Daphne Carter

Set in the 1960s, Daphne Carter is a vivacious, witty, wealthy twenty-year-old with a social conscience and a glamorous job in the Kennedy White House. She has everything going for her -- until she doesn't. Ernest Kolowrat was born in Prague in 1935. After attending schools in the former Czechoslovakia, Turkey and England, he graduated from Yale and served as a junior naval reserve officer with the U. S. Pacific Fleet. During the decade of the 1960s, he was successively employed as world affairs editor for Scholastic Magazines in New York, director of information for the American Institute for Foreign Study in Greenwich, Connecticut, and director of 10th Anniversary Programs of the Peace Corps in Washington. Since 1971, he has been a freelance writer, publicist and filmmaker. He is the author of "Hotchkiss: A Chronicle of an American School." "Ernest Kolowrat has written a tender, haunting love story set in a long-ago world that was really only yesterday." --Stephen Birmingham, Author "Our Crowd" "A perceptive story of a courageous girl with insightful nuances of social conventions of the upper classes in America in a different era. Edith Wharton for the mid-twentieth century." --Peter Tcherepnine on Amazon.com From beginning of Part II: Glancing through the gossip columns in the New York Journal American for familiar names, I came across the following item: "Washington socialite Daphne Carter is now out of danger, we are told by friends who ought to know, following her automobile mishap on Virginia's back roads last week. We wish you speedy recovery, Daphne." It was an unusually warm spring day. Intent on acquiring an early tan, I was lounging with the afternoon paper on a beach chair at the ocean's edge of my host's Southampton weekend home. I hadn't seen Daphne since she had left for Shannon months earlier. I had received a card from her from Cortina, noting that after skiing in Austria and Switzerland, she had taken my suggestion and was spending two glorious weeks on the slopes in Italy. Some weeks later I ran across one of her Garrison Forest classmates who had joined Daphne in Ireland for one of the major hunts. She related a typical Daphne tale - how Daphne had drawn a terrible horse, was sent sprawling into an icy stream, got right back on, and by the end of the hunt Daphne and horse were in perfect accord. More recently I heard from various sources that Daphne was back in the States, living in Washington and thinking of going back to work for the government, this time in the State Department. The rumor also had it that she was involved with her stable boy. And just a few weeks earlier, I had spoken with Daphne's mother after seeing Mrs. Carter's name plastered on the front pages of New York's afternoon papers. Her clinic in Harlem was campaigning for legislation that would encourage sterilization of mothers with more than four children. Cardinal Spellman took the lead in having her condemned in sermons throughout the diocese for lobbying against the natural order. From a different venue came the accusation by a leader of the Black Muslims that Daphne's mother was waging a sinister campaign to eliminate his race. That's why her name was now on a "White List" of those who would one day be taken to task. While I had phoned Mrs. Carter to offer moral support, I had been hoping she would volunteer news of her daughter. She didn't, and considering the rumors about the stable boy, I didn't think it tactful to ask. Now, I reread the brief item about Daphne's accident . . . what began to bother me after yet another reading was the part that Daphne "is now out of danger." If so, what exactly had she been in danger of?" DAPHNE CARTER is a novella inspired by Phyllis Mills Wyeth, whose photo from 1962 is on the book's cover -- and whose horse, Union Rags, won the Belmont Stakes in 2012.