Welcome to the Lehigh Valley Landmarks with Leon podcast series, celebrating 250 years of independence. I'm your host, Rachel Leon. Since being elected in 2022 and serving as Vice President of Bethlehem City Council, I'm humbled by the opportunity to serve the diverse communities that make up our great city. But to understand where we're going, we need to understand our past. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story about the 250 years that made the Lehigh Valley and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, known as the Christmas City, as we explore historic landmarks.
“There is excitement in the very act of composition,” Catherine Drinker Bowen once wrote in an article for The Atlantic. This sentiment was the defining principle by which Bowen lived her life.
Catherine Shober Drinker was born on January 1st, 1897 to parents Henry Sturgis Drinker and Ernesta Beaux Drinker. Growing up in Haverford, Pennsylvania, Catherine was the youngest of six children. In 1905, the Drinker family moved to their new home in Bethlehem, PA—the President’s House on Lehigh University’s campus.
With her father as president, Catherine and her siblings spent much of their childhood on Lehigh’s campus and in greater Bethlehem. Catherine received her education from Mrs. Kellogg’s Dame School and the Moravian Seminary before moving to Maryland to attend St. Timothy’s boarding school. While at St. Timothy’s Catherine learned how to play the violin.
Catherine’s exceptional talent as a violinist led her to study at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore from 1915-1917. After Peabody, Catherine continued her study of the violin at the Juilliard School in New York City.
After Juilliard, Catherine returned to Bethlehem. On March 19, 1919, she married Ezra Bowen, an economics professor at Lehigh. In 1920, Catherine and Ezra moved to Easton, Pennsylvania for Ezra’s new position as the head of the economics department at Lafayette College. After Catherine was married, she put her musical career on hold, but continued to teach lessons and play in amateur quartets.
In 1920, Catherine Drinker Bowen began to write. Her first success in writing was a piece that won ten dollars in a writing contest in the Easton Express. After this accomplishment, Bowen began writing a daily column for the Express as well as articles for Woman’s Home Companion, Pictorial Review, and Good Housekeeping.
Bowen published her first books in 1924. The Story of the Oak Tree was a 127-page children’s book. The History of Lehigh University was a detailed history of the campus on which Bowen spent much of her early life. In the decade following, Bowen published a fiction novel, Rufus Starbuck’s Wife, and a book of essays about music, Friends and Fiddlers.
It was not until the late 1930s that Catherine began to write in the genre that she would eventually be famous for: biographies. Bowen’s first biography, “Beloved Friend”: The Story of Tchaikovsky and Nadeja Von Meck sold over 150,000 copies in the United States and was named one of the day’s best biographies by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Bowen’s second biography, Free Artist: The Story of Anton and Nicholas Rubenstein, cemented her reputation as an in-depth researcher and biographer; Bowen travelled to Russia and conducted interviews with friends of the Rubenstein brothers in order to depict them properly in her book.
After two biographies about musicians, Bowen pivoted her focus to lawyers, publishing Yankee from Olympus, a biography about Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Adams and the American Revolution, The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke, and Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man. The Lion and the Throne was Bowen’s most decorated book, winning the National Book Award for nonfiction, the Nonfiction award of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, and the Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence from the American Philosophical Society.
In 1962, Bowen received the Women’s National Book Association Award for her “work in the world of books beyond the duties or responsibilities of her profession or occupation.”
Catherine Drinker Bowen died on November 1, 1973 of cancer. Her final book, a biography of Benjamin Franklin, was published posthumously in 1974.
Bowen described her career best: “Biographers, by their very nature, want to know everything about everybody, dead or alive. With me the appetite has centered on the genus lawyer and the genus musician.” Bowen’s focus on the human behind the grand public personas of her subjects revolutionized the genre of biography and reflected her philosophy that artists “maintain a constant love affair with life.”
We want to give a special thanks to Jordan Knox, an undergraduate student studying English and Environmental Studies at Lehigh University for her writing contribution for this episode.
