Persistence Can Sometimes Be ‘Your Greatest Gift’
Philip Van Doren Stern’s story The Greatest Gift starts simply enough: “The little town straggling up the hill was bright with colored Christmas lights. But George Pratt did not see them.” The holidays were anything but merry for Pratt. As far as he could tell, the town he lived in seemed to have little use for him, and neither did anyone else. Even the army, desperate for men to fill the ranks during World War II, had rejected him.
George Pratt’s literary creator might have felt much the same way. As the winter of 1943 set in, his story, The Greatest Gift, had been rejected by yet another publisher. Van Doren Stern had spent most of his literary career publishing scholarly tomes about the Civil War and taking classics by authors such as Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe and editing them down into pocket novels that could be carried by American soldiers. Van Doren Stern’s own literary contribution wasn’t in the same ballpark as far as the publishers were concerned, and now the author, much like his protagonist, had to contemplate what to do when no one wanted him.
He could have given up, but Van Doren Stern possessed one quality that anyone who’s ever done anything remarkable has in abundance: persistence. Undeterred by the rejections, the author printed two-hundred copies of the story at his own expense. He took it a step further though. Rather than merely printing them as small book or pamphlets, he sent them out to all his friends, not as small books or pamphlets, but as Christmas cards.
One of those Christmas cards found its way into the hands of David Hampstead, a producer at RKO pictures. Hampstead in turn showed it to actor Cary Grant, who became interested in playing the part of George Pratt. All of a sudden some big names wanted the story no one else had cared about. RKO purchased the movie rights from Van Doren Stern for $10,000, a tidy sum for 1943.
What happened next went on to make cinema history. RKO pictures sold the rights to Frank Capra’s production company and Jimmy Stewart was cast to play the lead character, now called George Bailey. In 1946, the short story was adapted into the film It’s a Wonderful Life and made its debut on the silver screen. Since then the film has become a holiday classic and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. While much of the credit for that success rightfully goes to actors like Stewart who gave such life to George Bailey, none of it would have been possible without the persistence of Philip Van Doren Stern.