Barbara Schilling, 77, Phila. author

Philadelphia author Barbara Holland had a sharp wit and a taste for extravagant titles.

Hail to the Chiefs: Presidential Mischief, Morals, and Malarkey from George W. to George W. was a 2003 reworking of an earlier raspberry.

Of President Chester A. Arthur, she wrote that his extravagant cheek whiskers suggested that "he'd been trying to eat a sheep without peeling it."

You might not remember Mr. Arthur's career highlights, but you might well remember that image.

Barbara Murray Schilling, 77, a longtime Philadelphia writer who as Barbara Holland penned 15 nonfiction books such as Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences, died of lung cancer Tuesday, Sept. 7, at her home in Bluemont, Va., where she had lived since 1993.

Mrs. Schilling wrote under the surname of her stepfather, Thomas Holland.

"She's a wisp of a woman with short white hair and a face that's weather-beaten enough to be called craggy," a Washington Post interviewer wrote after a 2007 visit to her home in rural Loudoun County.

"She has just published her 15th book. It's called The Joy of Drinking, and, as the title suggests, it's a lighthearted history of humanity's long romance with strong liquids."

In 1997, Inquirer reviewer Susan Dundon recalled that in Mrs. Schilling's first book for adults, Mother's Day (1980), she "wrote somewhat bitterly about the 'alwaysness' of dinner and the inevitable ownership of the laundry."

"The book's subtitle - Or the View From in Here - was apt. The horizon, achingly familiar, stopped at the dog's dish."

That was around the time, her daughter Emily said, that she left her third husband.

Born in Washington, Mrs. Schilling graduated from high school in Chevy Chase, Md., and briefly attended American University.

While in high school, she "won the National Scholastic poetry competition two years running," her daughter said. "She was the first student in the award's history to win it as a junior and, the following year, the first to win it twice."

After living with the second of three husbands near Cape Canaveral, Fla., Mrs. Schilling moved to Center City in the late 1950s, her daughter said.

As Barbara Holland, she had sold "lots and lots" of short stories to magazines such as Redbook and Ladies' Home Journal in the 1950s, but in Philadelphia she became an advertising copywriter, too.

Mrs. Schilling worked for Domsky & Simon, an ad agency at 734 Pine St., which accommodated her "when my mother would want to take some time off or go off and live in Denmark for six months," her daughter said.

She sometimes worked from home, but when she kept office hours, the firm "allowed her to not have to worry about child care. She could bring me along, and she did."

Working from home might have mattered more when the family moved to Chester Springs in 1971. But when Mrs. Schilling left her third husband at the end of the decade, she returned to Center City and office work.

Not all her work was satiric.

Her first book was for children, The Pony Problem, about Emily.

And in 1988, Inquirer pet columnist Deborah Lawson wrote that her latest, The Name of the Cat, "may be the most elegantly written, witty, perceptive statement about felines ever published."

In 1993, Mrs. Schilling moved to the cabin in Bluemont, inherited from her mother, where, among other things, she wrote a collection of essays, Bingo Night at the Firehall: The Case for Cows, Orchards, Bake Sales & Fairs, published in 1997.

Words had helped build the cabin.

"My mother's mother, Marion Holland, was a children's book author. One made a boatload of money," Emily Schilling said, so Marion "built a house in 1950 in the mountains."

Besides her daughter, Mrs. Schilling is survived by sons Matthew and Benjamin, two brothers, two sisters, two grandchildren, and two former husbands, John Wood and Mark Schilling. Her first husband, George Earnshaw, died in 2004.

Though Mrs. Schilling asked for no funeral, her daughter said that somewhere near her mother's mountain home "we're thinking about scattering her ashes and doing it in the spring, possibly in May."

"She was much loved on the mountain. I had no idea of the [numbers of] friends and neighbors who came in tears to the house" after her death.