Arthur Stratton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arthur Stratton was an American author and traveller of the 20th century.
Born in 1911 in Massachusetts, he had an extremely varied life. He was educated at Bowdoin College in Maine and at Columbia University. He was in France on the outbreak of the World War II, and he joined the French Army as a volunteer. In 1940, as an ambulance driver in France, he was the first foreign volunteer to be decorated by the French Army during the war. He was to receive the Croix de guerre twice.
Two years later, while serving with the Free French Forces in the Eighth Army commmanded by Montgomery, he was badly wounded at Bir Hakeim in the Libyan desert. After his recovery, he moved to Turkey and taught English at Robert College in İstanbul. It is during this period that he wrote his first major book, a biography of Sinan the Architect. After the war, he travelled widely, returning to Turkey often and also living in Greece, Madagascar and India. Madagascar was to inspire him his second major book, a history of the country presented in the form of a biography weaving back and forth between the past and the present, and India his third.
An Arthur James Stratton (d. 1955) was a British architect and writer of many books on English architecture. A full namesake was an American actor of the 1920s and 1930s. [1].
[edit] References
- ^ IMDB File: Arthur Stratton, the actor (English). IMDB.
[edit] Books
- [1] Arthur Stratton (1972). Sinan: Biography of One of the World's Greatest Architects and a Portrait of the Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire ISBN 0333029011 (in English). Macmillan Publishers.
- [2] Arthur Stratton. The Great Red Island: A biography of Madagascar (in English).
- [3] Arthur Stratton (1955). One man's India (in English). W.W. Norton & Company, New York City.
