from cancer in 1957, at the age of fifty-three.