Bio:John Biggs, Jr.

Judge John Biggs, Jr., was born in Delaware in 1895, educated first at Princeton where he was roommates with lifelong friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. The two were on the Princeton Tiger board together. He then studied at Harvard Law School, graduating in 1922, at which point he was admitted to the bar of Delaware. He practiced law in Wilmington, and served as a referee in bankruptcy for the district of Delaware. While in Wilmington, Biggs and his wife Anna helped the Fitzgerald's find "Ellerslie", the mansion they rented there (1927-1929). Biggs got Fitzgerald out of trouble more than once, when he was held by the police for drunkenness. It was at Fitzgerald's recommendation that Scribner's published Biggs' two novels, Demigods in 1926 and Seven Days Whipping in 1928. He had previously published at least one short story, God's Justice, in the Nov. 1917 issue of The Nassau Literary Magazine.

In 1937 Biggs was appointed a judge of the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. In 1939 he was appointed chief judge of the the circuit. In 1954 he received an award from the American Psychiatric Association for his notable contributions to legal problems connected with mental disorders. The award included him giving a series of lectures, which were published as The Guilty Mind: Psychiatry And The Law Of Homicide in 1955.

A biography of his life was published by Seymour Toll as A Judge Uncommon: A Life of John Biggs, Jr. in 1993.

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An F. Scott Fitzgerald Encyclopedia, by Robert L. Gale, 1998.

Hearings, United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966.

The Psychoanalytic quarterly, Volume 23, p. 485, 1954.