Lester Cohen

Jenna Wade thought she had everything in life when she married Daniel Prescott. But when her marriage fell apart and she lost the child she was carrying, along with her dreams she lost her faith. Returning home to Cypress Creek, she built a wall between her and the rest of the world. Jake McConnell had faced his own challenges, but his faith had carried him through his own personal crisis. Now he wanted to help Jenna find her way back to God and see if they could build a future together. Can he break through her barriers and convince her they can have a future or will she keep her back turned to everything she believed in?

This is novelist (Sweepings) and [screenwriter]Cohen's history of The New York Evening Graphic, the Roaring Twenties tabloid where he had been, among other things, "contest editor," early in his career. As the book's "world's zaniest newspaper" subtitle suggests, the Graphic was something different -- founded by body-building "physical culture" entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden in competition with the city's first two tabloids, the Daily News and Hearst's Daily Mirror. It experimented with circulation-building stunts, composite photographs, first-person stories by people in the news, Macfadden's health columns, and more. Walter Winchell pretty much invented the celebrity-gossip column there; Ed Sullivan was sports editor before switching to Broadway (after Winchell left for the Mirror and radio). Cohen includes insider anecdotes, clippings and [composite images]from the collection of the art department editor who created them. Part scrapbook, part reminiscence, part oral history, this was written decades after the events it describes and published after the author's death in 1963. (And, alas, after most copies of the 1920s tabloid had turned to dust, so the book includes few images from the paper itself.)

Sweepings, a family saga about a Chicago department store founder and his disappointing children, was a best-seller, and was twice made into movies (Sweepings, 1933, and Three Sons, 1939.) Its author became a Hollywood screenwriter in the process. (The 1933 film starred Lionel Barrymore, playing the entrepreneur from his twenties to old age.)