\"Summer of \'42\" Herman Raucher Hand Signed FDC Dated 1949 For Sale

Up for sale "Summer of '42" Herman Raucher Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1949. 

ES-3204

Herman Raucher (born

April 13, 1928) is an American author and screenwriter. He is best known for

writing the autobiographical screenplay and novel Summer of '42, which became one of the highest-grossing

films and one of the best selling novels of the 1970s, respectively. He began

his writing career during the Golden Age of Television,

when he moonlighted as a scriptwriter while working for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. He effectively retired

from writing in the 1980s after a number of projects failed to come to

fruition, though his books remain in print and a remake of one of his

films, Sweet November, was

produced in 2001. Raucher was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Sophie

(Weinshank) and Benjamin Brooks Raucher. His father was a World War I

veteran whom Raucher recalled as having a bayonet wound across his forehead.

The family's financial situation fluctuated according to the success of the

elder Raucher's career. During more profitable years, the family vacationed on

Nantucket. During one such trip, when he was fourteen, Raucher developed a

friendship with an older woman he identified as "Dorothy", a war bride whose husband was fighting in Europe, an event

which formed the basis for Summer of '42. During this time, Raucher's best friend was

a boy named Oscar "Oscy" Seltzer, who became a United States Army medic and

who died during the Korean War while

tending to a wounded soldier. After

graduating from high school, Raucher attended New York University, where he

studied advertising and worked as a cartoonist for $38 per week, drawing comic

strips. After graduating he became an office boy at 20th Century Fox and eventually worked his way into

advertising; Raucher was known for his hobby of writing plays, which several ad

executives believed to be the mark of a creative genius. Raucher proved

successful as an ad man, and was part of the advertising team that developed

the ad campaign for the opening of Disneyland. While

working as an ad executive, Raucher simultaneously pursued a writing career,

and several of his plays were successfully staged on Broadway, including Harold,

one of the earliest plays to feature Anthony Perkins. Raucher also wrote for television, with short

plays being featured as segments on a number of variety shows. A film agent saw

a preliminary draft of the script for Raucher's play Sweet November and

helped Raucher negotiate a sale of the script to Warner Brothers. While working on Sweet November,

Raucher befriended Anthony Newley, with whom

he shared a lifelong friendship; Newley later became the godfather to Raucher's

youngest daughter. Following the success of Sweet November, Raucher

helped Newley co-write Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?,

which became a cult film. Inspired by several of his friends who expressed

liberal sentiments while retaining racist ideologies, Raucher wrote the script

for Watermelon Man. He

successfully sold the script and partnered with Melvin van Peebles on

making the film, though he was displeased with van Peebles' desire to alter his

script in order to make the picture a black power movie. Due to the two's tense relationship,

Raucher novelized his original script, both to retain his original message and

to prevent van Peebles from publishing his own version of the story.[2] Peebles' idea to turn Watermelon

Man into the first black power picture later becameSweet Sweetback's Badass

Song. For much of his early career, Raucher had attempted to

sell a screenplay based on his experiences with Dorothy and Oscar Seltzer;

after seven years he successfully sold the script of Summer of '42 to Robert Mulligan, who was looking to recreate the success

of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Although the script originally began as a tribute to Seltzer, Raucher instead

found himself focusing more on Dorothy. Warner Bros., fearful that the movie

would be a box office bomb, not only

agreed to give Raucher a large share of the royalties in lieu of payment but

also paid him to write a novelization of his script in an effort to drum up

interest in the movie. Using the opportunity, Raucher focused the novel more on

his relationship with Seltzer and less on Dorothy. Against expectation, Summer

of '42 became a national bestseller and helped drive the movie to

become one of the highest-grossing films of the 1970s. Raucher continued to

write prolifically throughout the 1970s, ultimately publishing six novels and

penning six screenplays throughout the decade. He effectively retired in the

1980s, when a number of planned film projects failed to materialize, notably a

film adaptation of his bestselling novel There Should Have Been

Castles, a period piece about 1950s artists partially inspired by

his early career, which studio executives said was too lewd to successfully market.

Despite this, Summer of '42 has continued to be a cultural

phenomenon, with a Broadway show based on the film being produced in 2001. A

planned film of Maynard's House, Raucher's sole horror novel, was

trapped in development hell for much of the 1990s and 2000s, with the rights

last belonging to Studio Canal, which

planned to produce it under the title Ara/Froom.