The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

Another excursion into bestsellers past. I can't help it -- the Wombat just finds the old lists too inviting to pass up. Excuse the long-winded setup on this two-part question, which is not as complicated as the thicket of verbiage that precedes it might suggest.

This bestselling author wrote his first novel while still an undergraduate, in 1920. After working for some time as a journalist (and continuing to write novels under a psuedonym) he began to have enough success as a novelist to work at it full-time. In 1933 The British Weekly commissioned a 3,000-word short story from him to be published in its Christmas edition. The unabashedly sentimental piece he turned in was over five times that length, and it was published as a special illustrated insert. The story was then sold to The Atlantic Monthly in the U.S., and was an immediate in the States: it wound up published in a hardcover edition that made it the No. 4 fiction bestseller in the U.S. in 1934, and continuing in 1935 as the No. 5 fiction bestseller, according to Publishers Weekly.

The same author ALSO hit the yearly Top 10 in '35 with another story -- one he wrote and published before the short-story-turned-novel mentioned above. In this case, it was a novel he'd published with quite a different theme, back in 1933. It took Britain's Hawthornden Prize in 1934. It took a little longer to become an enormous success in America, rising to No. 8 on the Publishers Weekly chart for 1935. The author continued to have big hits in the forties, but none as well-remembered as these two books. The title of one is well-known, even though the book is not widely read any more. It was adapted as a successful film in 1937, and re-adapted more than once. The other -- also adapted for the movies -- is best remembered not for its title, but for a name coined in the book that has passed into such common use that it appears in many dictionaries. President Franklin Roosevelt was so taken with it, that he used this name to denote a favorite place-- now known by a different name.

What are the names of the two books? For a bonus point, name the author. For a second, super-bonus point, a gold star, and a roll of Smarties, by what name do we know the place Roosevelt loved?

First correct answer posted to comments wins a damaged cassingle of 3rd Bass's "Pop Goes the Weasel," which runs at an eerie half-speed. No Googling or going through those old copies of the British Weekly in your great-uncle's country house. One guess (at each part of the question) per comment, but comment as often as you like.