Horgan, Paul, 1903-

Paul Horgan. Photo by Cynthia Farah Haines. Part of Writers of the Southwest Collection. PICT 986-008.

Paul Horgan was born August 1903, in Buffalo, New York. His family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1914, due to his father's poor health. Horgan attended New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI), in Roswell, N.M. 1919-1923. Relocated to Rochester, N.Y., after the death of his father in 1923, Horgan attended the Eastman School of Music. In 1926 he returned to Roswell to become the librarian at NMMI and stayed there until 1942.

Horgan's writing career took off between 1924-1925, when his first published poems appeared in poetry magazines. His short stories, often about spiritual conflict, were first published in 1929. Thereafter, they appeared in a variety of magazines, and were also published together as collections. Horgan's interest in music and art set the stage for his first published novel, The Fault of Angels, a story about fine arts in a small town. His second novel, No Quarter Given, was about a composer who lived in Santa Fe, N.M. Many of his other short stories and novels were set in New Mexico as well. Over the course of his writing career, Horgan produced seventeen novels, four volumes of short stories, five biographies, and a two volume history. He won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1955 for his history of the Rio Grande entitled, The Great River, and again in 1975 for the biography, Lamy of Santa Fe.

In 1959 Horgan took a position at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. He stayed there, teaching and writing, for the remainder of his life. Horgan died in Middletown in 1995.

From the guide to the Paul Horgan Manuscripts, 1935-1942, (University of New Mexico. Center for Southwest Research.)