The Puppet Master

by Robert Nathan

An elderly puppeteer watches his assistant and neighbor fall in love while a ‘marriage’ between one of his puppets and a rag doll ends in a grisly puppet suicide.


It’s early twentieth century New York. Elderly puppeteer PAPA JONAS lives in a small workshop with a cast of magical puppets he and assistant CHRISTOPHER LANE have created out of cloth and wood. Papa watches as Christopher and pretty single mother and upstairs neighbor MARY HOLLY fall in love. At the same time, her young daughter AMY MAY ‘marries’ off her rag doll ANNABELLE LEE to ‘clownphilosopher’ puppet MISTER ARISTOTLE. As Christopher and Mary contemplate their future together, jealousy and duplicity doom the relationship of the puppet and rag doll. Over time, the sensitive young Christopher and older Mary move to California while Mister Aristotle, fed up with love, commits puppet suicide. Papa Jonas gives half his puppet collection to Christopher as a means of support for Mary and young Amy May. Papa stays in New York and wistfully contemplates his remaining days.
“The rarity of the comic spirit in our fiction should make us prize its infrequent expression, and we should welcome the novel that neither flatters nor indicts us but invites us to observe ourselves with a little wholesome amusement. Such a book is ‘The Puppet Master,’ in which imagination and insight, sympathy and humor have collaborated to produce a story with the accent of fantasy and the warm humanity of comedy.”

Lloyd Morris
New York Times

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"There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday"
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Hardcover

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

Robert Gruntal Nathan was born into a prominent New York Sephardic family. He was educated in the United States and Switzerland and attended Harvard University for several years beginning in 1912. It was there that he began writing short fiction and poetry. However, he never graduated, choosing instead to drop out and take a job at an advertising firm to support his family (he married while a junior at Harvard). It was while working in 1919 that he wrote his first novel—the semi-autobiographical work Peter Kindred—which was a critical failure. But his luck soon changed during the 1920s, when he wrote seven more novels, including The Bishop's Wife, which was later made into a successful film starring Cary Grant, David Niven, and Loretta Young.

During the 1930s, his success continued with more works, including fictional pieces and poetry. In 1940, he wrote his most successful book, Portrait of Jennie, about a Depression-era artist and the woman he is painting, who is slipping through time. Portrait of Jennie is considered a modern masterpiece of fantasy fiction and was made into a film, starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.

In January 1956 the author wrote, as well as narrated, an episode of the CBS Radio Workshop, called "A Pride of Carrots or Venus Well-Served."

Nathan's seventh wife was the British actress Anna Lee, to whom he was married from 1970 until his death. He came from a talented family — the activist Maud Nathan and author Annie Nathan Meyer were his aunts, and the poet Emma Lazarus and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo his cousins

Reviews

[Nancy Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite author

Mr. Nathan writes of things ethereal and wonderful. His prose takes one to magical places and people: honest, with easily broken hearts and faery dreams. Delightful story, as are all of his books.