Bellamy Partridge(1877-1960)
- Writer
A 1900 graduate of Hobart College, Bellamy Partridge went on to study
law, and for about a decade practiced law with his father, Civil War
veteran and country lawyer Samuel Selden Partridge, in the little town
of Phelps, New York--near Rochester--before striking out as a freelance
writer, novelist and popular historian. He was the author of many
works, including the national best-seller "Country Lawyer" (1939), a
memoir of his father, and its sequel, "The Big Family" (1941).
Partridge and his family moved out to California when "Country Lawyer"
was picked up by one of the studios and he was given a six-month
contract to adapt it for the screen. They lived at the Chateau Marmont
on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and while her husband labored on the
screenplay, his wife, a short story and article writer herself,
composed letters back to her family in Connecticut that would later
become the basis of her 1941 book "A Lady Goes to Hollywood: Being The
Casual Adventures of an Author's Wife in the Much Misunderstood Capital
of Filmland". By the time the screenplay was finished, Pearl Harbor was
attacked and America entered World War II; the project was permanently
shelved and the film was never made.
