Miracle At Philadelphia

Catherine Drinker Bowen was an American writer who became best known for her popular biographies of historical subjects. Born in Pennsylvania in 1897, she showed early promise as a violinist, and attended the prestigious Julliard School in New York City, but ceased her studies upon her marriage to Ezra Bowen, an economics professor at Lafayette University. Relegated to the home and tasked with caring for their two children (a boy and girl named after their father and mother), she began writing, keeping it a secret for many years even as she had published a daily column, several magazine articles, and two books. In 1932, she wrote a novel, Rufus Starbuck’s Wife, about a woman struggling to make a career in writing while living under the shadow of her husband. This was likely semi-autobiographical, as she divorced Bowen in 1936 and began to pursue writing full-time, publishing a well-regarded biography of the Russian composer Tchaikovsky in 1937. When the outbreak of the Second World War prevented any further research in Europe, she turned to American subjects, first the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Founding Father John Adams. In 1957, she published what is widely considered her best book, The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke, 1522-1634, about an important jurist in the age of Queen Elizabeth and King James I.