Dustwrapper for the
Garden City Publishing edition, 1945

Philip Van Doren Stern,
a traveler by moonlight

Jessica Amanda Salmonson

   

It is an odd contradiction that a work of fantasy can have become a deep part of American culture with so few people conscious of who wrote the tale. In 1943 Philip Van Doren Stern wrote a fantasy short story "The Greatest Gift" about a man who on the brink of suicide wishes he had never been born, & is temporarily given his wish by a guardian angel. Frank Capra enthused, "It was the story I had been looking for all my life!" Capra transformed it into the 1946 classic film It's a Wonderful Life.

The best modern edition of the story is The Greatest Gift: The Original Story that Inspired the Christmas Classic 'It's a Wonderful Life' (Viking Penguin, 1996). You can also find the story in No, But I Saw the Movief edited by David Wheeler (Penguin, 1989); Christmas Stars edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor, 1992 ) & in a tinkered-with version in The Bank Street Book of Creepy Tales edited by Howard Zimmerman, Seymour Reit & Barbara Brenner (Pocket, 1989).

The far reaching cultural effect of the story, as filtered through the film, cannot be exaggerated. The screenplay itself has been a bestseller, while the film has inspired such novelty books as The It's a Wonderful Life Cookbook by Sarah Key (Abbeville Press, 1995) & Zuzu Bailey's It's a Wonderful Life Cookbook by Karolyn Grimes, with Franklin Dohanyes (Carol Publishing, 1996). Grimes was the actress who played Zuzu. She also helped write It's a Wonderful Life Story & Activity Book (Bailey's Angel Productions, 1996), & is the subject of the biography Everytime a Bell Rings: The Wonderful Life of Karolyn Grimes by Clay Eals (Pastime Press, 1997). There's also a novelization of It's a Wonderful Life by M.C. Bolin (Harper, 1947) with a special fiftieth anniversary edition reissued in 1996. Other celebrations or critical studies include Marie Cahill's It's a Wonderful Life: A Hollywood Classic (Smithmark,1994); Jeanine Basinger's The It's A Wonderful Life Book (Knopf, 1987); Jimmy Hawkins & Paul Peterson's The It's a Wonderful Life Trivia Book (Crown, 1992); not to mention several biographies & filmographies for the film's key actors & Capra himself. In all this, Philip Van Doren Stern has gotten just a mite submerged!

His story hadn't had a propitious beginning. He'd tried to sell it with no success & had finally given up. So that it would not be wasted effort, he printed up 200 copies at his own expense as Christmas gifts for friends; if you ever stumble onto one of those 200 copies boy are you holding something valuable. Stern's Christmas mailing included a Hollywood agent. She adored the tale & asked Stern if she might show it around to film producers, starting a progression of events that would change many a film career both in front of & behind the camera, & infect the uniquely American holiday imagination as no other film ever has, though Valentine Davies' Miracle on 43rd Street (Harcourt Brace, 1947) filmed in 1947, 1973 & 1994 qualifies as a distant second place, with the first of these adaptations a marvelous film indeed.

   

Stern was a great lover of the macabre. His major anthologies for the genre were these:

These are aficionados' collections mixing well known classics with great things Stern spotted in his wide-ranging reading. In Strange Beasts he included tales of that theme by authors not well known to horror collectors, such as John B. L. Goodwin & Eric C. Williams, side by side with authors well known to discerning lovers of the macabre, such as May Sinclair & Joseph Payne Brennan, besides classic tales by Doyle, Stoker, & Wells. His best-selling The Moonlight Traveler is a "who's who" of leading horror writers; I have never parted with my copy because it also includes such rarities as Stella Benson's "The Man Who Missed the Bus" & Jan Struthers' "Cobbler, Cobbler, Mend My Shoe." Travelers in Time similarly gathers tales by well-known masters (Wells, Kipling, Doyal, Machen & the like) but also such comparative rarities as Katherine Fullerton Gerould's brilliant "On the Staircase" & Lady Eleanor Smith's "No Ships Pass." The Midnight Reader shows his knowledge of the traditional ghost story by the likes of M. R. James & Oliver Onions.

His scarce anthology The Other Side of the Clock reveals Stern to have been well-read in the pulps, including as it does stories drawn from Astounding, Galaxy & Science-Fantasy alongside tales from Saturday Evening Post & Colliers, The really remarkable thing about his theme anthology Travelers in Time is that it finds so many time travel tales without mining science fiction writers' works; he preferred such tales by authors better known for ghost stories (Algernon Blackwood, A. M. Burrage, A. E. Coppard & so on) or are mainstream writers not widely acknowledged for such tales, including Somerset Maugham's "The Taipan," James Thurber's "A Friend to Alexander" & F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

His love of the weird tale was deeply considered. In his introduction to The Moonlight Traveler he rightly assumes a love of eerie fiction stems in great part from the fact that "endless earthly existence is withheld from us," & he assumes a similarity from the top to the bottom for such literature, because "Hamlet & Macbeth & the rental-library novel on your bedside table are alike concerned with the same eternal themes."

With such an intellectual sentiment about horror, he could not help but love especially Arthur Machen & composed an esay on Machen's life & works which served as introduction to his selection of Machen's Tales of Horror & the Supernatural (Alfred A. Knopf, 1948; Richards, 1949). Tartarus Press has reissued Stern's selection but, alas, did not have permission to include Stern's superior essay, in which he says of the author, "There is more essential truth to be found in the tales by such weavers of fantasy as Arthur Machen than in all the charts & graphs & statistics of the world." So too Stern was devoted to Edgar Allan Poe, having published essays on Poe, & edited The Portable Poe (Viking, 1945).

   

Though his name sadly is not often spoken by today's fans of fantasy & the supernatural, he will always be remembered by all who have an abiding interest in the American Civil War. He wrote a good deal of authoratative nonfiction about the era, including The Man Who Killed Lincoln (Random House, 1939); The Life & Writings of Abraham Lincoln (Random House, 1940); Civil War Christmas Album (Hawthorn, 1951); Robert E. Lee: The Man & the Soldier (McGraw Hill, 1963); The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin (Erickson, 1963); An End to Valor: The Last Days of the Civil War (Houghton Mifflin, 1958); Secret Missions of the Civil War (Rand McNally, 1959); They Were There: The Civil war in Action as Seen by Its Combat Artists (Crown, 1959); Soldier Life in the Union & Confederate Armies (Indiana University Press, 1961); The Confederate Navy (Doubleday, 1962) & others on related topics. His novel The Drums of Morning (Doubleday Doran, 1942) is regarded one of the great novels about the abolisionist movement, & vastly preferred over Gone with the Wind by anyone with even a little real knowledge of the Civil War.

Stern was born in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, but grew up in New Jersey. He graduated from Rutgers University. During his career as an editor he worked at Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, & Alfred A. Knopf. He served in World War II as general manager of Armed Services Editions from 1943 until the end of the war, during which period he issued 1,324 titles & delivered 122,951,031 books to the U. S. Government for distributioni among soldiers. Stern's personal collection of ASE editions is now the property of the Virginia University Library special collections. These books had a unique format wider than they are tall, & they have many collectors today, perhaps fewer as America's old warhorses pass from this earth.

He died at the age of 83 in Sarasota, Florida, on August 1, 1984.

   

copyright © 2000 by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, all rights reserved

   

For a vast array of anthologies of weird fiction, glance throughout
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