(In this highly praised biography of the formative years o...)
In this highly praised biography of the formative years of the America's second president, Mrs. Bowen portrays John Adams within the context of colonial America and examines the momentous events that forged a new nation and the character of our second president. This is an old-fashioned biography, beautifully written, passionately interested in its subject. Mrs. Bowen's primary aim is to convey the temper of mind and intellectual curiosity of a man who many consider the most brilliant individual to have ever held the high office of the presidency.
(Catherine Drinker Bowen was a Philadelphian with music in...)
Catherine Drinker Bowen was a Philadelphian with music in her veins....
Into this book she has crammed the joy, comedy, and desperation of a musical life. With the skill of a biographer she sums up the human equation in music with insatiable enthusiasm. She discourses on amateur quartets, fiddlers, wild-eyed cellists, wives who play violas and children who bang the box.
This is a book which musicians will chortle over, a book which the layman will read with dawning delight.
Miracle At Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May - September 1787
(A classic history of the Federal Convention at Philadelph...)
A classic history of the Federal Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, the stormy, dramatic session that produced the most enduring of political documents: the Constitution of the United States.
From Catherine Drinker Bowen, noted American biographer and National Book Award winner, comes the canonical account of the Constitutional Convention recommended as "required reading for every American." Looked at straight from the records, the Federal Convention is startlingly fresh and new, and Mrs. Bowen evokes it as if the reader were actually there, mingling with the delegates, hearing their arguments, witnessing a dramatic moment in history.
Here is the fascinating record of the hot, sultry summer months of debate and decision when ideas clashed and tempers flared. Here is the country as it was then, described by contemporaries, by Berkshire farmers in Massachusetts, by Patrick Henry's Kentucky allies, by French and English travelers. Here, too, are the offstage voices--Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and John Adams from Europe.
In all, fifty-five men attended; and in spite of the heat, in spite of clashing interests--the big states against the little, the slave states against the anti-slave states--in tension and anxiety that mounted week after week, they wrote out a working plan of government and put their signatures to it.
Catherine Drinker Bowen was an American writer. She is a famous historical biographer who is known for her partly fictionalized biographies, such as one of the Elizabethan jurist Sir Edward Coke, The Lion and The Throne (1957), which won her the National Book Award in 1958.
Background
Catherine Drinker Bowen was born on January 1, 1897, in Haverford, Pennsylvania. She was the youngest of six children of Henry Sturgis Drinker, an attorney, and Aimee Ernesta Beaux.
Her ancestors were among the first English settlers in Philadelphia. Drinker grew up in a household of extraordinary drive and competitiveness. She recalled that her four brothers looked over her shoulder, "seldom approving but always challenging. " Henry, Jr. , the oldest brother, was a prominent Philadelphia lawyer and a talented musician.
Another brother, Philip, invented the iron lung; and her brother Cecil was a renowned medical scholar and dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. In her early youth, Drinker and her family lived on the Haverford College campus outside Philadelphia.
When her father left his law practice to become president of Lehigh University in 1905, the family moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Education
Catherine Bowen received private tutoring at home; attended Bishopthorpe Manor, a finishing school, and the Moravian Seminary in Bethlehem; then entered St. Timothy's School in Catonsville, Maryland, from which she graduated in 1916.
Music was her greatest love, and she became an accomplished violinist. Catherine studied music at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School) in New York City, earning a teacher's certificate.
Career
In her formative years, Catherine Bowen discovered her passion and skill for writing when she began keeping diaries of the family's travels to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
As a young mother, Bowen began a career as a free-lance writer. She produced articles for yachting magazines and in 1923 and 1924 wrote a daily column for the Easton Express. In 1924, her first two books were published: A History of Lehigh University and The Story of an Oak Tree, a book for children. Her only novel, Rufus Starbuck's Wife (1932), about a troubled marriage, was partly autobiographical, for her own marriage was unraveling.
Friends and Fiddlers (1935), in collaboration with Barbara von Meck, was an engaging collection of essays that blended her passions for music and writing. It was music that led her into the field of biography. Beloved Friend: The Story of Tchaikovsky and Nadejda von Meck (1937), also written in collaboration with Barbara von Meck, was a fresh and revealing study of the Russian composer and his patron. The book was based on exhaustive research, but Bowen did not go to Russia. For her next project, a dual biography of Tchaikovsky's mentors, Bowen spent months in the libraries of Paris, Berlin, Leningrad, and Moscow.
Free Artist: The Story of Anton and Nicholas Rubinstein (1939), authoritative and vividly written, placed Bowen in the front rank of biographers. She wanted to follow this work with a portrait of Felix Mendelssohn but was cut off from access to the primary source material by the outbreak of World War II.
During the war, Bowen applied herself to an American subject: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. She was drawn to Holmes because of her interest in the Constitution and American government. Though denied access to the justice's unpublished writings, Bowen was a skilled and indefatigable archivist who found voluminous new materials and interviewed dozens of Holmes associates.
For six years, Bowen researched Coke's life at libraries in England and the United States. In Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man (1963), Bowen illuminated the life of Coke's great rival. A. L. Rowse, the British historian, wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Bowen, who had produced the best study of Coke, also painted the most perceptive and insightful Bacon portrait. Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention (1966) was Bowen's most ambitious work, a masterful study that captured the drama and conflict in the shaping of American government. Family Portrait (1970), a memoir of Bowen's family, was described by the author as "a celebration and a mourning. " In it, Bowen revealed more about other family members than herself.
Bowen died in Haverford, Pennsylvania and was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
Achievements
Catherine Bowen gained critical acclaim and national popularity for her literary works written in the 1930's. Justice Holmes and His Family (1944) was her triumphant success. Bowen next wrote about John Adams because she wanted to explore Holmes's New England heritage and the origins of American government. John Adams and the American Revolution (1950) was another biographical masterpiece. She next focused on Sir Edward Coke (1552 - 1634), the English attorney general and author of the Petition of Right that was used as a model by leaders of the American Revolution.
The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke (1957) won critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic and earned Bowen the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1958. She was also a recipient of the 1957 Philadelphia Award and the 1962 Women's National Book Association award. At the time of her death, Bowen was widely viewed as America's premier biographer.
Bowen passionately believed that good biography was also good literature. Bowen, who wrote in a rich, evocative style, approached her subjects with enthusiasm and excitement. Her gift was an ability to take major historical figures out of the pantheon and to bring them vividly to life.
Quotations:
"Whenever I get interested in a subject, I always find it easier to study it through a person than deal with it in the abstract. "
"Writing biography is an exciting business. "
"Like courtship, it has its moments of gratification and its days of despair when history closes her doors and will not show her face. To recreate the past is no less a task artistically than to write a novel or an epic poem. "
Personality
Bowen was a tall, long-jawed woman with aristocratic features and bearing.
Connections
In 1919, Catherine Drinker was married to Ezra Bowen. In 1920, the Bowens settled in Easton, Pennsylvania, where Ezra chaired the economics department at Lafayette College. They had two children.
After a long separation, the Bowens were divorced in 1936. She married Dr. Thomas McKean Downs in 1939.
