Summary

Volume Two

That Biddle Boy From Philadelphia, The Flying Dutchwoman and The Man With The Piercing Green Eyes of a Wild Animal, explores the impact on Olive and her sister Dorothy of their mother Josephine's perfidity in regard to their true blood lines, her manic-depressive bouts of behavior and her hot-and-cold treatment of them.

The catalyst for That Biddle Boy was the discovery of yet another cache of letters, ones that before her death Olive had secreted in a black metal box kept on the top shelf of her bedroom closet. They were written to her by the author's father (That Biddle Boy) and her lover (The Man With The Piercing Green Eyes) in 1927 during her psychoanalysis by Carl Gustav Jung in Küsnacht, Switzerland. Subsequent to their divorce, That Biddle Boy continued to send her letters from Berlin, Germany, during his training analysis by the Freudian analyst, Franz Alexander, and these she also saved.

Volume One - "Josephine"
Volume Three - "Gussie's Bombshell"
Readers' Comments

Author Bio

The author, Oliver Biddle, has lived for the past thirty-three years with his family in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia. He attended St. Bernard's elementary school in New York, Milton Academy and Harvard College. During World War II he served aboard two destroyers, USS Borie (DD 215) and USS Paul Hamilton (DD 590). After graduating from Columbia Law School as a member of its Law Review, he clerked for United States Circuit Court Judge William Hastie, served for two years in the Litigation Section of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and for several years after that, in the litigation department of Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City, before joining the firm of Ballard Spahr, Andrews & Ingersoll in Philadelphia.

Readers' Comments

Josephine:

"Clap, clap clap! Stomp, stomp, stomp! Honk! Honk! Flags waving; hats in the air! A masterpiece! Mind-boggling-the sheer depth and scope of intellectual effort involved! So interesting. And well written. And it's a riot!"

-Julia Legier

Josephine and That Biddle Boy From Philadelphia:

" I recently read the two-volume page-turner about Josephine and the Biddle Clan. What a bunch of characters! I much admire your skill and imagination in starting with a couple of boxes of correspondence and ending up with an insightful family saga. Also luck for us readers is the generous display of your sense of humor."

–Edmund Brunswick

That Biddle Boy From Philadelphia:

"Your book is gripping! Fascinating and dreadful! Your rendition of this history is lively and well organized. What a job of research! Your imagination in creating conversations and situations is amazing! The book is a real page-turner. The tale you of your parents is fascinating and tragic- it would make a great movie!"

–Flora Whitney Biddle, author of The Whitney Women

"Immediately I was immersed in a story of passion and capital, with the seductive addition of a gigantic fight over a will.  Wonderful stuff."

– Buck Scott

"My oh my, you really have a masterpiece there! When do I get back to a normal life?"

– Thelma Priest

Volume One - "Josephine"
Volume Three - "Gussie's Bombshell"
Readers' Comments