My Brother's Keeper

My Brother's Keeper is a novel by Marcia Davenport based on the true story of the Collyer brothers. Published in 1954 by Charles Scribner, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was later reprinted as a 1956 Cardinal paperback with a cover painting by Tom Dunn. Inspired by the 1947 New York Times articles detailing items taken from the Collyers' brownstone after their deaths, Davenport constructed a tale of the Holt brothers, one a failing concert pianist and the other a naval architect, and the events that prompted them to become recluses in later life. The back cover blurb of the 1956 Cardinal paperback edition described the story with hyperbolic highlights: "Dramatic and charged with emotional violence..." Under tons of rubbish, rat-infested and filthy, the police found the bodies of two enormously wealthy old men. Once they had been gay and talented men about town. Why did these two, who had everything, live out their lives as hermits in a nightmare of gruesome squalor? The answer lay in the monstrous house - in diaries, sealed boxes and trunks filled with the rotting splendor of a woman's clothes.