Allan Seager

Who was Allan Seager?

Allan Seager was a novelist and short-story writer. Seager published more than 80 short stories in publications including Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Sports Illustrated. E.J. O'Brien, editor of the yearly Best American Short Stories series, once stated that the "apostolic succession of the American short story" ran from Sherwood Anderson to Ernest Hemingway to Seager. Poet and novelist James Dickey credited Seager's novel Amos Berry as a principal reason that he chose to pursue poetry.

As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Seager was a member of two national championship swimming teams. He subsequently earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, but his studies were interrupted by a bout of tuberculosis. He spent a year "curing" at the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York; his experiences there and in Ann Arbor and Oxford led to the semi-autobiographical short stories published in the collection A Frieze of Girls. Subsequent to his Rhodes Scholarship, Seager worked for Vanity Fair magazine as an assistant editor. He returned to Ann Arbor in 1935, where he taught creative writing at the University of Michigan until 1968.