The Authors

Marion Elizabeth Green (1908-2003) was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in Sparta, a town located fifteen miles to the north which is the central locale of Good Times, Bad Times.  She received her bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Michigan and  taught high school and   occasionally college English much of her life in schools in central and northern Michigan and in Louisiana, Iowa, and Missouri.  She loved nature, literature, and history. She spent her last eight years in South Bend, Indiana, where she impressed all who knew her with her diversity of interests and her alert, inquiring  mind.  Good Times, Bad Times, written in her eighty  fifth year, is an effort to recapture life in a small town nearly a century ago for future generations.                                                                                            

Dr. Andrew J. Green (1898-1964), Marion’s husband, taught English at

the University of Michigan, Washington State University, Louisiana State University, Northern Arizona University, and finally Drake University. He wrote numerous articles and reviews for Philological Quarterly, Sewanee Review, Shakespeare Quarterly, the New York Times Book Review and Chicago Sun Book Week, and several other periodicals, along with some unpublished fiction and poetry. His life was characterized by deep ethical idealism: during the Second World War, for example, he published articles protesting the way the Army was wasting the talents of college students by abandoning programs designed to train them for technical specialization and relocating them instead in the front lines unprepared for combat. His teaching style was characterized by earnestness, charm and eloquence, and by graceful  and somewhat sentimental turns of phrase which made him very popular with his students.

Dr. Green was a self-made man. His family which had lived on a small farm near Lapeer, Michigan, broke apart after his mother died when he was five years old, and he was brought up afterwards by an aunt who lived with her husband in Petoskey. “The Signal,” written while he was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, is a fictional account of a storm in Petoskey during his childhood; the breakwater he writes about still exists there and looks almost exactly as he describes it. “The Old Secretary” records his memories of the “old secretary that stood in the parlor” of his home in Petoskey during the first two decades of the past century and the reading tastes of the middle class family which had adopted him.

[Marion Elizabeth and Andrew J. Green - Recollected History of Sparta and Petoskey, Michigan, in the Early Twentieth Century] [Authors] [Text and Table of Contents]