Clay Lancaster, architectural historian, a native of Lexington, Kentucky, was born on March 30, 1917, to Della (Pigg) and J.W. Lancaster, Jr. In 1936, he spent a half year at the Art Students' League of New York City. He then earned an A.B. (1938) and an M.A. (1939) from the University of Kentucky. In 1943 Lancaster returned to New York to become the Ware librarian of the Avery Library at Columbia University, where he studied Asian cultures. He taught at Columbia, Vassar College, New York City's Cooper Union, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New York University.

Lancaster received two Guggenheim Fellowships -- the first, in 1954-55, for research for the book The Japanese Influence in America (1963), and the second, in 1963-64, for research on Kentucky architecture, the basis of numerous publications. In 1971 Lancaster moved to Nantucket, Massachusetts, where he devoted himself exclusively to writing. Books of this period include The Architecture of Historic Nantucket (1972), The Far Out Island Railroad (1972), and Nantucket in the Nineteenth Century (1979). In 1978 Lancaster returned to Kentucky to live at Warwick, on the Kentucky River , in Mercer County. He soon completed Vestiges of the Venerable City (1978) and Eutaw -- The Builders and Architecture of an Ante-Bellum Southern Town (1979). He taught at Transylvania University and the University of Kentucky and was the Morgan professor at the University of Louisville in 1983.

Lancaster has written several children's books, including The Periwinkle Steamboat (1961), Michiko, or Mrs. Belmont's Brownstone on Brooklyn Heights (1965), The Flight of the Periwinkle (1987), The Toy Room (1988), and The Runaway Prince (1990). His scholarly publications include Architectural Follies in America (1960), Old Brooklyn Heights, New York's First Suburb (1961), Ante Bellum Houses of the Bluegrass (1961), Victorian Houses: A Treasury of Lesser Known Examples (1973), The American Bungalow, 1880-1930 (1985), and more than a hundred articles.

WILLIAM B. SCOTT, JR.
Entry Author

In the print edition this entry appears on page 533