Arthur Stratton

Arthur Mills Perce Stratton (1911 – 3 September 1975) was an American author and traveller. He was a playwright, a novelist, an OSS agent, a teacher in Turkey, and an assistant college professor in the US, before working for the CIA for about ten years and becoming a travel writer and biographer.

While serving with the American Field Service as a World War II ambulance driver, he was twice awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery under fire, the first time on the Western Front, the second in North Africa.

Early life Stratton was born in Brunswick, Maine, the son of Arthur Mills Stratton (1868–1916), a native of Portsea Island, Portsmouth, England, a music hall performer known as 'Arthur Rudd', by his marriage to Frances Cora Perce, which took place on 16 October 1902 in Kimberley, in what was then the Cape Colony. His mother, a soprano, who had been born in Baltimore in 1873, lived until 1954. Stratton's father was said to be of a family "impeccably Church and Army", while his mother was described as "American as can be, which means English, Scottish, French and New York State Dutch". Stratton's mother, the daughter of Colonel LeGrand W. Perce, a lawyer practising at the Chicago Bar, was one of six children and was described as "One of the most promising young singers of Chicago... Miss Perce has a pure, even soprano voice, of great range, clear, sweet quality and of more than usual power."

Stratton was educated at Bowdoin College in his hometown and at Columbia University's Graduate School, In 1940, as an ambulance driver in France, he was the first foreign volunteer to be decorated by the French Army during the war. The annual Report of the President of Bowdoin referred to the incident:

In its review of The Great Red Island, The Spectator drew attention to Stratton's description of a southeastern stretch of the island as "Almost as lovely as the Attic coast" and noted that "Mr Stratton celebrates Madagascar. A New Englander who, as a volunteer with the Free French, first saw the name Madagascar on a can of singe doing duty for corned beef at Bir Hakeim in 1942... Mr Stratton has a baroque turn of style that offers in the first few pages words like 'struthious,' 'rhipidistian', and 'xerophytic'.

His last major work to appear was a biography of the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, which when it was published in 1972 he dedicated "Chiefly to the Turks".

In 1973, a donation Stratton made to Bowdoin College was noted in the President's annual report. He died on 3 September 1975. In his memory, Barbara Stratton Bolling and Deborah S. Booker presented a collection of prints to the University of Missouri's Museum of Art and Archaeology, including work from Ethiopia, a lithographic portrait by Edvard Munch of the composer Frederick Delius, and comic art by Honoré Daumier.

In 1945, Stratton's sister Barbara had married Richard Walker Bolling, later a Democratic Congressman from Kansas City, Missouri, and chairman of the United States House Committee on Rules. Barbara Stratton had four children, one with Bolling and three by a previous marriage.

Major publications

Other publications Arthur Stratton, Brush Fire; a play in 3 acts (1936) Arthur Stratton, See While the City Sleeps. My next play; a play in 3 acts (1936) Arthur Mills Stratton, 'The Battle for the Sands: Ambulance at Bit Hacheim', in The Atlantic November 1942 issue (vol. 170, no. 5) A. M. P. Stratton, Lord Love Us (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948, a novel)

Quotations "Radama was a conqueror. He was a drunkard. Andrianampoinimerina, the Prince Worthy of the Highland People Under the Sun, made his son into an alcoholic and, in effect, cut the young man's throat." "Madagascar's great luxury is space, luminous, beautiful emptiness, mile after mile of grassland, brush, and woodland, broken by craggy mountains." "Of lemurs, Madagascar has almost the monopoly; this charming primate family branched off the main stem of the tree too soon — before the monkeys, before the apes, before the Hominidae." " 'So am I American', she said, speaking educated, cultivated French; and, having surprised me, coolly added 'Central American, from Martinique' ".

Footnotes