Gerstle Mack

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Born in San Francisco, Gerstle Mack (1894-1983) studied architecture at UC-Berkeley before switching to MIT where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1916. He worked as an architectural draftsman in New York until World War I. After serving in the War in Paris as a Lieutenant in the US Reserve Corps of Engineers, he returned to San Francisco to do architectural work and theater design production. In 1926 he left his architecture work to travel to Spain where he made architectural measurements and produced a book on southern Spanish architecture in 1928. A companion volume for northern Spanish architecture appeared in 1930.

Mack did extensive archival research in France, England and the United States on Paul Cézanne before publishing a highly praised
biography of the painter in 1935. He followed this with a biography of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in 1938, which was equally well received. During World War II, Mack served in the military in England with the Office of Strategic Services. The Land Divided, his history of the Panama Canal, was published in 1944 and his biography of Gustave Courbet appeared in 1951. In 1981, he wrote a book on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which he personally survived. Manhattan has been Mack’s home since 1938, but he travelled extensively across the world.


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