John Faunce Leavitt, was born in 1905 in Lynn, Massachusetts, of Maine parentage, and lived alternately in Lynn and in other Maine towns. He left school at the age of fourteen, to sail in coasting schooners. For the next seven years he spent his time aboard two, three, and four-masted schooners, going from one vessel to another, usually at wages of ten to twenty dollars a month.

During the winter months, when most of the coasters were laid up, he worked at odd jobs, and on several occasions went back to school as a special student.

After his marriage in 1927, to the former Virginia Coane, he worked at various jobs including yacht captain, ship rigger, and steeplejack. He then became a reporter for the old Philadelphia Ledger. Later he worked for Lynn Telegram-News, and for the Marblehead Messenger.

Mr. Leavitt became a yacht broker in 1936, first in the Boston office of Sparkman & Stephens, Inc., and then with Eldredge-McInnes, Inc., and then John G. Alden. He left Alden in 1960, for a curatorial position at Mystic Seaport Museum, and soon after became an honorary member of the curatorial staff at the Peabody Museum in Salem.

Mr. Leavitt gained recognition at a marine artist. According to Ernest S. Dodge, director of the Peabody Museum, "John had a natural talent for drawing inherited from his father. The bulk of his work date from the time after he gave up coasting, but it was during the coasting period that John gained the experience and knowledge which gives his work the extreme authenticity and accuracy that it possesses.

Leavitt held one-man shows at The Fanrsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME.; the Concord Free Library, Concord, MA.; and at galleries in Boston and Providence. His paintings hang in the Peabody Museum, Mystic Seaport Museum, The Maine Maritime Academy, The Mariner's Museum, Newport News, VA., in maritime museums in England and Denmark, and in many private collections.

Leavitt was also an author. His "Wake of the Coasters," was published in 1970, by the American Maritime Library. It is an informal history of the New England coasting trades and a series of recollections of men, vessels, and ports and a way of life almost forgotten.

"The Charles W. Morgan," published by Mystic Seaport Museum in the fall of 1973 is the biography of the last remaining wooden whale ship now under restoration and permanently exhibited at Mystic Seaport Museum. He was also the author of numerous articles on various aspects of maritime history.

At the time of his death on May 25, 1974, John Leavitt was associate curator at Mystic Seaport Museum.