Rooster Crows for Day

New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1945. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Alice Caddy (Sketches). 308, [8] pages. This work was the Winner of the 1944-1945 Thomas Jefferson Award. Ben Lucien Burman (December 12, 1895 - November 12, 1984) was an American author and journalist born in Covington, Kentucky. He also fought in both World War I and World War II, and graduated from Harvard University. He was married to Alice Caddy who illustrated many of his books, including his most popular books, the Catfish Bend series. The series, set in Catfish Bend, Mississippi, tells a tale of the many animal residents of Catfish Bend. It was published in eleven languages. Alice Caddy Burman was an artist and illustrator of a series of popular books by her husband, Ben Lucien Burman. Mrs. Burman uses her maiden name, Alice Caddy, professionally. She traveled in the Arctic and the Sahara, the jungles in Africa, Borneo and New Guinea to do her art work. She lived at times among former headhunters arid cannibals. She also helped her husband, a war correspondent for The Reader's Digest and the Newspaper Enterprise Association, on his assignments in the Middle East during World War II. She also traveled extensively on Mississippi River boats to get material to illustrate her husband's "Catfish Bend" books, which Walt Disney Productions was making into a feature film and Ed Padula was scheduled to make into a Broadway musical.
Mrs. Burman, born in Hamilton, Ontario, studied at the Art Students League on a scholarship. She met her husband in Greenwich Village and married him in 1929. Derived from a Kirkus review: Winner of the fourth Thomas Jefferson Award, and a good choice. Burman knows his Mississippi River people, and the pattern of his story carries through it the thread of that love of the river which Little Doc never loses though his wanderlust, his thirst for knowledge of new places and things, takes him to the jungles and deserts of Africa. Sensitive, artistic and yet at the same time intrepid and able, Little Doc, with his devoted henchman and engineer of his fish boat, Poppy, go out to Africa from New Orleans, to run a steamboat on a river in the Congo. They are tricked by the of Big Business; they are almost defeated again and again by her jungle worst; yellow fever takes from Little Doc the girl be has grown to love; the desert left him almost at death's door -- and finally, the two of them come back to their beloved Cotton Valley eager for a taste of triumph, only to find that their departure had been barely noted and then forgotten, their adventures discarded and that Little Doc was not going to be a member of The Boosters Club after all. It took the loyal Princie Joe to give them back their faith -- and an outsider to make the tribute. An original story, with warm characterization and rich color. I liked it.