Finis Farr

The son of Rev. Dr. Finis K. Farr and his wife Ethel Riley Farr, Finis Farr was born in Lebanon, Tennessee.^[1] Hw was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio;^[2] moving their with his family in 1910.^[1] He attended Hughes High School in Cincinnati before attending Princeton University.^[1] He graduated from Princeton in 1926.^[2]

After college, Farr initially worked as a journalist for the Cincinnati Post.^[2] He worked for several newspapers in Ohio and New York state before joining the staff of NBC in New York City in the late 1920s.^[1] At NBC he worked as a writer for radio; writing several radio dramas for company and working as a writer and producer for The March of Time.^[2] He also was a main writer for the program Mr. District Attorney.^[3]

In the late 1930 Farr was employed as a contributing editor to Time magazine.^[2][1] He abandoned his writing career to serve in the United States Army during World War II.^[2] He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for his war service.^[1] After the war he worked in the Central Intelligence Agency;^[2] leaving his position at the CIA in 1955.^[4] In 1959 he resumed writing full time, and was principally active as a writer of biographies thereafter.^[2] He also contributed articles to magazines like American Heritage, Sports Illustrated, and The Saturday Evening Post.^[1]

Farr was a longtime resident of Ridgewood, New Jersey prior to retiring to Portland, Maine in 1978.^[1] He died in Portland on January 3, 1982.^[2]

• Frank Lloyd Wright (1961), biography of an architect Frank Lloyd Wright (Charles Scribner's Sons)
• Black Champion: The Life and Times of Jack Jackson (1964), biography of the boxer Jack Johnson
• The Elephant Valley (1967)
• FDR (1972), biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Arlington House)
• O'Hara: A Biography (1973), biography of John O'Hara (Little, Brown and Company)
• Chicago: A Personal History of America's Most American City (1973) (Arlington House)
• Fair enough: The life of Westbrook Pegler (1975), biography of Westbrook Pegler (Artington House)
• Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: the author of Gone With the Wind (1976), biography of Margaret Mitchell (Avon)
• Richenbacker's Luck: An American Life (1979), biography of Eddie Rickenbacker