Introduction

Photograph of John Ames Mitchell from Sarah Lowry Ames' blog The Diary of a Yankee Housewife

John Ames Mitchell was a Harvard University educated architect, an artist, and the author of a number of novels, including The Pines of Lory, though he is more widely known for founding Life Magazine and the non-profit organization, The Fresh Air Fund.  During Mitchell’s lifetime, Life Magazine not only contributed significantly to literary culture at the time, fostering the start of careers for a number of writers and artists, and an accessible space for both producers and consumers of the arts, but it sought to address a number of social and political issues, as well. Mitchell’s nonprofit, The Fresh Air Fund, also provided children and families in low-income, urban areas with the chance to experience the world outside the city. In addition to the larger scale work Mitchell was doing to support the literary arts around the start of the 20th century, he contributed to this cause by writing and publishing works of literature himself. Given these details of his life, it is unsurprising that nature plays a central role in the themes and the plot of the novel.

Cover of a first edition of The Pines of Lory from the Manhattan College Fales Collection

The idea that life and art and nature are inextricable from one another, an idea that permeates both the content and the physical design of The Pines of Lory, seems to be one that guided John Ames Mitchell in almost every personal and professional endeavor there is record of during his lifetime. LIFE Magazine, which would have been akin to today’s New Yorker, For a man who is remembered as honest, outspoken, and unwavering in his beliefs, surprisingly, there is little documentation evidencing the details of his personal life, and his thoughts and opinions outside of his work at Life Magazine. In order to gain a fuller picture of the man behind the magazine there is much to be interpreted by reading between the lines of his life and legacy, the reverberations of which continue to lend themselves to American cultural and social life 100 years after his death.