Extremely popular in and beyond their own time and one of the primary reasons for the initial success of the New Yorker magazine, the writings of Clarence Day have been largely neglected by contemporary readers. Although the 1939 Broadway production of Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse's play version of Life With Father enjoyed one of the longest runs in history, its quaintness and its concern for seemingly trivial domestic problems from an earlier era found a less willing audience after the 1960s. Ironically, virtually nothing is known about this author of popular autobiographic stories beyond a few sketchy facts and the anecdotes of his adolescence that were collected in God and My Father, Life With Father, and Life With Mother. Even those volumes focus on Day's father, not on his chronicler son.

Clarence Shepard Day, Jr., was born in New York City, the eldest son of a Wall Street...