Russell M. Coryell

Russell, like his three brothers, attended Harvard University, class of 1914, but he dropped out after one year, finding “the academic life pretentious and uninspiring.”[1] In the following two years, he served in a variety of odd jobs, from mechanic to department store clerk to bellhop.[2] He was athletic and, like his father, an advocate of physical culture. He made money as a swimming instructor, posing nude for artists, and training Welsh boxing champion Freddie Welsh.[1]

In the summer of 1912, he lived with poet Robinson Jeffers in Santa Barbara.[3] Coryell served as society editor of the Santa Barbara Independent.[2] From 1913 to 1916, he was a professor of English and art at Boyland, an experimental boarding school in Santa Barbara.[2] He also claimed to have prospected for gold in the Sierra Nevadas and been a cowboy.

After Santa Barbara, he relocated to Europe. He described his occupations as: “war correspondent to the Los Angeles Times, English Professor at Milan, Genoa, and Paris,”[2] and an “advertising manager of a Paris newspaper.”[4] From 1916 to 1920, he was a ship chandler at the ports of Genoa and Trieste. In Trieste, on April 20, 1920, he married a Venetian woman, Lella Franchin. He soon became manager of the Adriatic Marine Supply Company in the disputed Free State of Fiume (now Croatia), under the occupation of Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio. In December, during the “Bloody Christmas” actions, the couple, like other Americans, was forced to leave Fiume, with D’Annunzio himself writing across Coryell's passport: “He leaves Fiume forever to return to his own country.”[5]

Their return may not have been immediate, as Coryell claims to have spent six years abroad.[4] At any rate, the couple relocated to Maine where John R. Coryell had a summer home, and Russell began his writing career. He wrote numerous articles on child rearing and early education. In his early writing career, he published some works under the penname Franklin Holt. His most lucrative work went to the two publishers that his father had been most associated with, Macfadden Publications and Street & Smith. The best known part of his career was a series of romance serials he published from 1934 to 1941 in Street & Smith pulps like Love Story Magazine and Smart Love Stories.

He died on October 16, 1941, after a short illness.[6]