Evan Shipman

Life

Evan Biddle Shipman was born in Plainfield, New Hampshire, on October 23, 1904, son of the playwright and editor Louis Evan Shipman and his wife Ellen McGowan Biddle Shipman, the landscape architect. He attended various schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts and read widely, encouraged by his father; although a lifelong love of horse racing affected his attendance.

After 1917, Shipman traveled in Europe, taking degrees at the University of Louvain and the Sorbonne. He returned to Paris in 1924 to focus on his writing. In Paris, he became an acquaintance of fellow American expatriates Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and the French painter André Masson. Shipman enjoyed the boozy literary scene. His poems and articles were published in The New Republic, The Nation, Scribner's Magazine, and later The New Yorker and Esquire.

In 1937, partly convinced by Hemingway, Shipman, whose marriage had failed, decided to devote himself to the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. He first drove ambulances and led American volunteers for the Lincoln Brigade from France into Spain across the Pyrenees, and then saw action as an infantryman in the battles of Jarama and Bruente, being badly wounded at Brunete. He carried shrapnel fragments in his leg until his death.

Shipman returned to the United States in 1938 and found work as a columnist of the New York Morning Telegraph, but soon after America's entry into World War II in 1941, he enlisted with the U.S. Army and became a war correspondent. He was sergeant major of the 16th Armored Division's 16th Regiment, and was also with the 787th Tank Battalion until its deactivation in 1945.

After the end of World War II, Shipman returned to journalism and eventually became a featured columnist of the Morning Telegraph. He was also a recognized expert on thoroughbred and harness racing and a columnist of the Daily Racing Form. He died of cancer on June 24, 1957, in New York Hospital, and was buried in Gilkey Cemetery in Plainfield, New Hampshire. The Evan Shipman Handicap at Belmont Park was later named for him.

Personal

While living in the United States, Shipman married Elizabeth Gerwig of Pittsburgh in 1934. The union was troubled by alcoholism, and Elizabeth, who became insane, was confined to an asylum, while Shipman went back to Paris in 1937.