Menu:

• Books
• Journals
• Information
• News
• About

The Genius Belt
The Story of the Arts in Bucks County, Pennsylvania

George S. Bush

"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."

George S. Bush is a former editor at the old Saturday Evening Post, Look, and Better Homes and Gardens. He is a resident of Bucks County, Pennsylvania."