Biography
Norman M. Isham was born in Hartford, Connecticut, but as a child his family moved to Providence, Rhode Island. Norman Isham attended Mowry and Goff's preparatory school and Brown University. He received a A.B. from Brown in 1886 and an A.M. in 1890. After graduation in 1886, Isham worked for architectural firm of Stone, Carpenter and Wilson and later Martin and Hall. He also served as an architecture instructor at Brown University.
In 1899 Isham and Benjamin Wright created an architecture partnership which existed from 1912 to 1920 and 1923 to 1933. Isham also chaired the architectural department at the Rhode Island School of Design. He was a member of the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Institute of British Architects and published several architecture texts, including "Early Rhode Island Houses" in 1895. Isham was well known for his renovations of many prominent early Rhode Island and other New England houses, particularly, stone-enders.
After Isham's wife, Elizabeth Barbour Ormsbee, died in 1917, he moved from Providence to Wickford, Rhode Island and constructed a permanent home there having summered in Wickford for many years. Norman Isham is buried in Wickford and has no descendants.
Read more about this topic: Norman Isham
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)