In 1933, Nancy Brewster (1910-2009) married Charles Brown Grace, son of the chairman of Bethlehem Steel. Their son Charles Jr. said Edmund Bacon, the city planner who made Society Hill a neighborhood of national significance, was "the great friend of her final years."
But it took her a while to stand on her own. For 15 years in the 1940s and 1950s, the Graces rented a home on Ardrossan, the Radnor estate of Hope Montgomery Scott, celebrated in the film The Philadelphia Story.
After their 1955 divorce, "She was released from Philadelphia society as it was," Bacon said, "traveled the world wide, and became very involved with the art scene in Philadelphia." While she was a contributing editor for Vogue, Earrings for Celia, her children's book set in Mexico, was published by Random House in 1963. It was the first of three books, two were published privately.
At her death she was working on a fourth - a memoir, Paris and Back. She wrote a great deal for Town & Country, travel articles that would include Afghanistan, Borneo, Sri Lanka, other places.
It was during visits to the former Ceylon, she became close to Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Out of those visits came her second book, the privately published Meineke, about an elephant.
A 1970 Inquirer society-page item noted that during a tour of her Society Hill home to benefit a hospital, visitors marveled at her uncaged parrot flying about and speaking its only language, Mexican Spanish. In 1997, her final book, Letitia, was a children's book about a parrot.
Born in Manila while her father, an Army colonel, was stationed there, she grew up in Bethlehem, Pa., and attended Sarah Lawrence College.
