Joseph Hergesheimer, best known for his leisurely paced historical novels, was born in Philadelphia. Of Protestant German and Scots ancestry, he was reared in the home of his maternal grandfather, a typefounder and hymn writer whose character and influence are recounted in Hergesheimer's The Presbyterian Child (1923). Describing himself as "spoiled by sickness and money," Hergesheimer attended an orthodox Quaker school, where poring over maps and listening to music constituted most of his earlier education. At sixteen he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to study painting. Upon the deaths of members of his family he inherited a modest legacy and went for further study to Italy, where he desultorily maintained studios in both Venice and Florence. The effect of his long apprenticeship in painting can be seen in the pictorial and visual effects of his early fiction, especially the extraordinary detail with which he rendered interiors and...