Clark, Eleanor (1913–1996)

American author and travel essayist. Name variations: Eleanor Clark Warren. Born in Los Angeles, California, on July 6, 1913; raised from four weeks on in Roxbury, Connecticut; died in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 16, 1996; daughter of Frederick Huntington (an engineer) and Eleanor (Phelps) Clark; attended Rosemary Hall School; graduated from Vassar College, 1934; married Jan Frankle (Czech secretary to Leon Trotsky), in 1937 (divorced 1938); married Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989, author and Pulitzer Prize winner); children: (second marriage) Rosanna Warren; Gabriel Penn Warren.

Following graduation from Vassar, Eleanor Clark moved to New York, where she wrote fiction, reviewed for The New Republic, worked for the Partisan Review, and edited New Letters in America for Norton. In 1937, she became a translator for Leon Trotsky while he was in Mexico and, that same year, married Trotsky's secretary Jan Frankle. The marriage lasted one year. In 1939, Clark was involved with poet Louis MacNeice. From 1943 to 1946, she worked for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C., interviewing French and Italian refugees. During this period, she met Robert Penn Warren (1944).

Most of the latter '40s and early '50s were spent in Italy where Clark finished her first book Rome and a Villa (1952); Anatole Broyard would later refer to it as "perhaps the finest book ever to be written about a city." On returning home, she married Warren, and the couple settled on Redding Road in Fairfield, Connecticut, where they lived for 37 years. When Warren died in 1989, Clark moved to Cambridge, then to Boston, while struggling with emphysema.

Considered a master stylist, Clark wrote four novels (including The Bitter Box, 1946, and Baldur's Gate, 1970), three travel memoirs, children's books, essays, and a memoir about her failing sight, Eyes, Etc. Her 1964 book The Oysters of Locmariaquer, an account of oystering in Brittany, received the National Book Award.