Entity | Edmund Fuller

Edmund Maybank Fuller (3 March 1914 – 29 January 2001) was an American educator, editor, novelist, historian, and literary critic. Fuller directed plays at Longwood Gardens, taught playwriting at the New School for Social Research, and wrote a history of drama for students at the secondary-school level. His biography of Milton (1944) is enlivened by novelistic techniques which he justified, in an "Author's Note," by appealing to the example of other biographers from Plutarch on down. This led in 1946 to the most important of his novels, A Star Pointed North, a historical novel based on the life of Frederick Douglass which includes as characters William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, and his successor as president, Andrew Johnson. Other novels followed: Brothers Divided (1951), The Corridor (1963), and Flight (1970). In the Douglass novel Fuller is said to have "bridged an aching gap in American history." As a historian and biographer he was attracted to off-the-beaten-track topics. In Journey into the Self (1950) he wove together the surviving papers of Gertrude Stein's brother, Leo Stein, in a biographical narrative, and two years later the Vermont State Board of Education published his Vermont: A History of the Green Mountain State. Tinkers and Genius: The Story of the Yankee Inventors followed in 1955; God in the White House: The Faiths of American Presidents, co-authored with David E. Green, in 1968; and Prudence Crandall: An Incident of Racism in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut in 1971.