Alexander Eliot

About

Born April 28, 1919, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Alexander Eliot has published eighteen books on art, mythology, history, and novels. Also the author of hundreds of published essays in magazines as varied as The Eastern Buddhist, Travel & Leisure, and England’s Systematics.

Eliot was the first of five generations of American Eliots who chose not to attend Harvard – instead he left home at eighteen and drove west to live on a Navajo Reservation in 1938. (His father was a professor at Smith; his great-grandfather was president of Harvard for almost fifty years). After his southwestern sojourn he attended Black Mountain College to study art with abstract painter Josef Albers. He dropped out two years later, when Albers left and opened an art gallery in Boston before moving to New York City.

Time Magazine: From age 26 to 42 (1945-1960) Eliot was the art editor at Time Magazine, during which time he socialized with and wrote about every major American (and European) artist. Salvador Dali became a special friend – not only because of their shared passion for art but also because Eliot’s wife, Jane Winslow, had lived for several years in Catalonia and spoke Dali’s native Catalan fluently. Eliot’s stories of encounters and interviews with Mondrian, Picasso, de Kooning, Pollack, Matisse, and many, many others have enthralled friends and family all his life.

In 1959 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to research “Studies of Greece and the Middle East as Spiritual Cradles of the Western World.” While he was there he visited Delphi in Greece, and wondered why anyone would want to raise a family anywhere else in the world.

So, he took early retirement from Time Inc. at age 42, moved to Greece with his family, and continued to write and travel – determined to explore, with his wife, Jane Winslow Eliot, every sacred place in the world. He never obtained a degree beyond his high school certificate, but continued to write and research and explore spirituality, myth, love, and life.

Alexander Eliot, who said:  “Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible?”

Alexander Eliot, perhaps best known for this unorthodox biography in Who’s Who In America and Who’s Who in the World:  “The sun shines on me and in me as well. But what am I? A goose-pimpled crazy on a skewed glass bicycle, continually crashing into scribbled walls. And this being, this moment is the thing.”