James Playsted Wood

1905 - 1983
A successful US author, editor and educator, he had ancestral connections to the Forest. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction on a wide range of topics, and children's fiction. In 1965 he published The Golden Swan, a children's novel set in the 'Great Forest' during the English Civil War.  

biography

James was born in New York City in December 1911. His father, William Thomas Wood, worked at a dress factory. Growing up in Brooklyn, James would have seen the huge Brooklyn Army Terminal being built, at one time one of the biggest concrete buildings in the world. He would have enjoyed the fun fairs and other attractions of Coney Island too. As a young man he attended the city's prestigious Columbia University, graduating as a Bachelor of Arts in 1927, staying on to complete his Masters degree that he completed in 1932. He first taught at the Du Pont Manual Training High School in Louisville, Kentucky, later taking up a post at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Today the college archive holds a large collection of his papers. Amongst James' teaching colleagues at Amherst was the poet Robert Frost who was Professor of English there (on and off) from 1916 to 1938 (returning there and holding a teaching post until he died in 1963). He and James had a shared interest in Gloucestershire. Frost had lived just north of the Forest of Dean, at Little Iddens, in 1914, and was recognised as one of the Dymock Poets, the group of Georgian Poets that had clustered around the village of Dymock before the First World War. James had ancestors buried in two different villages in the Forest, and would go on to set his children's novel, The Golden Swan (1965) there (though in the book it is renamed 'The Great Forest'). 

​With America joining the Second World War by 1943 James had joined the US Army Airforce, serving in Washington under General George C. Marshall. He was promoted to Major and was awarded an army commendation medal. It was during his time in Washington that he met and married Elizabeth Craig, herself a teacher (of Latin, French and Greek). 
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the golden swan

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