Bellaman was born in Fulton, Missouri. He was a serious student of music and studied both in the U.S. and abroad. From 1907 until 1932, when he began to pursue writing full-time, Bellamann held administrative and teaching positions at several educational institutions including Juilliard and Vassar. He died in New York.

Poetry

During the years that Bellamann taught, he wrote poetry and published three volumes:

• A Music Teacher's Notebook (1920)
• Cups of Illusion (1923)
• The Upward Pass (1928)

Although his poetry is today even less well known than his fiction, Bellamann was recognized by David Perkins in his 1976 History of Modern Poetry, in which he ranks Bellamann with the serious minor poets who "adopted the mode" of the Imagists (p. 347).

Fiction

In 1942 Publishers Weekly inaccurately reported that Bellamann was an author "new to the book trade" prior to the publication of Kings Row in 1940 (143:244). However, in addition to the three volumes of poetry already mentioned, four of Bellamann's novels were published before Kings Row. Furthermore, the range of sub-genre in which Bellamann experimented is quite surprising. In addition to Kings Row, Bellamann wrote two farm novels, a novel of manners, a social drama, a mystery, and a gothic romance.

From 1907 until his death in 1945, Bellamann was married to Katherine Jones Bellamann of Carthage, Mississippi. Mrs. Bellamann herself was a novelist and poet and shared much creative work with her husband. In 1948, she completed Parris Mitchell of Kings Row, his posthumous sequel to Kings Row. She died in 1956. The Bellamanns had no children.

Kings Row was made into a famous movie starring Ronald Reagan and Claude Rains in 1942. There was also a short-lived TV series in 1955.