Antiques

Item Description

This Antique Desk donated by Anthony Weller was the birthplace of his novels and is a true Annisquam treasure having been handed down to him from his father George Weller.

Born in 1957, Anthony Weller is both a writer (novelist, poet, and journalist) and a musician (jazz & classical guitarist, composer). Anthony Weller was born in Macon, Georgia, USA, on September 18, 1957, the son of Gladys Lasky, a British ballet teacher and scholar, and George Weller, an American foreign correspondent and novelist, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize. His childhood was spent in Georgia, in the Bahamas, in coastal Massachusetts, and on frequent travels in Europe. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy (’75) and Yale University (B.A., Music, ’80). He then moved to New York to get started as a writer and musician. 

His first literary love was poetry and he was fortunate enough, at age nineteen, to fall under the tutelage of a great poet, Peyton Houston. His poems have appeared in Yankee, The Saturday Evening Post, Chelys, Pendulum, Light, Erizu, Infinity Three, and the Lace Neck Review. He was given a New York State CAPS Grant for Poetry (1983) and an award of the Academy of American Poets (1980), and was runner-up in The Nation-92nd St. Y. Poetry Competition (1979). More recently, he was a Guest Writer at the Flagstaff (Arizona) Bookfest for 2000.

While in New York he began to work as a journalist, traveling extensively throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, the South Pacific, Central America, and the Caribbean. Over the years he has written over one hundred and fifty articles for National Geographic Traveler, The Paris Review, Forbes, GEO, The New York Times Magazine, G.Q., Conde-Nast Traveler, Gourmet, Harpers, Playboy, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Smithsonian, Pan, Delta-Sky, Esquire, Merian, Guitar Review, New York, Travel & Leisure, and many other magazines. He received a Lowell Thomas Award for foreign reporting in 1993. After five years in New York he moved to Amsterdam and then to Paris. During this time he was able to spend a few months each year in Kyrenia, in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, doing his own writing. 

Having first published professionally at age thirteen (an anthology of science fiction), and despite the appearance of several short stories throughout his twenties, it took Weller another decade and a persistent literary agent to sell a novel. In 1996 Marlowe & Co. published The Garden of the Peacocks; in 1997 a travel memoir of India and Pakistan, Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road: Calcutta to Khyber; and in 1998 another novel, The Polish Lover. Thus, by a peculiar irony, work that had taken over twelve years to write appeared over the course of eighteen months. Another novel, The Siege of Salt Cove, was published by W. W. Norton in 2004. His fourth novel, The Land of Later On,appeared in autumn 2011.
 
Anthony edited and wrote a long essay for First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War (Crown, 2006, introduction by Walter Cronkite). This was the reporting by George Weller, utterly blocked at the time [September 1945] and thought lost to history until Anthony found copies among his late father's papers. Acclaimed by historians worldwide, it was named by Kirkus one of the best books of the year. In 2009 Anthony edited an enormous follow-up compilation for Crown of his father's finest 1941-45 reporting, Weller's War: A Legendary Correspondent's Saga of World War II on Five Continents.

Item Special Note

Winner to pick-up Desk in Annisquam following the Auction.

Measurements: approx. 28 inches wide; 20 inches deep; 21 inches high