Helene Magaret

Born 1906-05-18 Omaha, NE (USA)

Died 1998-02-01
Omaha, NE (USA)

Magaret was especially known for her careful literary biographies of Catholic saints and martyrs. Born in Omaha, and briefly attending, at one time, the predecessor of UNO, she taught English literature at Marymount College in New York for some 30 years. She published poetry in leading American magazines from the 1930s to the 1950s. She retired to Omaha. Writer Ruth Crone of Omaha was a close friend.

In old age, Magaret sold her correspondence with poet Ezra Pound to the New York Public Library, where it still resides. Some of her letters are in Ezra Pound related collections in the Yale Library.

Places Lived

Omaha, NE
Iowa
Tarrytown, NY

Author Of

Biography
Fiction
Journalism
Nonfiction
Poetry

Keywords

Essays and articles; Catholic Biography; Saints; Education

Education

Central High School, Omaha
Grinnell
Omaha Uuniversity
AB, 1932, Barnard College
PhD, 1940, Iowa

Occupation

Secretarial work
Professor of English at Marymount College in Tarrytown, NY
Foreign correspondent and translator in Spain (1920s)
Interpreter for Chilean Nobel laureat Gabriela Mistral

Places Worked

Ferderal Land Bank and Livestock National Bank, Omaha
Marymount College, Tarrytown NY

Honors

Phi Beta Kappa
Matianna Griswold Van Rensselaer Poetry Prize, 1932
Gallery of Living Catholic Authors
AAUP Fellow

Associations

Of great influence on her work was her conversion to Catholicism in her early 30's, resulting in a string of literary biographies exploring the lives of Catholic saints and martyrs.' Omaha World-Herald 2-3-98
Served as interpreter for Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistra
Friend of Loren Eiseley

Bibliography

The Trumpeting Crane: A Narrative Poem. 1934.
The Great Horse: A Narrative Poem. 1937.
Minnesota and Nebraska Poets: An Anthology of Verse. 1937.
Father De Smet, Pioneer Priest of the Rockies. 1940.
Change of Seasons: Lyrics. 1941.
Who Walk in Pride: A novel. 1945.
Gailhac of Beziers. 1946.
Giant in the Wilderness. 1952.
The Head on London Bridge: Life of St. Thomas More. 1956.
A Kingdom and a Cross: St. Alphonsus Ligouri. 1958.
Filipe: Being a little known history of the only canonized saint born in North American. 1962.
Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, 1867-2017. 2017. (contributor)

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.