Raisbeck, Kenneth

Kenneth Romaver-Ron Raisbeck (1899-1931) was born in Odell, Illinois, the youngest of nine children. He graduated from Bloomington High School in Bloomington, Illinois (Class of 1916) and Harvard College (Class of 1920, A.B. 1921). While at Harvard, Raisbeck was an assistant to (and later a good friend of) George Pierce Baker for his 47 Workshop play writing course and a close friend of American novelist Thomas Wolfe, whom he met in 1920. Raisbeck was said to be openly homosexual while at Harvard. In 1926, Raisbeck toured Paris with Wolfe and other friends, Marjorie Crocker Fairbanks (Mrs. Sydney Fairbanks) and Miss Helen Harding. At some point Wolfe and Raisbeck had an argument and continued their trips separately. Wolfe and Raisbeck never saw each other again.

Raisbeck became a playwright and screenwriter and lived in various locations in the United States. As a close friend of G. P. Baker, he spent time at Baker's summer home in New Hampshire. His plays consisted of Torches (1923), Rock Me, Julie which played for two weeks on Broadway in New York City (1931), and The lady of [in?] Spain which was never produced. Late in the 1920s he worked on screenplay scenarios in Hollywood and in 1931 he came East again. He was found dead in a Westport, Connecticut cemetery on September 30, 1931; the cause of death developed into a controversy but many said he was murdered by strangulation. The killer was never found.

Raisbeck was the model for the character Frank Starwick in Wolfe's second autobiographical novel, Of time and the river.

Marjorie Crocker Fairbanks was a close friend of Raisbeck, and for a time, the wife of Sydney Fairbanks. Sydney Van Kleek Fairbanks (1895-1985, Harvard (Class of 1917) A.B. 1920, JD 1925, AM 1933, PhD 1936) was the founder of the Harvard Poetry Society, a playwright, and author and former attaché to the Italian Ambassador. Austen Crocker Fairbanks was their child.

Biographical information taken from: Wolfe, Thomas, 1900-1938. The Starwick episodes ; edited, with an introduction by Richard S. Kennedy. Akron, Ohio: Thomas Wolfe Society, 1989.

From the guide to the Kenneth Raisbeck papers, 1916-1938., (Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University)