Robert Lowry

Robert James Collas Lowry (March 28, 1919 – December 5, 1994) was an American novelist, short story writer, illustrator, and independent press publisher. Lowry was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was a literary wunderkind who began writing at the age of 8; within a year, he had stories published in the Cincinnati Times Star. He graduated from Withrow High School in 1937, after which he entered the University of Cincinnati. He was, according to biographer James Reide, a voracious reader of the literary works of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Guy de Maupassant. The Little Man Press In 1938, while enrolled at the University of Cincinnati, Lowry served as editor for a university-sponsored chapbook titled The Little Man (whose credits claim it "was established in the Fall of 1937 by some students," but the contents were copyrighted under Lowry's name). William Saroyan contributed the lead essay "A Word on Reading and Writing." The same year, with illustrator James Flora, a student at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Lowry founded The Little Man Press. The partners published dozens of chapbooks under the Little Man imprint from 1939 to 1942. Lowry wrote many titles (some under such pseudonyms as James Caldwell), but the Little Man imprint published essays and fiction by Saroyan, Thomas Mann, Jesse Stuart, Charles Henri Ford, William Edward March Campbell, and others.