The afternoon rains on Sunday, August 19 went away by the time the Christopher Morley Knothole Association had planned their Day of Literature in the Park, itself the resumption of an annual tribute to the writer for whom the big park in Roslyn Estates is named.

About a dozen people showed up for the event, which was held at the Knothole Museum in Christopher Morley Park. The museum is the former study where Mr. Morley used to escape to write his works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Originally located at Mr. Morley's house in The Springs section of Roslyn Estates, the renovated Knothole Museum is open from 1 to 5 p.m. on Sundays.

The Aug. 19 event featured readings from Mr. Morley's works and a few literary games for those in attendance. Association members read sentences from classic works of literature and asked the audience to guess their source. Those gathered also played a game of "telephone" where a line of poetry or prose was whispered from one ear to another in the hope of it remaining intact throughout the passages. Sentences were read from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (an audience member guessed this one correctly) and Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Sherlock Holmes was one of Mr. Morley's favorite authors and lines from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's many works were also read.

Peter Cohn, president of the Knothole Association and Joe Whalen, who serves as tour guide for the museum on Sundays, gave readings. Traveling in from Pennsylvania for the day was Fred Williams, the nation's foremost collector of Christopher Morley publications. As with Mr. Morley, Mr. Williams is a native of Pennsylvania, and according to Mr. Whalen, the former owns 80 percent of all the many books Christopher Morley published in his lifetime. Mr. Williams also "knows where the rest of them are," Mr. Whalen added.

For his part, Mr. Whalen read from a long essay by Mr. Morley in which the author extols the virtues of being an artist in modern society. By this, he meant not just the writer, painter or sculptor, but also people engaged in everyday activities, including working at a job or raising a small child. Mr. Whalen praised the author for being "the most well-read person who ever lived on Long Island," a number which apparently includes the literati that for decades has gathered at The Hamptons every summer for fun and work.

Mr. Williams claimed that Mr. Morley wanted, above all, to be a great poet. But he claimed, and most attendees agreed, that his greatest contributions came not from his verse or fiction (which included the 1940 best seller Kitty Foyle) but through his numerous essays, collected in several volumes, a number of which are available in circulation at the Bryant Library. A commuter into Manhattan himself, Mr. Morley often wrote of the everyday struggles both city and suburban people face. He also liked to reflect on the quieter side of things, writing essays about nature, walking, and rummaging through small bookstores, which in Mr. Morley's day, were quite numerous all throughout Manhattan island.

The speakers told of how the Morley writing studio came into being in the first place. Such a house was against Roslyn Estates zoning laws, so Mr. Morley had to obtain a variance to get it built at all. The studio was described as Mr. Morley's "own Walden," a place to get away from domestic life and write. As an editor at both The New York Evening Post and The Saturday Evening Post, Mr. Morley was one of the leading arbiters of literary tastes in his day; as such, he was often visited by other writers in his studio. When Mr. Morley died in the 1950s, several of his friends and devotees decided, right after the funeral, to form a society in his name and to move the Knothole. When the big park on Searingtown Road was being built, it turned out that one of the developers was a book lover; in addition, one of his favorite authors was Christopher Morley. And so the park was named after Mr. Morley, which itself became the new home for the Knothole.

But most of all, there was Christopher Morley, the Long Islander. The most famous Long Island author remains Walt Whitman. Unlike the poet, Mr. Morley was not a native of Long Island, but he made it his adopted home, and happily lived there all his adult life. In fact, Mr. Morley loved Long Island so much that he dubbed it, in his writings, "Salamis" because he wanted to keep the island a secret. "I believe it's one of the loveliest places in America," he wrote in Long Island Sketch, "but I never write about it by its name because I don't want a lot of people coming here to 'sitt down upon itt' as the old document said of the 1640 settlers at Southampton."

In the same essay, Mr. Morley wrote of concerns that are just as relevant as when he wrote the following lines several decades ago. "We've tried to spoil the Island, as humanity always does," he noted. "But the romance is still here...I get worried sometimes when I see the great tide of real estate development, country clubs, seven passenger sedans and picnickers who leave Sunday papers and olive bottles behind them. I see this tide foaming across the country I love, and I tremble a little and hunt out a few more byways among the Suffolk woods where I can read Leaves of Grass undisturbed. But I guess the Island's big enough for us all, if we'll just keep our heads. That blue ridge you see on the northern air is the Switzerland of Nassau County. I think of old Walt and his lonely ecstasies on Long Island beaches, shouting Homer and Shakespeare to the surf and the gulls. I think of the woody promontories of Lloyd's Neck, of the canals and shellfish smells of Bay Shore...and I forget the smart and dapper fellows who only think of this region as a fruitful Development. I remember that it was on Long Island that a great and understanding artist, Mr. Muirhead Bone, said he had first found what he came to America in hope to experience, 'the Edgar Allan Poe feeling.'"