Francis Van Wyck Mason (November 11, 1901 – August 28, 1978) was an American historian and novelist. He had a long and prolific career as a writer spanning 50 years and including 78 published novels, many of which were well-received best sellers.
Biography
Early life and education
Van Wyck (pronounced Wike) Mason was born to a patrician Boston family which immigrated to North America during the 17th Century. His early life featured much adventure, even before he began writing. His first eight years he lived in Berlin and then Paris, where his grandfather served as U.S. Consul General, and during that time he learned the French language. Mason himself noted that he didn't learn English until he was nearly ten. After a few years in Illinois he left for Europe in 1917, while still a teenager, to fight in World War I. Like many future writers, he was an ambulance driver for a while. He then managed to enlist in the French Army, where he received decorations as an artillery officer, including the Legion of Honor. On Armistice Day, he was celebrating just his 17th birthday, yet had already joined the United States Army and achieved the rank of Lieutenant. After the war he went to preparatory school, then attended Harvard University, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1924. At one time during his college years, he was mistakenly arrested for murder. Having borrowed a dinner jacket, he was identified wrongly as a waiter who had committed a murder.
His hopes of entering the diplomatic corps were thwarted after his father's death, so Mason started an import business instead and spent the next few years traveling the world buying antiques and rugs. His travels included Europe, Russia, the Near East, North Africa (nine weeks with his own caravan), the West Indies, Central Africa, and a ride across Central America on horseback. He lived in New York City, served in a cavalry unit of the National Guard, and played quite a bit of polo. He indulged an interest in hunting the rest of his life.
Writing career and personal life
By 1927 a chance meeting with one of his college professors, John Gallishaw, encouraged him to try writing. He attended Gallishaw's course in short fiction on the condition that he pay for the course out of future sales. He married socialite Dorothy L. MacReady in New York City during November of that year. By May 1928 he had his first story published. He enjoyed immediate success selling to the pulp magazines, and sold 18 stories before his first rejection. The magazines paid well at that time, and he was soon able to build a comfortable home outside of Baltimore, Maryland. In 1930, he published his first novel, The Seeds Of Murder, which introduced Captain Hugh North, an agent of U.S. Army Intelligence. North was the hero in a long series of "intrigue" novels.
By 1931, he had settled into a career as an author of novels as well as short fiction, publishing his first historical novel in book form, Captain Nemesis, which was republished from an earlier pulp serial. The historical novel apparently did not sell well, because he resumed the mystery/intrigue genre, publishing a dozen or so volumes during the next seven years, including nine more about Hugh North.
Mason was still writing historical stories for the pulps during this period and during 1938 resumed the genre for a major novel, Three Harbours, about the early phases of the American Revolution. By this time Mason was doing very well financially, with residences in Bermuda and Nantucket, as well as Maryland. When delivering the manuscript of Three Harbours from Nantucket, he was caught in the middle of the New England Hurricane of 1938. He made it to New York, and the book became very popular. It changed his emphasis to historical fiction for the rest of his career, though he continued to write Hugh North stories until 1968.