| "All
of us who lived here in those dazzling days felt part of the parade.
We cheered when our Pearl Buck won the Nobel Prize and our Oscar Hammerstein the Pulitzer. We relished Perelman's latest books
and roared at his scripts for the Marx Brothers' movies. I was stunned
by the brilliance of how our neighbors, Samuel and Bella Spewack,
produced the musical gem, Kiss Me, Kate. . . . The bonds that
tied me to that time and place never parted. Long after I moved away,
my wife and I returned year after year to the Phillips Mill to reassure
ourselves that Bucks County painters were still at their easels."-James
A. Michener
Bucks County, Pennsylvania-the name conjures up
images of colonial villages, pastoral vistas, and famous artists.
Walking down the streets of Doylestown or New Hope in the 1930s
or 40s, you might have glimpsed humorist Dorothy Parker at a lunch
counter or satirist S. J. Perelman at the hardware store, not to
mention Pulitzer-Prize-winning writers like Oscar Hammerstein, James
A. Michener, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, or Pearl S. Buck. Thanks
to cheap real estate, proximity to New York City, and the lure of
country living, Bucks County became such a well-known haven for
creativity that the New York media began to call it "the genius
belt."
This book tells the story of Bucks County's rich
artistic tradition: from the nineteenth-century's best-known primitive
painter, Edward Hicks, to the turn-of-the-century birth of a major
art colony along the Delaware River, to the influx of literary and
theatrical figures during the Depression. A colorful introduction
by James Michener begins with the renowned author's boyhood in Doylestown
and recalls his delightful memories of the county's "golden years."
Contents
Introduction: The Golden Years James A. Michener
The
Writers Dorothy Herrmann
Footlights
and Fireflies: The Bucks County Theater Tradition Phil Johnson
Ruth
Henry
Chapman Mercer and the Craft Tradition Cleota Reed
The
Visual Artists Patricia Tanis Sydney
Afterword:
A Brief History of the James A. Michener Art Museum Brian H.
Peterson
Appendix
1: "Revolutionary Theater" at Washington Crossing St. John Terrell
Appendix
2: Memories of the Early Bucks County Playhouse W. Lester Trauch |
