Catherine Drinker Bowen

Photo courtesy of Bowen in 1972. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Catherine Drinker Bowen is best known for her biographies, including the best-selling books “Beloved Friend”: The Story of Tchaikowsky and Nadeja Von Meck (1937, sold through Book-of-the-Month Club), and John Adams and the American Revolution (1950).

Bowen studied violin at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, and the Institute of Musical Arts (now Juilliard School) in New York City. She put her musical career on hold when she married. In 1920, a year into her marriage, she began writing, which she kept a secret from her husband. Her early writing includes a children’s book, The Story of the Oak Tree (1924), a novel, Rufus Starbuck’s Wife (1932), and a collection of essays, Friends and Fiddlers (1935).

After her divorce in 1936, she started writing biographies, of such people as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sir Edward Coke, Francis Bacon, and Benjamin Franklin, as well as a best-selling group biography, Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention (1966). She published eight biographies in all, as well as four collections of essays, including Biography: The Craft and Calling (1969). Bowen won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Women’s National Book Association Award, and the Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence from the American Philosophical Society. She was on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference for several summers. She was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Lehigh University.

Bowen lived in DC in the mid-1940s, and Zenobia Camprubí Aymar wrote in her diaries about their friendship. Bowen had two children with her first husband; she remarried in 1939, to a surgeon, Thomas McKean Downs. The 1970 movie “The Music Lovers” was based on Bowen’s “Beloved Friend.”