Frederic Babcock

Born 1892-10-31 Ord, NE (USA)

Died 1979-05-13
Wheaton, IL (USA)

Babcock was a distinguished journalist who had a long career at the Chicago Tribune, where he was a reporter, travel editor from 1928 to 1942, and founded and edited the Chicago Tribune Magazine of Books from 1942 to 1960. He may be most famous for the article on Al Capone's domination of Chicago that he published in The Nation magazine in 1928. He published three novels, one of which, Hang Up the Fiddle (1954) was loosely based on his experiences as a reporter for the Lincoln Journal, where he worked while he attended the University of Nebraska from 1913 to 1917.

The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University in Boston, MA has a Frederic Babcock collection.

Places Lived

Columbus, NE
Lincoln, NE
Chicago, IL
Winter Park, FL

Author Of

Fiction
Journalism

Keywords

Newspaper Journalism; Novels

Education

Attended University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1913-1917

Occupation

Journalist
Newspaper Editor
Novelist

Places Worked

Columbus Telegram
Nebraska State Journal renamed The Lincoln Journal
Wyoming State Tribune
Seattle Times
Minneapolis Journal
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune Magazine of Books

Bibliography

Blood of the Lamb. 1932.
Hang up the Fiddle. 1954.
Lay Down the Sword. 1962.

Numerous book reviews in national magazines, including The New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, Nation and Christian Century.

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to heritage@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.