Philip Van Doren Stern (September 10, 1900 – July 31, 1984) was an American writer, editor, and Civil War historian whose story "The Greatest Gift", published in 1943, inspired the classic Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life (1946).
His Pennsylvania-born father, Isadore Ullman, was a traveling merchant of Bavarian Jewish[1] descent, who came to Wyalusing from West Virginia with his New Jersey-born wife, the former Anne Van Doren.
He was an historian and author of some 40 works, and was best known for his books on the Civil War[4] that a New York Times obituary called "authoritative" and "widely respected by scholars".
[4] He compiled and annotated short story collections by and the writings and letters of Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau.
Inspired by a dream that was reminiscent of the 1843 Charles Dickens novella A Christmas Carol, Stern wrote a 4000-word short story called "The Greatest Gift".
[7] After several screenwriters worked on adaptations, RKO sold the rights to the story in 1945 to Frank Capra's production company, Liberty Films, for the same $10,000.