Queer Places:
1321 Eutaw Pl, Baltimore, MD 21217
Goucher College, 1021 Dulaney Valley Rd, Baltimore, MD 21204
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218
Columbia University (Ivy League), 116th St and Broadway, New York, NY 10027
4 Rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris, France
Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce St, New York, NY 10014
Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery
Baltimore, Baltimore City, Maryland, USA
Adele Gutman Nathan (September 15, 1889 - July 24, 1986)
was a Children's author and director of "Mr. Lincoln Goes to Gettysburg." She
was the founder of the Vagabond Players, a theater group in Baltimore. Her
other theater credits include an appearance in the movie "Reds," starring
Warren Beatty, and planning commemorative pageants for communities.
Adele Gutman Nathan was born on September 15, 1889, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Ida Newberger and Louis Kayton Gutman. Her father owned Joel Gutman and Company, a department store founded by his father. She had two siblings, Joel and Elizabeth. She grew up with Claribel and Etta Cone, friends of her mother, and saw them and Gertrude Stein in Europe in the 1920s. In Paris, Nathan lived at 4 Rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris, France.
She graduated from (Baltimore) Girls Latin High School and Goucher College (1910) and did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University (M.A.), Columbia University, and the Peabody Institute.
She married James Nathan on February 20, 1912, and divorced him about 1920.
She helped found the Vagabond Players (1916) in Baltimore, was involved in children’s theater with the Little Lyric Theatre (Baltimore) in the 1920s, directed at the Cellar Players of the Hudson Guild (1920s to 1940s) and the Cherry Lane Theatre (New York City), and headed the Federal Theatre Project in New Jersey (1937). She met and produced plays by Theodore Dreiser, H.L. Mencken, Eugene O’Neill, and Elmer Rice.
She later directed short nonfiction subjects for Paramount and Grand National Pictures (mid-1930s) and was chief scriptwriter at the U.S. Department of Education (1941). She wrote for newspapers, corresponding from Europe in the mid-1920s about cultural affairs for the Baltimore Daily Gazette and writing in the 1950s for the Cripple Creek Gold Rush (Colorado). She was feature editor for St. Nicholas Magazine (1943–1944) and contributed to Vogue, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and the Encyclopedia Americana. Nathan had another career as a well-respected writer of nonfiction children’s books, publishing fourteen, many of which had multiple printings and were translated into other languages.
Her greatest successes came as a writer and producer of historical pageants. She staged commemorative events for cities, corporations, and groups, including the centenaries of the B&O Railroad (1927) and of International Harvester (1929), the 1933 and 1939 World’s Fairs, the cities of Rochester, New York (1934), and Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1949), the American Jewish Tercentenary in Trenton (1955), and the Hundredth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1963). In 1974, she wrote How to Plan and Conduct a Bicentennial Celebration for the American Bicentennial.
In 1952, Nathan directed a pageant for the 100th anniversary of the Western Maryland Railroad in Gettysburg. The pageant, "Mr. Lincoln Goes to Gettysburg," starred many well-known radio and theatre personalities such as Ben Grauer, Robert Montgomery, Marc Connelly and Marvin Arrowsmith. The event gained national coverage in Life magazine.
She was awarded the Freedom Foundation Award (1953), the Vagabond Players Citation (1971), Special Decoration–U.S. Navy, and the Goucher College Alumnae Award. Her clubs and memberships included Gilbert and Sullivan Association, Lincoln Circle, American Revolution Roundtable (archivist, 1941–1950), The Woman Pays (president, 1967–1968, 1977–1983), the Overseas Press Club of America, and the American Theatre Wing.
She was the author of 14 children's books. Among these include books Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, on the building of the first railroad and the laying of the undersea transatlantic telegraph wire, and on famous railroad stations of the world. Some of her books on railroading wheels have been transcribed into other languages.
Adele Gutman Nathan, of New York City. N.Y., died at the Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, on July 24, 1986, at the age of 86.
Her papers were bequeathed to the Beinecke Library in accordance with terms of Nathan's will following her death in 1986. he Adele Gutman Nathan Theatrical Collection consists of manuscripts, working notes, letters, photographs, printed materials, and scripts which document the life and works of Adele Nathan as well as her sister, Elizabeth Gutman Kaye.
My published books:
