Evan Biddle Shipman (October 23, 1904 – June 24, 1957) was an American novelist, poet, newspaperman and soldier. After schooling in New England, Shipman befriended fellow American writer Ernest Hemingway in 1920s Paris and wrote poems and articles for various American magazines. In 1937, he aided the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded in battle.[1] He returned to the United States in 1938 and served in the U.S. Army during World War II as a war correspondent.[1] He was a long-time columnist of The Morning Telegraph and a recognized expert on horse breeding.[1] The Evan Shipman Handicap is named for him.[1]
Life
Evan Biddle Shipman was born in Plainfield, New Hampshire, on October 23, 1904, son of the playwright and editor Louis Evan Shipman and his wife Ellen McGowan Biddle Shipman, the landscape architect.[1] He attended various schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts and read widely, encouraged by his father; although a lifelong love of horse racing affected his attendance.[1]
In 1937, partly convinced by Hemingway, Shipman, whose marriage had failed, decided to devote himself to the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. He first drove ambulances and led American volunteers for the Lincoln Brigade from France into Spain across the Pyrenees, and then saw action as an infantryman in the battles of Jarama and Bruente, being badly wounded at Brunete.[1] He carried shrapnel fragments in his leg until his death.[3]
Shipman returned to the United States in 1938 and found work as a columnist of the New York Morning Telegraph, but soon after America's entry into World War II in 1941, he enlisted with the U.S. Army and became a war correspondent.[1] He was sergeant major of the 16th Armored Division's 16th Regiment, and was also with the 787th Tank Battalion until its deactivation in 1945.[3]
After the end of World War II, Shipman returned to journalism and eventually became a featured columnist of the Morning Telegraph.[1] He was also a recognized expert on thoroughbred and harness racing and a columnist of the Daily Racing Form.[3] He died of cancer on June 24, 1957, in New York Hospital,[4] and was buried in Gilkey Cemetery in Plainfield, New Hampshire.[5] The Evan Shipman Handicap at Belmont Park was later named for him.[1]
Personal
While living in the United States, Shipman married Elizabeth Gerwig of Pittsburgh in 1934.[6] The union was troubled by alcoholism, and Elizabeth, who became insane, was confined to an asylum, while Shipman went back to Paris in 1937.[1]
Works
Free For All (New York: Scribner's, 1935), a novel about harness racing (trotters)[2]
"Mazeppa" (1936), a poem which likens women to flowers, partly based on his wife[1][2][7]
The Racing Memoirs of John Hertz as told to Evan Shipman (Chicago, Privately Printed, 1954), non-fiction[2][3]
Literary allusions
Evan Shipman is mentioned in Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway's account of Spanish bullfighting, as a fellow admirer of a certain half-bred racehorse, a steeplechaser, named Uncas. "Uncas, when he won a classic steeplechase race at Auteuil at odds of better than ten to one, carrying my money on him, I felt profound affection for. But if you should ask me what eventually happened to this animal that I was so fond of that Evan Shipman and I were nearly moved to tears when speaking of the noble beast, I would have to answer that I do not know." Hemingway went on to portray his friend at greater length in the section of A Moveable Feast (1964) titled "Evan Shipman at the Lilas".[2]
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