Bern Porter

Bernard Harden "Bern" Porter (born February 14, 1911, Porter Settlement in Houlton, Aroostook County, Maine– died June 7, 2004 in Belfast, Maine) was an American artist, writer, publisher, performer, and physicist. He was a representative of the avant-garde art movements Mail Art and Found Poetry.

In 2010 his work was recognized by an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Bern Porter was born in Maine and studied at Colby College and Brown University. He spent the last decades of his life living in Belfast, Maine.

Porter's talent showed itself at Ricker Junior College and he soon received a scholarship at the prestigious private Colby College in Waterville, Maine. His main subjects were physics, chemistry and economics. Porter earned his master's degree at Brown University. In 1935, Porter received a job with the Acheson Colloids Corporation in New York. He worked on the development of the coating of the television tube with a graphite mixture. In Paris around 1937-38 he was taken into the circle around Gertrude Stein. Porter read the manuscript of Henry Miller's book Tropic of Cancer. After the US entry into the Second World War he worked from 1940 as a soldier for the Manhattan Project in Princeton where he made the acquaintance of Albert Einstein. He worked there and in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on creating methods for nuclear fission. He then worked at the University of California, Berkeley. His first marriage (1946) with the young student Helen Elaine Hendren failed after one year. As early as 1944 he was, even during his time at Manhattan Project in Tennessee, a pacifist, publishing an anonymous pamphlet by Henry Miller.

That same year, he came into close contact with Miller in Big Sur, while he worked on a Miller Bibliography. Porter formed a small press, Bern Porter Books, which published texts by and about Henry Miller and poetry books by California poets. George Leite, a bookseller from San Francisco, published via Porter, the literary magazine Circle (10 issues, 1944–48) featuring Porter's views on the interplay of Art and Science he presented in his SciArt Manifesto (1950). Porter's parents arrived for a visit when Porter's father was arrested for fondling a 12-year-old girl, and Porter discovered that his father had a long history of molesting children in Maine. Refusing to see his father, Porter spent the next five years in Guam, working for the Guam Daily News and as a waiter and writing for an ad agency. During this time, Porter traveled in the South Pacific and meeting artists and writers and observing the rebirth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. In 1955, upon his return to California, he married the anthropologist and writer Margaret Eudine Preston. They worked in Burnie, Tasmania in a wood processing plant and in Venezuela. In the 1960s, Porter was part of the Saturn V program at the NASA Marshall Space Centre in Huntsville, Alabama until 1967). Margaret died in 1975.

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