John Franklin Bardin - Biography

Biography

Bardin was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father was a well-to-do coal merchant and his mother an office worker. Nearly all of his immediate family died of various illnesses, however, with an elder sister dying of septicaemia, and, a year later, his father succumbing to a coronary and leaving little money. Bardin, who by then had graduated from Walnut High School, was studying engineering at the University of Cincinnati, and had to leave in his first year in order to work full-time as a ticket-taker and bouncer at a roller-skating rink, and later as a night clerk at a bookstore, where he would educate himself by reading. "Mother had become a paranoid schizophrenic by then," Bardin said. "It was on visits to her that I first had an insight into the 'going home' hallucinations" that would later form the core of his third novel, Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly. Other jobs, held in some combination of Cincinnati and New York City, to which he moved before turning 30, including working as a bench hand in a valve foundry; in the advertising department of a bank; in the production department of an advertising agency; and doing freelance market research for Barron Collier.

In New York, he began working in 1944 for the ad agency Edwin Bird Wilson, Inc., and from 1946 to 1948 completed the three novels for which he would be best known: The Deadly Percheron, The Last of Philip Banter, and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly, published over the course of 18 months, though that last not in the U.S. until the 1960s. Bardin would eventually write 10 novels over the course of his lifetime. His magazine articles include "The Disadvantages of Respectability", a review of the book Father of the Man: How Your Child Gets His Personality, by W. Allison Davis and Robert J. Havighurst, in The Nation, May 3, 1947.

After gradually rising to become vice president and director of Edwin Bird Wilson, Bardin left that agency in 1963. Two years earlier he had begun teaching creative writing and advertising at the New School for Social Research, which he would continue to do through 1966. That year he worked as associate publicity director for the United Negro College Fund, and from 1967 to 1968, he wrote for the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York. Turning to magazines, he then served as an editor at Coronet through 1972.

For the next two years at least, Bardin lived in Chicago, Illinois, where he served as managing editor of the American Medical Association magazine Today's Health through 1973; and through 1974 originated, and served as managing editor of, two American Bar Association Press magazines, Learning and the Law and Barrister. While his official site states he returned to New York in 1974, one source places him in Chicago still in 1978. He resided in New York City's East Village until his death on July 9, 1981.

As of at least 2010, Bardin's copyrights are held by Franklin C. Bardin and Judith A. Bardin, a.k.a. Judith Aycock, his children from his first marriage. Bardin, who died at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, was survived by his second wife, Phyllida.