Though he shares a birthday (November 29th) with C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, and Louisa May Alcott, Jared Lobdell has written (with his sister) only one piece of children’s fiction, Tinsel; the Tree that Grew–A Story for Christmas and other Seasons (2014). His other fiction includes The Four Corners of the Tapestry: A Casebook of Palmer Hopkins (1999); The Lord Whom Ye Seek (2016); and two more works in process, The Years Between and Introits and Imitations.
When he was sixteen he wrote that his future plans were for teaching after study at Yale. He holds his B.A. from Yale, M.B.A. and M.S. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon. Something of an academic gypsy, he has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Pace University, Marist College, Suffolk University, Muskingum College, Washington & Jefferson, Northwood University, Central Pennsylvania College, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, Elizabethtown College, and since retirement at four of the five campuses of Harrisburg Area Community College–business, finance, statistics, economics, history, English, Rhetoric and Composition, sociology and psychology. He was on the Board of Contributors to National Review 1966-74, a writer/editor at AEI 1972-84, Garland Publishing 1986-88, and at IESC on contract to USAID 1988-92.
His books include The Civil War Journals and Letters of J. V. DuBois (1967, new edition A Hudson Valley Soldier in Missouri and the West 2017); A Tolkien Compass (1974, Ballantine pb edition 1980, new edition 2003); England and Always (1981, new edition 2004 The World of the Rings); Sylvia Dubois [The Autobiography of a Slave] (1988, pb 1990); four volumes of Draper Society publications (1991-1994, mostly collected in Bravest of the Brave: The Heroic Age on the Upper Ohio (2017); The Scientifiction Novels of C. S. Lewis (2004); The Detective Fiction Reviews of Charles Williams (2004); This Strange Illness: Alcoholism and Bill W. (2004); The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy (2005); Eight Children in Narnia (2016); Tax Revision by Commission in Pennsylvania 1889-1949 (2017 for 2006); Simon Lobdell and the Judges in the Cave (2017); Garrit Storm: One Man’s Life in Old New York , Part I (2018).
He is working on three volumes on the American Revolution, on The Forgotten Campaign in New Jersey Jan-Mar 1777, Neutral Ground and Neutral Water 1779-1781, and The Last Battle of the Revolution (complete and awaiting publisher’s editing and publication). Also in the works: an edition of the short stories of William Austin; an edition of Guy Seguine LaTourette, A North Jersey Jaunt; a collection of essays in economics and political economy; a sequel (but a collection of essays) to This Strange Illness; and a collection of essays on the “Inklings.” If time allows for all.
Dr. Lobdell lives in Elizabethtown, PA with his wife Janie, her grandson Jeffrey, and the kitten (“One-o’-Cat”). He has been a member of SFWA, SFRA, the AHA, MLA, Eastern Economics Association, the Society for American Baseball Research, and half a dozen (at least) other historical and literary societies–not to mention the Elizabethan Club and Manuscript Society at Yale.
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