William Amory Gardner

This first biography of William Amory Gardner brings to view a remarkable figure in the worlds of Groton School and Gilded Age Boston.

The orphaned nephew of the celebrated art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, he became an accomplished classicist and a brilliant, if eccentric, teacher. As one of the three founders of Groton School, he helped create an innovative education for America's elite based on Christian principles and a unique "family" environment.

Through his aunt, Gardner knew many of Boston's leading cultural and intellectual figures, including Henry James, John Singer Sargent, George Santayana, and Henry Cabot Lodge. His wealth enabled him to live on a remarkable scale: he owned three large yachts, dined at the White House with Theodore Roosevelt, traveled by muleback through rural Greece, and journeyed up the Nile on a luxury steamer straight from the pages of Agatha Christie.

Yet behind this privileged and sociable public life lay a private world that Gardner could not openly acknowledge. Surrounded by friends and admiring former students, he never married. As a gay man living at a time when openness could carry grave personal and social consequences, he was compelled to keep an essential part of his life private.

Drawing on unpublished letters, family papers, and school archives, William Amory Gardner: Groton School and Boston in the Gilded Age offers new insight into Isabella Stewart Gardner and her circle, the founding and early culture of Groton School, elite American education at the turn of the twentieth century, and the privileged but tightly ordered society of Gilded Age Boston.

The volume is heavily illustrated with 94 full color images, many of them photographs taken by Gardner himself.