Robert Bell

Robert Eugene Bell (born October 13, 1926 in Tarrant City; died November 19, 1999 in Davis, California) was a scholar, reference librarian and novelist.

Bell was the son of Archie Herbert and Jessie Adkins Bell of Tarrant City. He graduated from Phillips High School in 1944 and served with the U.S. Army in World War II. Though his family had relocated to Fairhope in Baldwin County in 1947, he returned to Birmingham to complete a bachelor of arts at Birmingham-Southern College in 1950, then went on to earn a master of arts in English at Harvard University in 1952.

In 1953 Bell began working at the Mobile Public Library, spending his summer in additional study at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. In 1955 he was appointed assistant director of the Fort Worth Public Library in Fort Worth, Texas. In 1959 he published his first novel, The Butterfly Tree, which combined a small-town Alabama setting, inspired by Fairhope, with elements of classical mythology.

In 1960 Bell and his partner, Mark Hanrahan, moved to San Francisco, California. They opened the Banquette Book Shop there, and Bell served as director of the Book Club of California. In 1962 Banquette opened a second location in New Orleans, Louisiana and Bell and Hanrahan moved to Mobile in 1962, with Bell returning to the Mobile Public Library.

In 1964 Bell and Hanrahan moved to New Orleans. Bell worked for a while at the New Orleans Public Library, but left to study library science full time at LSU, graduating in 1967. The couple returned to San Francisco, where Bell continued his studies at the University of California in Berkeley, interrupting by teaching stints at the University of South Carolina.

Bell completed his Ph.D. in 1974 and taught as an adjunct professor at Berkeley while working in the reference department at the City College of San Francisco's library. He was soon appointed head of the department of humanities and social science references at the library for the University of California, Davis. While there he published three non-fiction reference books on classical mythology along with numerous articles in scholarly journals. His research required frequent travel to Europe for study.

After retiring in 1991 Bell remained in Davis, California. He died in November 1999.

Publications

• Bell, Robert E. (1956) A Bibliography of Mobile, Alabama.
• Bell, Robert E. (1959) The Butterfly Tree.
• Bell, Robert E. (1982) A Dictionary of Classical Mythology: Symbols, Attributes, and Associations
• Bell, Robert E. (1989) Place-Names in Classical Mythology: A Biographical Dictionary
• Bell, Robert E. (1991) Women of Classical Mythology: A Biographical Dictionary
• Bell, Robert E. & Mary Lois Timbes (2001) Meet Me At the Butterfly Tree

References

• Rountree, Thomas (1991) "Introduction" to the 2nd edition of The Butterfly Tree. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press
• Brown, Marthanne (September 6, 2012) "Robert Bell" Encyclopedia of Alabama Online - accessed November 12, 2015