CORNELIA OTIS SKINNER - AUTOGRAPH CIRCA 1941 CO-SIGNED BY: CECIL ROBERTS, BELLAMY PARTRIDGE, PIERRE VAN PAASEN, OLGA KOCHANSKA, LEW R. SARETT, BOB CASEY, L. BURKE, STEWART HALL HOLBROOK, GENEVIEVE FOSTER, CARL VAN DOREN, MARY ELLEN CHASE, JACK HARDING - HFSID 29588

BEST-SELLING AUTHORS of 1941: CORNELIA OTIS SKINNER, CARL VAN DOREN, GENEVIEVE FOSTER and OTHERS.
14 authors sign a guest register at Marshall Field department store, Chicago.
Signatures: "Cornelia Otis Skinner", "Jack Harding 'I Like Brazil'/- and the too long deferred meeting/with a gracious lady was a distinct/pleasure/October 8, 1941", "Bellamy Partridge Easton, Conn.", "Pierre van Paassen", "Olga Kochaniska 'Arrest and Exile'"/Oct. 29, 1941", "For Rose Aller Harbaugh/A choice spirit/Faithfully/Lew Sarett", "Bob Casey, Chicago Daily News, Nov. 4 -'41", "L. Burke. N.Y.C. 1941" and on verso "[name illegible]/(who is turning over a new leaf/on November 8, 1941", "Stewart H. Holbrook/November 14, 1941", "Mary Ellen Chase - with many thanks/to Marshall Field & Company and to Miss/Oller and her staff, November 15 th, 1941", "Genevieve Foster/I shall open all my letters after this!/'George Washington's World'", "For Heaven's Sake - and a return/soon to a city of pleasant memories/Cecil Roberts" and "Some day I'll write the Open History/of my admiration for this store/Sincerely,/Carl Van Doren/22 November 1941", 2p (front and verso), 7½x11¼. It rare to find in recent times a classic department store which upholds a city's culture. Marshall Field & Company of Chicago, a business tracing its origins back to 1852, is an example of a quality department store which helped establish the Chicago arts scene. In 1914, Marshall Field opened a book department featuring in-store signings by authors. This 2-sided page is from the store's guest register for October-November 1941, when many celebrated authors appeared. The inscriptions are to Rose Oller, later Harbaugh, longtime manager of the book department. Among the signers here are CORNELIA OTIS SKINNER (1901-1979), a stage and film actress who also wrote eight plays, satirical verses and essays. Her Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, a description of a European vacation, was one of several of her works made into films. JACK HARDING (d.1954), an advertising man married to prolific author Bertita Harding, wrote his own 1940 book about their vacation in Brazil. EDWARD BELLAMY PARTRIDGE (1877-1960) published Big Family in 1941, a collection of family jokes and stories which was the long-awaited sequel to Country Lawyer (1928). PIERRE VAN PAASEN (1895-1968), was a Dutch-Canadian-American journalist, a global correspondent for the New York Evening World. He wrote warnings not only about the menace of Naziism, but also of radical Islam - in the early 1930s! Two of his books, That Day Alone and The Time is Now appeared in 1941. OLGA KOCHANSKA was the subject, not the author of Arrest and Exile, Lilian T. Mowrer's book documenting the ordeal of Kochanska, a Polish woman exiled to Siberia after the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939. LEW SARETT (1888-1954) taught speech at Northwestern University (1920-1953), wrote six volumes of poetry and three speech textbooks. A lover of nature and wildlife, he often teamed with Carl Sandburg for lectures and readings by "the poet of the wilderness" and "the poet of the city." ROBERT J. CASEY (1890-1962), a decorated combat veteran of World War I, covered international affairs and wrote a humor column for the Chicago Daily News from 1920-1947. In 1940, he covered the London Blitz for the paper, and he traveled to many theaters of World War II. STEWART HOLBROOK (1893-1964), a high school dropout who started writing while working as a logger in his native Oregon, was a popular nonfiction writer in his day and almost forgotten until recently rediscovered. The Oregon Book Awards nonfiction category is now named for him. Holbrooke's books include Murder Out Yonder, a collection of true crime stories from rural and small town America. MARY ELLEN CHASE (1887-1973) wrote novels (Mary Peters, 1934; Windswept, 1941), children's books (The Story of Lighthouses, 1965) and three autobiographical works, all of which carried the strong regional favor of her native Maine. She also wrote biblical studies (Life and Language in the Old Testament, 1955). GENEVIEVE FOSTER (1893-1979) wrote children's books about famous persons, including Augustus Caesar, Columbus and Galileo. She conceived these books as "horizontal history," describing the world at the time each person lived. Her George Washington's World was a Newbery Honor Book in 1942. CECIL ROBERTS (1892-1976), a British journalist and novelist, served in the British Embassy in Washington during World War II. In 1941 he published A Man Arose, a poetic tribute to Winston Churchill. CARL VAN DOREN (1885-1950), a literary critic and professor at Columbia University, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for his biography of Benjamin Franklin. Carl was the brother of fellow Columbia University professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Van Doren and the uncle of Charles Van Doren, briefly famous from the rigged quiz show Twenty One. Binding remnants at left edge from removal from book. Lightly soiled at lower right. Otherwise, fine condition.