Authors
Eliot House will be a posthumous publication for Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr., and a first book for Constantine A. Valhouli.
Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. (1935–2022) served as managing editor of The Paris Review, senior editor at Harper’s and Inc. magazines, and editor-in-chief of The American Benefactor and Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress. He also contributed to The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and New England Monthly. Nelson authored several books — including Tommy Hitchcock: An American Hero (1985), Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America (1988), and the oral history of George Plimpton George, Being George (2008) — and was Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989. He also taught writing at M.I.T. and Connecticut College. Nelson was graduated from St. Paul’s School and Harvard College (Class of 1957), where he was a resident of Eliot House under Mr. Finley.
Constantine A. Valhouli. The high point of his life was winning the spelling bee in middle school; it’s been downhill ever since. His career, such as it is, began at The Washington Post under the later years of Eliot House’s Ben Bradlee. He also worked for former White House press secretary Ron Nessen. He directed two documentaries, one on comic books — released under, in hindsight, the frankly unfortunate name of Sex, Lies, and Superheroes (which one journalist memorably misheard as “The Sex Lives of Superheroes”) — the other, Curve, on shifting ideals of beauty. The latter was featured on Oprah, and in a cover story in People magazine titled, “Who’s Sexy Now?” Constantine, whilst quoted in the piece, was not however the answer to the titular question. For reasons largely unknown to him, he has been quoted extensively in the Financial Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
