His Pennsylvania-born father was a traveling merchant of Bavarian descent, who came to Wyalusing from West Virginia with his New Jersey-born wife.
Philip van Doren Stern was born in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania into a family of humble means. two sisters, Miriam Stern of New York and Henrietta Farr of Hopewell, N.J., and three granddaughters.Philip van Doren Stern was an American author, editor, and Civil War historian whose story "The Greatest Gift," published in 1943, inspired the classic Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life (1946). He is survived by a daughter, Marguerite Robinson of Cambridge, Mass. He served during World War II as general manager of Armed Services Editions, which made books available to the uniformed forces. During his career as an editor, he worked for Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Stern was born in Wyalusing, Pa., grew up in New Jersey, and graduated from Rutgers University. In 1946, the fantasy became the basis for a Frank Capra movie, ''It's a Wonderful Life,'' with James Stewart, Donna Reed and Lionel Barrymore. It was published the next year as a fantasy called ''The Greatest Gift,'' about a man who was brought to a realization of the joy of living after he had expressed a wish that he had never been born. Stern wrote a 4,000-word Christmas message to his friends. Stern's major Civil War novel, ''The Drums of Morning,'' published in 1942, ''the long overdue fictional answer to 'Gone With the Wind.' '' The story centered on the efforts of the abolitionists in New England and Illinois to end slavery and it included wartime scenes, ranging from Fort Sumter to Andersonville Prison. Lewis Gannett in The New York Herald Tribune called Mr. Stern does, and with great skill, is to weave the whole story together, the North and the South, the military and the civilian, the portentous and the trivial, into a coherent pattern, and to present it all with the impartiality of an artist.'' Writing of ''An End to Valor'' in The New York Times Book Review in 1958, Henry Steele Commager assessed the author's work in these words: ''What Mr. Lee: The Man and the Soldier,'' ''The Confederate Navy: A Pictorial History,'' ''The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin,'' ''They Were There: The Civil War in Action as Seen by Its Combat Artists,'' ''Secret Missions of the Civil War'' and ''An End to Valor: The Last Days of the Civil War.'' The author of some 40 books, his historical titles included ''The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln,'' ''Robert E.
Stern had lived in retirement in Florida for the last eight years after having spent most of his life in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Philip Van Doren Stern, a historian, novelist and editor who was widely respected by scholars for his authoritative books on the Civil War era, died of a heart attack yesterday in Sarasota, Fla.
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