Robert Nathan

Robert Gruntal Nathan (2 January 1894 – 25 May 1985) was an American novelist, poet, and screenwriter whose delicate fantasies and gentle satires occupy a singular place in twentieth-century American letters. He published over fifty books — novels, poetry collections, and non-fiction — between 1919 and 1969, and his distinctive blend of lyricism, whimsy, and melancholy influenced writers from Ray Bradbury to Peter S. Beagle. Two of his novels became classic Hollywood films: The Bishop’s Wife (1947, starring Cary Grant) and Portrait of Jennie (1948, starring Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones).

Life

Nathan was born in New York City to a prosperous family. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, where he studied alongside e. e. cummings and John Dos Passos but left without a degree. He began publishing poetry and novels in his mid-twenties and quickly established himself as a writer of unusual charm and formal elegance. He worked intermittently in Hollywood as a screenwriter — credits include The Clock (1945) — and spent much of his life in Los Angeles.

Nathan was married six times, his last wife being the British actress Anna Lee. He lived to ninety-one, outlasting most of the modernist generation he had belonged to, and continued writing well into his seventies. By the time of his death in 1985, his work was largely out of print and his reputation had faded dramatically.

Portrait of Jennie (1940)

Nathan’s masterpiece is a short, haunting novel about a painter, Eben Adams, who meets a mysterious young girl named Jennie Appleton in Central Park. At each subsequent encounter, Jennie has aged years — she is somehow moving through time at a different rate. Adams falls in love with her and paints her portrait, which becomes his greatest work, but Jennie is doomed: she died years ago in a hurricane at Land’s End.

The novel is only about 30,000 words long, but its compression is its strength. Nathan achieves a genuine sense of the uncanny through restraint — Jennie’s temporal displacement is never explained, never rationalised, and the novel’s power comes from the reader’s growing awareness that the love story is impossible. The 1948 David O. Selznick film, starring Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones, captured much of the novel’s atmosphere, particularly in its famous finale shot in Technicolor.

The Bishop’s Wife (1928)

Nathan’s other widely known novel tells the story of an angel who comes to earth to help a bishop raise funds for a new cathedral — and who falls in love with the bishop’s wife. The novel is light, witty, and surprisingly irreverent about organised religion. The 1947 film starring Cary Grant, Loretta Young, and David Niven softened some of Nathan’s satirical edge but became a beloved Christmas classic. A 2007 remake, The Preacher’s Wife (starring Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston), transposed the story to a Black church in Harlem.

Other Novels

Nathan was extraordinarily prolific, and several of his lesser-known novels deserve attention:

• One More Spring (1933) — three people shelter in a toolshed in Central Park during the Depression. A tender, funny novel that captures the spirit of the era without sentimentality
• Road of Ages (1935) — the Jewish people are expelled from Europe and wander eastward on a modern exodus. A prescient allegory written four years before the Second World War
• Autumn (1921) — a quiet, melancholy novella about an elderly schoolteacher, one of Nathan’s earliest and most purely lyrical works
• The Enchanted Voyage (1936) — a man sails a small boat across an imaginary ocean, a Quixotic fantasy
• Jonah (1925) — a retelling of the biblical story, characteristic of Nathan’s playful engagement with religious themes

Poetry

Nathan published several volumes of poetry and regarded himself as a poet at least as much as a novelist. His verse is formal, lyrical, and conservative — closer to Edna St. Vincent Millay than to the modernist experimentalism of his Harvard contemporaries. His poetry has been almost entirely forgotten, but individual poems occasionally surface in anthologies.

Critical Standing

Nathan presents a genuine puzzle of literary reputation. In the 1920s and 1930s he was widely admired — Alexander Woollcott championed him, and his novels were reviewed alongside those of his more celebrated contemporaries. But he never fit neatly into the literary categories of his era. He was not a realist, not a modernist, not a genre fantasist. His novels were too literary for the pulps and too fantastical for the literary establishment.

Ray Bradbury repeatedly cited Nathan as a major influence, and Peter S. Beagle — whose The Last Unicorn occupies similar territory — acknowledged the debt explicitly. The quiet, poetic fantasy that Nathan pioneered found its fullest expression in these successors.

Today, Portrait of Jennie and The Bishop’s Wife remain in print; the rest of Nathan’s oeuvre is largely unavailable. He is ripe for rediscovery — a writer of genuine grace and originality whose best work transcends the categories that failed to contain it.

Collecting Nathan

Portrait of Jennie (1940, Knopf) in first edition with dust jacket brings $100–$300. The Bishop’s Wife (1928, Bobbs-Merrill) is scarcer and more valuable, particularly with jacket. Nathan’s many Knopf first editions from the 1930s and 1940s are available for $15–$50. The small print runs of his later novels make some of them genuinely rare despite modest demand.