YOUNG, AGNES BROOKS

YOUNG, AGNES BROOKS (18 Nov. 1898-6 Feb. 1974) turned her talents to the writing of novels after achieving wide recognition as an authority on fashion and costuming. The daughter of Edward and Agnes Chapin Brooks, she was born in Cleveland and educated at the Cleveland School of Art (see CLEVELAND INSTITUTE OF ART), the School of Arts and Design and Columbia Univ. in New York, and L'Ecole Francais in Paris. Following her marriage in 1920 to Cleveland lawyer George Benham Young (1894-1957), she served as costume director at the CLEVELAND PLAY HOUSE from 1923-7 and filled the same function at Yale Univ.'s School of the Theater in 1928-9. A faculty member at Western Reserve Univ. (see CASE WESTERN RESERVE) from 1930-32, she published studies on Stage Costuming and Recurring Cycles in Fashion, 1760-1937. She and her husband lived in SHAKER HTS. and in her family homestead in CHAGRIN FALLS, which had an English garden planned by her and A. DONALD GRAY. During WORLD WAR II, Mrs. Young served as statistical consultant for the War Dept. and the War Manpower Commission. Published under the pen name of Agatha Young, her first novel, Light in the Sky (1948), featured a Cleveland setting during the 1870s. Another novel, Clown of the Gods, won the 1955 fiction award of the Martha Kinney Cooper Ohioans Library Assn. She and Brooks later lived in Vermont and New York City. She died in the latter city, leaving no survivors.


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