C
CelticWarlord
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Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897 – 1973) was an American writer best known for her biographies. She was an accomplished violinist who studied for a musical career at the Peabody Institute and the Julliard School of Music but ultimately decided to become a writer. She had no formal writing education and no academic career but became a bestselling American biographer and writer. Bowen did all her own research, without hiring research assistants, and sometimes took the controversial step of interviewing subjects without taking a single note. A number of Bowen’s books were chosen as Book of the Month Club selections, including Beloved Friend (1937), Yankee from Olympus (1944) and John Adams and the American Revolution (1950). In 1958 she won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), a biography of the prominent lawyer of Elizabethan England. In addition, Ms. Bowen received the 1957 Philadelphia Award and the 1962 Women’s National Book Association award. Her last book, Family Portrait , received critical acclaim, and was a Literary Guild selection. During her lifetime she was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Philadelphia Award. In 1962, she became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Lehigh University.
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
"Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind."
"If art and literature have a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions."
"Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them."
“It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace–the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.”
“For the born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
“Colonial America looked upon lawyers as mere tradesmen who earned a questionable living by cleverness and chicanery.”
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- - - - - - -"Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind."
"If art and literature have a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions."
"Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them."
“It is a great, a pleasant thing to have a friend with whom to walk, untroubled, through the woods, by the stream, saying nothing, at peace–the heart all clean and quiet and empty, ready for the spirit that may choose to be its guest.”
“For the born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
“Colonial America looked upon lawyers as mere tradesmen who earned a questionable living by cleverness and chicanery.”