Alan Marcus

Alan Marcus is a graduate of Brown University and has been a professional writer since 1946. His work has been critically acclaimed by the likes of Archibald MacLeish, Saul Bellow, Dorothy Parker, Kenneth Patchen, Harvey Swados, and Granville Hicks. He is a novelist (Straw to Make Brick, Of Streets and Stars), a short story writer (Atlantic "first" winner, annual O'Henry collection honors), award-winning playwright (Pity For the Blind), and distinguished radio dramatist (The Peabody-Award-Winning program, "The Eternal Light"). He is a former Guggenheim Fellow, a colonist at the McDowell Colony, and foreign correspondent accredited to both The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly.

He has scripted (pseudonymously) over a dozen feature films and thrice that many television dramas, and in the 1960s was the creator of a hit series, "Here Come the Brides" for ABC. He also conceived and directed a public radio series, "Three Minutes to Midnight" on the menace of the nuclear arms race that was produced in Monterey, CA on KAZU and subsequently aired on many NPR stations.

In recent years, he has turned his hand to educational matters, writing and directing a series of video dramas (employing masks, puppets, mimes, and actors) which scrutinized various aspects of cross-cultural dissonance in the Salinas Valley (for which he received support from private foundations and public agencies as well as appreciative acknowledgments from The New York Times and enthusiastic accounts of this work on PBS).

His interest in problems of health care policy and practice has led to the writing of a series of articles (in collaboration with his wife, Lotte, a clinical psychologist) on the increasingly critical problems of inadequate and irrelevant training for health care providers in this country as well as the runaway costs of health care itself. Published in medical journals like Family Medicine and Family Systems Medicine, these articles document the current out-of-step march towards increased "industrialization" of medical services, with the attendant shift of decision-making to technocrats and accountants and the loss of responsiveness to the nation's anguished (and increasingly victimized) patient population.

In 1991, he became interested in the possibilities of specialized publishing and founded Other Shore Press, whose initial title, A False Autobiography by Ben Maddow (co-produced with Rick Foster) came off the presses to critical acclaim.