The Armstrongs, Alan and Martha, two long-accomplished artists thrive, almost unnoticed, in this valley of artists. Levellers Press brings this detailed glimpse of their lives during the Covid year of 2022, with its ties to and reminiscences of they the careers they kept developing well into their 80s. Alan begins his yearbook:
“January 1. I’m a journalist in the old sense, a daily writer. I live with Martha, a painter. Her pictures and my notes tell something of our life together, our family, friends, seashores, our home in Haverford, building, painting and writing on a hill in Vermont, living on a seaport in France, in a village in Italy, in Hatfield, Massachusetts, our adventures. My agent and friend called this assemblage a gallimaufry, a jumble like those rocks that make up the Stone Cottage we built. His other word for it was haggis. I prefer gallimaufry for its elegance of tone.”
Alan Armstrong was born in 1939 and raised in Washington, D.C. He is a 1961 graduate of Haverford College, MPA Princeton University 1963, Yale Law School 1966. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.
He has written Whittington (Random House, 2005, Newbery Honor), Raleigh’s Page (Random House, 2007), Looking for Marco Polo (Random House, 2009), Racing the Moon (Random House, 2012—a story about the start of our space program), and Regards, Rodeo: The Mariner Dog of Cassis (Townsend Publishing, 1999). In addition, he published Off in Zora, A Modern-Day Tale of a Traveling Bookseller (Booksellers House, 1997) and edited the letters of an eighteenth-century English botanist, Forget Not Mee & My Garden, Selected Letters 1725–1768 of Peter Collinson, F.R.S. Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 2002. With Peter Smith he wrote From the Other Side: A Ninth Grade Class Follows the OSIRIS-REX Mission to Bennu, (The Van Zora Press, 2024).
