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Cancer, that horrible plague of our times, claimed one more victim on Tuesday, June 29th, when Christopher Cook Gilmore, unquestionably the finest writer to have been born and raised on Absecon Island, succumbed at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He is survived by his wife, Anita, who devotedly saw him through his final illness and who was with him at the end, and by his mother Margot, a well-known Margate artist, and by his half-sisters Schulyar, Suzanne, and Victoria, and by his many friends.

Gilmore, who was descended from Captain James Cook on his mothers side and from poet Sidney Lanier (1842 - 1881) on his fathers, was a regular contributor to Atlantic City magazine, which featured him on its cover in January 1991, and he was a Contributing Editor to New Jersey magazine. His essays on aspects of South Jersey life were incisive in their depiction of sub-culture at the Jersey shore, and always glowed with the love Gilmore had for his native Margate.

His published early novel, Atlantic City Proof, was a textured and charming tale of a vanished Atlantic City, and in his two later novels, The Bad Room and Road Kills, he dealt with violence and madness endemic to America, and he honed his writing style, influenced by favorites such as Hemingway and Kerouac, into a masterful verb-oriented precision.

Gilmore also appeared to great advantage in a documentary film about George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris, where Christopher often stayed on his travels to and from Essaouira, Morocco, which was a home away from home for him for over 25 years. Often he would stop in Tangier and visit the great writer and composer Paul Bowles.

A legendary character on the beaches, he was South Jersey’s most outstanding hobiecat racer, winning competitions into his early sixties, and he also sailed the inland waterways and back bays in his small wooden garvey, and recently he was interviewed on National Public Radio discussing boating, and the history of Absecon Island.

A graduate of Atlantic City High, he did a B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Miami, and he worked as a lifeguard for many years in Margate. As a young man, he taught woodworking at the prestigious St Paul’s School in London, and locally he taught at Absecon High School. Later in life he worked part-time teaching at Ocean City High and at Atlantic County Community College.

Gilmore was an accomplished performance artist and troubadour whose work was internationally known. In 2003, he represented the U.S. at the Swedish Academy’s International Poetry Festival in Göteburg.

As one of his friends put it, “he was a lion of a man” who quested courageously and relentlessly for (as he himself wrote in one of his poems):

                                   the secret place
                                   where the serpent never knows
                                   the shadow of the rose.