Bellairs was born January 17 in
Marshall, Michigan, and attended
Saint Mary's Catholic School. He later graduated from
Marshall High School
in 1955.
In
South Bend, Indiana, Bellairs's interest in English literature blossomed, and he became a
member of various literature clubs. During his senior year, he wrote a
series of humor articles for the student-produced weekly newspaper, the
Scholastic. Bellairs became a minor celebrity when he and four other students
appeared on the G.E. College Quiz Bowl program in March 1959. During their
first appearance on the program, Bellairs recited line after line of the
Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in perfect Middle English. A
Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Bellairs graduated Magna cum laude and moved
to Chicago,
after which he shortly earned a master's degree in English from the
University of Chicago.
In 1963 Bellairs
began his teaching career, first in
Winona, Minnesota, at the
College of Saint Teresa
and then as a Humanities faculty member at Shimer College in Mount
Carroll, Illinois. After teaching in Illinois for only a year, Bellairs
moved overseas to live and write in
Bristol, England, for six months. Upon his return to the United States in
1968, Bellairs
relocated to Massachusetts, married Priscilla Braids, and began teaching
at Emmanuel College in Boston.
After a two-year teaching post at Merrimack College in North Andover,
Bellairs hit it big with the publication of his young-adult masterpiece,
The House With a Clock in its Walls, a supernatural thriller
starring the portly Lewis Barnavelt, Uncle Jonathan Barnavelt, and their
neighbor Florence Zimmermann. Two sequels,
The Figure in the Shadows (1975) and
The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring (1976), quickly followed.
House, and a later book, The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn,
were adapted for television in the early 1980s. During this decade,
Bellairs wrote nine books, many focusing on Johnny Dixon and Professor
Childermass's exploits in and around New England, including
The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull (1984) and
The Revenge of the Wizard's Ghost (1985). Another set of characters
- Anthony Monday and Miss Myra Eells - also fought supernatural battles
against wizards and warlocks in rural Minnesota, as seen in
The Dark Secret of Weatherend (1984) and
The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb (1988). Prominent artist Edward Gorey
illustrated most of these books.
Bellairs died on March 8, 1991.
The following year, Marshall, Michigan honored him with a historical
marker outside the
Cronin House, the famed residence serving as inspiration for
The House with a Clock in its Walls. In 2000, the Haverhill,
Massachusetts, Hall of Fame inducted Bellairs into their Hall of Fame, and
in 2008 that city unveiled an outdoor mural celebrating the author.
His characters live on in the completed and continued works by author
Brad Strickland.
In 2018, Universal Pictures adapted
The House with a Clock in its Walls into a major motion picture
starring Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, and Owen Vaccaro.
