Biography
One of three children, Ottolengui was a son of Daniel Ottolengui and Helen Rosalie Rodrigues Ottolengui; he had a sister, Helen, and a brother, Lee. He was the editor of Items of Interest: A Monthly Magazine of Dental Art, Science, and Literature for thirty-five years, which he continued to edit after retiring from dentistry; he compiled Table Talks on Dentistry, drawing from articles in Items of Interest. A dental pioneer, Ottolengui was one of the first to use X-rays and was a specialist in orthodontics and root canal therapy. He was also interested in entomology, taxidermy, and photography.
In addition to his work in dentistry, Ottolengui is remembered as an early exponent of detective fiction, with four novels and a short story collection published during the 1890s. The short story volume, Final Proof, was recognized by Ellery Queen as one of Queen's Quorum -- the most important collections of detective short stories. Many years later a second series, Before the Fact, originally published in 1901, was discovered and published in book form edited and introduced by detective fiction scholar Douglas G. Greene.
His wife, May C. Hall Ottolengui, died on 10 July 1936; he died at his New York residence the next year of a heart ailment and a stroke caused by a long illness. His sister died on 22 July 1938.
Read more about this topic: Rodrigues Ottolengui
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“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)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)