Biography
ALEXANDRA MARSHALL is the author of five novels: The Court of Common Pleas (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), Something Borrowed (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), The Brass Bed (Doubleday, 1986), Tender Offer (Knopf, 1981), and Gus in Bronze (Knopf, 1977). She has also published a nonfiction book, Still Waters (Morrow, 1978), which was prepared in conjunction with the PBS “Nova” film of the same title.
Born in 1944 in western Pennsylvania and raised in the near suburbs of New York City, Alexandra Marshall did not grow up imagining herself as a writer. She studied modern dance at Wheaton College and The New England Conservatory and graduated with a BA in French from Wheaton in 1965. The following year she studied Japanese classical dance in Kyoto, and upon her return to New York, worked at the Japanese Consulate while studying Japanese at the New School. In 1966 she married her first husband, Timothy Buxton, and they moved to Stanford University for a year, where she worked at its International Students Center. Back in New York, she received an MA from Columbia University Teachers College in 1969 and taught French the following year at a public junior high school in Exeter, NH. In 1970 the couple led a group of college students to Ghana, West Africa, for Operation Crossroads Africa, a program that John F. Kennedy called “the progenitor of the Peace Corps.” Her husband died there at age 28.
Returning to the U.S. she moved next to New Haven with the idea of doing graduate work in American Studies. But she instead began to write, educating herself by reading American, British, and Canadian contemporary fiction and by completing two “practice” novels. Moving next to Amherst, she began another novel which would become her first published book, Gus in Bronze, published by Knopf in 1977 and in condensed form by Redbook magazine. With Gus in Bronze in production, she moved to Boston, where her literary agent introduced her to another of his clients, the writer James Carroll. Married since 1977, they have remained in Boston, where they have raised two children.
In addition to her five novels and one nonfiction book, Ms. Marshall has written film criticism for The American Prospect and published essays, feature stories, travel journalism, and opinion pieces in many literary journals, newspapers, and magazines. A relative newcomer to short fiction, her first short story appeared in an issue of Ploughshares guest edited by Alice Hoffman, and was cited as one of “100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2003” in The Best American Short Stories.
As a teacher of creative writing, she has offered courses at the Harvard Extension School and to graduate students at Emerson College. In 1989, she and James Carroll founded the Ploughshares International Fiction Writing Seminar with Robie Macauley and Pamela Painter, which was held for nine years at Emerson’s Kasteel Well in The Netherlands.
Since 1991 Ms. Marshall has coordinated the essay judging for The Max Warburg Courage Curriculum taught to all sixth graders in the Boston Public Schools and in a number of independent schools. These selected “Courage In My Life” essays have been published in an annual edition of a volume called The Courage of Boston’s Children.