author
Herbert Sherman Gorman
1893–1954
A journalist, literary critic, novelist, and biographer, he moved through the lively literary world of early twentieth-century New York. He is especially remembered as James Joyce’s first biographer and for atmospheric historical novels such as The Place Called Dagon.
1 Audiobook
The place called Dagon
by Herbert Sherman Gorman
About the author
Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Herbert Sherman Gorman began his career in journalism and later worked for several major New York newspapers, including the New York Sun, the New York Evening Post, The New York Times, and the New York Herald-Tribune. Alongside newspaper work, he wrote poetry, articles, and book reviews for magazines.
Gorman published around twenty books, most of them historical novels and biographies. His subjects included James Joyce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alexandre Dumas, and Mary, Queen of Scots. His 1924 study James Joyce: His First Forty Years was the first book-length study of Joyce, followed by James Joyce: A Biography in 1940.
A familiar figure in Greenwich Village’s literary circles, Gorman hosted writers including Stephen Vincent Benét, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Elinor Wylie. His fiction combined historical settings with psychological tension and an interest in the darker, stranger sides of human experience.