1. William March was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8,2015.
12 Facts About William March
1. 2.
William March volunteered for the US Marines on July 25, and after completing his training on Parris Island was shipped to France in February 1918.
3.
William March reached France in March 1918 and served as a sergeant in Co F, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, 4th Brigade of Marines, Second Division of the US Army Expeditionary Force.
4.
In 1919, William March returned to civilian life but experienced bouts of anxiety and depression.
5.
In 1926, the company opened an office in Memphis, Tennessee, which William March supervised; he spent two years in Memphis and became involved in the local theater scene.
6.
In 1928, William March moved again, to New York, where he took creative writing classes at Columbia University and began writing short stories.
7.
William March's stories were included in two annual anthologies of short fiction, Edward O'Brien's The Best American Short Stories and the O Henry Prize Stories, in 1930,1931, and 1932.
8.
On one such visit in 1949, William March happened upon the gallery of New York art dealer Klaus Perls, which proved to be a turning point in William March's life.
9.
William March continued this friendship with routine visits to New York between 1949 and 1953, until ailing health prevented him from further travels.
10.
In late 1950, William March permanently left Mobile and purchased a Creole cottage on Dumaine Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
11.
William March viewed the latter novel as a meager accomplishment, but it gained the most praise and success of any of his novels, selling more than a million copies in one year, launching a long-running Broadway hit penned by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Maxwell Anderson and an eponymous 1956 movie directed by Mervyn LeRoy.
12.
William March was discharged from the hospital on April 24, but after only three weeks, on the night of May 15,1954, he died in his sleep of a second and more severe heart attack, at age 60.