Life with Father (ePub)

Life with Father is a humorous autobiographical book of stories compiled in 1935 by Clarence Day, Jr., which was adapted by Lindsay and Crouse in 1939 into the longest running non-musical Broadway play in history, which was, in turn, made into a 1947 movie and a television series.

Clarence Day wrote humorously about his family and life. The stories of his father, Clarence "Clare" Day, Senior, were first printed in the New Yorker magazine. They portray a rambunctious, overburdened Wall Street broker who demands that everything from his family should be just so. The more he rails against his staff, his cook, his wife, his horse, salesmen, holidays, his children and the inability of the world to live up to his impossible standards, the more comical and lovable he becomes to his own family who love him despite it all. First published in 1936, shortly after his death, Day's book is a picture of New York upper-middle-class family life in the 1890s. The stories are filled with affectionate irony. Day's understated, matter-of-fact style underlines the comedy in everyday situations.

Clarence Shepard Day, Jr. (1874 1935) was an American author and cartoonist, best known for his work Life With Father. Born in New York City, he attended St. Paul's School and graduated from Yale University in 1896, where he edited campus humor magazine The Yale Record. The following year, he joined the New York Stock Exchange, and became a partner in his father's Wall Street brokerage firm. Day enlisted in the Navy in 1898, but developed crippling arthritis and spent the remainder of his life as a semi-invalid.