The novelist, editor, and educator Robert DeMaria grew up during the Depression in Harlem, New York. He attended James Monroe High School in the Bronx and Columbia University, where he received his BA, MA, and Ph.D. in English literature. He taught at the University of Oregon, Hofstra College (now Hofstra University), and Dowling College (now defunct). He also worked as an editor for Macmillan and served for two years as Dean of Faculty at the New School for Social Research. His first novel, the semi-autobiographical A Carnival of Angels (1961), is set in Morningside Heights. Clodia, a work of historical fiction, followed in 1965; Don Juan in Lourds was published in 1966, and many others followed, including, notably, The Satyr in 1972 and The Decline and Fall of America in 1973.

In 1964 he left New York and lived in Deia, Mallorca, Spain with Ellen Hope Meyer, whom he married in 1966, after his divorce from Maddalena Buzzeo. In 1965-66, now a professor at Dowling College, DeMaria ran a year-long program for student writers called The Mediterranean Institute. In doing so he deepened or established connections with many writers who either lived in Deia (preeminently, Robert Graves and Ruthven Todd) or came for visits to the Institute: Anthony Burgess, Colin Wilson,Galway Kinnell, Paul Bowles, and others. Returning to Dowling College on Long Island, he and Ellen Meyer began The Mediterranean Review, which published the work of many visitors to the Institute and a host of other established and promising writers. (All nine issues of the Mediterranean Review--Fall 1970-Winter 1973--are included in Box 4 of this archive.)