Eric Hodgins, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetEric Hodgins
writer
Date of Birth: 02-Mar-1899
Place of Birth: Detroit, Michigan, United States
Date of Death: 07-Jan-1971
Profession: novelist
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Pisces 
About Eric Hodgins
- Eric Francis Hodgins (March 2, 1899 – January 7, 1971) was the American author of the popular novel Mr.
- Blandings Builds His Dream House, illustrated by William Steig. Hodgins was born in Detroit, Michigan to the Episcopal clergyman Frederic Brinkley Hodgins and Edith Gertrude Bull on March 2, 1899.
- He attended the Trinity School in New York City, from which he graduated in 1917.
- After working for a year, he entered Cornell University in 1918 and transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Autumn 1919.He graduated from MIT in 1922 with a chemical engineering degree.
- While at MIT, he was editor of VooDoo, the student humor magazine.
- After graduation, he was managing editor of Technology Review until 1927.
- From 1927-29, he was editor of The Youth's Companion.
- In 1929, he became an advertising salesman and then associate editor for Redbook.
- In 1933, he became associate managing editor of Fortune magazine, promoted to managing editor in 1935 and publisher from 1937-41.
- From 1941-46 he was a vice-president of Time Inc..
- While at Fortune, he wrote an exposé of the European munitions industry, published in March 1934 as "Arms and the Men".
- He resigned from Time Inc.
- in 1946 to become a full-time writer. In 1930, he married Catherine Carlson, who had been an editorial assistant at The Youth's Companion.
- She died on January 20, 1933 while giving birth to their son, Roderic.
- In 1936, he married Eleanor Treacy, an art editor at Fortune, with whom he had a daughter, Patricia.From 1929-32, he wrote several books on aviation and transportation with Frederick Alexander Magoun, who had been an instructor at MIT when Hodgins was a student there.
- In April 1946, he wrote an article for Fortune called "Mr.
- Blandings Builds His Castle", a fictional account of the real-life troubles he encountered while building a house in New Milford, Connecticut.
- Later that year, he turned the article into a book, Mr.
- Blandings Builds His Dream House, which was a best-seller.
- The novel was adapted as a popular movie of the same name, starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. In real life, the house was completed in 1939 but was so expensive (costing $56,000 while the original budget was $11,000), that Hodgins was forced to sell it in 1945 for $38,000 to John Allard, a retired Air Force general.
- Hodgins unsuccessfully tried to buy the house back after receiving $200,000 from movie rights to the book.
- In 1953, the house was sold to Ralph Gulliver who gave it to his son Jack in 1972.
- In 1980, the house was sold to the author and composer Stephen Citron and his wife, the biographer and novelist Anne Edwards.
- In 2004, the house was sold for $1.2 million. His next novel was a sequel called Blandings' Way about a liberal man working in advertising who wanted to do good but was accused of being a Communist.
- He thought it was a better book, but it was overshadowed by the success of the earlier one. On January 8, 1960, he suffered a stroke.
- He described the stroke and long recovery in Episode: Report On the Accident Inside My Skull, published in 1964.
- It received the Howard W.
- Blakeslee Award from the American Heart Association.
- At the time of his death in 1971, he was writing an autobiography that was published posthumously as Trolley to the Moon: An Autobiography
Read more at Wikipedia