Big Family
Stephen J. Voorhies New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1941. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xiv, 323, [5] pages. Illustrations. Signed by the author on the fep. Fep has a small portion of the top edge cut off. Cover has some wear and spine lettering faded. No DJ present. Story of the Partridge family and their eight children, set against the social background of the 1880's in the upper New York state town of Phelps. Bellamy Partridge was a 1900 graduate of Hobart College, Bellamy Partridge went on to study law, and for about a decade practiced law with his father, Civil War veteran and country lawyer Samuel Selden Partridge, in the little town of Phelps, New York--near Rochester--before striking out as a freelance writer, novelist and historian. He was the author of many works, including the national best-seller "Country Lawyer" (1939), a memoir of his father, and its sequel, "The Big Family" (1941). Partridge and his family moved out to California when "Country Lawyer" was picked up by one of the studios and he was given a six-month contract to adapt it for the screen. They lived at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and while her husband labored on the screenplay, his wife, a short story and article writer herself, composed letters back to her family in Connecticut that would later become the basis of her 1941 book "A Lady Goes to Hollywood: Being The Casual Adventures of an Author's Wife in the Much Misunderstood Capital of Filmland". By the time the screenplay was finished, Pearl Harbor was attacked and America entered World War II; the project was permanently shelved and the film was never made. Stephen J Voorhies was a popular muralist, pictorial mapmaker, book illustrator and painter from the 1920’s well into the 1960’s. Of Dutch descent, he was born in 1898 and grew up in the New York area. After serving in the U. S. Navy, Voorhies attended the Pratt Institute in the Clinton Hill area of Brooklyn, studying Art and Design. Graduating in 1922, he quickly earned a reputation as an artist able to work in any medium. He eventually established a permanent residence at 136 Linden Street, Rockville Centre, Long Island, but maintained a separate studio at 303 West 42nd Street in Manhattan. His wife, Dorothy Townsend Voorhies, was an accomplished book illustrator and fashion designer in her own right. Stephen J Voorhies was listed in both the Who Was Who in American Art, and Salons of America.
Voorhies loved the then-popular concept of pictorial maps and murals — filled with busy scenes of trade, industry and the bustle of rural and town life. In 1949, he designed the New York City Subway map. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Civil War, Country Lawyer, Samuel Selden Partridge, Phelps, New York, Stephen J. Voorhies, Germs, Epidemics, Conscience, School, Hooky, Seamstress, Croquet, Tennis, Manners
[Book #83712]
Price: $175.00