Richard Pike Bissell

A comedy of houseboat dwellers in a Mississippi river town, featuring a happy bachelor who dreams of Ava Gardner, actress.

Say, Darling is the fictional story of how the novel 7 1/2 Cents (also by Richard Bissell) became the Broadway musical, The Pajama Game. The story revolves around a Midwestern man who has written a successful book. It is optioned by Broadway producers and they contact him to come to New York to talk about adapting the book into a musical. The semi-autobiographical novel was turned into a Broadway play in 1958. It contained (from Wikipedia) "nine original songs with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Jule Styne, all of the songs were presented as either rehearsal or audition material and not as the thoughts or feelings of the characters." so that some conclude that Say, Darling was, indeed, a Broadway musical. The first people listed are fictional characters from the novel. George Abbott and Harold Prince are 2 people Richard Bissell worked with on Pajama Game and he based 2 characters in the novel on them. The other names are actors who played characters in the Broadway production.

A thirteen-year-old girl describes life in a small Iowa town in 1913.

The book is about union trouble at a small pajama factory in the fictional town of Junction City, IA and the romance between the new factory superintendent and one of the union workers. This book is the basis for the Tony Award winning 1954/1955 Broadway Musical, The Pajama Game. The novel has differences from the musical, especially the ending but it's still an enjoyable read. A word of caution, to quote a man named David (from VA) in a short review from GoodReads "anti-Semitic (and other racial) epithets were run of the mill in the period in which the book takes place.