American Literature Site Updates

Update to the Frank Norris bibliography

2012-01-16T14:50:00.000-08:00

Updates to the Frank Norris bibliography, http://www.howellssociety.org/norrisnew.htm.

Bibliographies and queries updates

2011-11-12T21:41:00.001-08:00

Updates to bibliographies and queries at the Howells Society, Wharton Society, and Crane Society sites.See especially Melissa Pennell's updates to the early bibliographies at the Wharton Society site .
Updates to the Maria Cristina Mena bibliography: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/menabib.htm.

Updates to the Wharton Society site

2011-10-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

I've created a New Books page for the Wharton Society site and have updated the bibliography and the queries pages. You can see them all at http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org.

University of Virginia Text Center files moved

2011-09-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of links to the University of Virginia Text Center at the author society and American author sites, but most of the texts, which used to be freely available, have now been been incorporated into subscription databases and require a password.

I'll be changing these links to free versions if I can find them, but it may take a while--sorry.

American literature sites back online

2011-05-26T15:26:00.000-07:00

The American literature and author society web sites are back online. WSU has given them a domain name, although the old one will still work: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld.

American literature and author sites should be up by the weekend

2011-05-26T03:57:00.000-07:00

The Washington State University server is still down in parts, so the American literature and other sites aren't accessible yet. They should be available by the weekend, according to WSU's IT department.

Naturalism in American Literature (alternate page until the Literary Movements site is available)

2011-05-24T13:17:00.001-07:00

American Literary Naturalism

The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. Zola's 1880 description of this method in Le roman experimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880) follows Claude Bernard's medical model and the historian Hippolyte Taine's observation that "virtue and vice are products like vitriol and sugar"--that is, that human beings as "products" should be studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures. Other influences on American naturalists include Herbert Spencer and Joseph LeConte.

Through this objective study of human beings, naturalistic writers believed that the laws behind the forces that govern human lives might be studied and understood. Naturalistic writers thus used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment. Although they used the techniques of accumulating detail pioneered by the realists, the naturalists thus had a specific object in mind when they chose the segment of reality that they wished to convey.

In George Becker's famous and much-annotated and contested phrase, naturalism's philosophical framework can be simply described as "pessimistic materialistic determinism." Another such concise definition appears in the introduction to American Realism: New Essays. In that piece,"The Country of the Blue," Eric Sundquist comments, "Revelling in the extraordinary, the excessive, and the grotesque in order to reveal the immutable bestiality of Man in Nature, naturalism dramatizes the loss of individuality at a physiological level by making a Calvinism without God its determining order and violent death its utopia" (13).

A modified definition appears in Donald Pizer's Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Revised Edition (1984):

[T]he naturalistic novel usually contains two tensions or contradictions, and . . . the two in conjunction comprise both an interpretation of experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience. In other words, the two constitute the theme and form of the naturalistic novel. The first tension is that between the subject matter of the naturalistic novel and the concept of man which emerges from this subject matter. The naturalist populates his novel primarily from the lower middle class or the lower class. . . . His fictional world is that of the commonplace and unheroic in which life would seem to be chiefly the dull round of daily existence, as we ourselves usually conceive of our lives. But the naturalist discovers in this world those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or adventurous, such as acts of violence and passion which involve sexual adventure or bodily strength and which culminate in desperate moments and violent death. A naturalistic novel is thus an extension of realism only in the sense that both modes often deal with the local and contemporary. The naturalist, however, discovers in this material the extraordinary and excessive in human nature. The second tension involves the theme of the naturalistic novel. The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new, discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise. (10-11)

For further definitions, see also The Cambridge Guide to American Realism and Naturalism, Charles Child Walcutt's American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream, June Howard's Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Lee Clark Mitchell's Determined Fictions, Mark Selzer's Bodies and Machines, and other works from the naturalism bibliography. See Lars Ahnebrink, Richard Lehan, and Louis J. Budd for information on the intellectual European and American backgrounds of naturalism.

Characters. Frequently but not invariably ill-educated or lower-class characters whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. Their attempts at exercising free will or choice are hamstrung by forces beyond their control; social Darwinism and other theories help to explain their fates to the reader. See June Howard's Form and History for information on the spectator in naturalism. Setting. Frequently an urban setting, as in Norris's McTeague. See Lee Clark Mitchell's Determined Fictions, Philip Fisher's Hard Facts, and James R. Giles's The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America.

Techniques and plots. Walcutt says that the naturalistic novel offers "clinical, panoramic, slice-of-life" drama that is often a "chronicle of despair" (21). The novel of degeneration--Zola's L'Assommoir and Norris's Vandover and the Brute, for example--is also a common type.

1.Walcutt identifies survival, determinism, violence, and taboo as key themes. 2. The "brute within" each individual, composed of strong and often warring emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often "man against nature" or "man against himself" as characters struggle to retain a "veneer of civilization" despite external pressures that threaten to release the "brute within."

3. Nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings. The romantic vision of Wordsworth--that "nature never did betray the heart that loved her"--here becomes Stephen Crane's view in "The Open Boat": "This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent."

4. The forces of heredity and environment as they affect--and afflict--individual lives.

5. An indifferent, deterministic universe. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals free will as an illusion.

Frank Norris

Theodore Dreiser

Jack London

Stephen Crane

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)

Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (1925)

John Dos Passos (1896-1970), U.S.A. trilogy (1938): The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)

James T. Farrell (1904-1979), Studs Lonigan (1934)

John Steinbeck (1902-1968), The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Richard Wright, Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945)

Norman Mailer (1923-2007), The Naked and the Dead (1948)

William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness (1951)

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

Other writers sometimes identified as naturalists:

Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Harriet Arnow, The Dollmaker (1954)

Ambrose Bierce

Abraham Cahan, The Making of an American Citizen

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Rebecca Harding Davis

Don DeLillo

Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods

Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier School-Master

William Faulkner

Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896)

Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers

Hamlin Garland, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly

Robert Herrick, The Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905)

Ernest Hemingway

E. W. Howe, The Story of a Country Town

Joseph Kirkland,

Joyce Carol Oates

David Graham Phillips

Hubert Selby, Jr.

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.

--Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat" A man said to the universe:

"Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the universe,

"The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane (1894, 1899)

To cite this page on a Works Cited page according to current MLA guidelines, supply the correct dates and use the suggested format below. If you are quoting another author quoted on this page, either look up the original source or indicate that original quotation is cited on ("Qtd. in") this page. The following is drawn from the examples and guidelines in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed. (2009), section 5.6.2.

Campbell, Donna M. "Naturalism in American Literature. " Literary Movements. Dept. of English, Washington State University. Date of publication or most recent update (listed above as the "last modified" date; you don't need to indicate the time). Web. Date you accessed the page.

Web outage at www.wsu.edu should be repaired by 5/27/11

2011-05-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

There are still significant outages at the WSU web site and hence all the American literature and author society pages, despite the incorrect "no outages" message on the IT web page: HTTP://infotech.wsu.edu/netops/NetStatus/Default.aspx. The IT department has said that these pages should be back online by 5/27/11. Again, I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

WSU main web site still is down, affecting American lit web pages

2011-05-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

The Washington State University web site was offline for server upgrades over the weekend, and although the main page says that there are no outages, the IT department says that faculty web pages are still down and will be back up "later today or in a few days." In other words, the American lit web pages and author society pages are down but should be available soon.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Updates to Mary Austin bibliography

2011-04-14T09:17:00.001-07:00

Updates to the Mary Austin bibliography:
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/austinbib.htm

New Whitman papers discovered

2011-04-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

http://newsroom.unl.edu/releases/2011/04/12/UNL+scholar+discovers+thousands+of+new+Walt+Whitman+papers

UNL scholar discovers thousands of new Walt Whitman papers

As a clerk in the U.S. Attorney General's Office in the 1860s and 1870s, Walt Whitman had a firsthand view of the legal, cultural and ideological challenges facing the nation after the Civil War. That experience, most believe, shaped his later works of poetry and prose.

Now, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln researcher [Prof. Kenneth Price] has discovered nearly 3,000 previously unknown Whitman documents from that era -- a trove of information that sheds new light on the legendary poet's post-war thinking, as well as Whitman's published reflections on the state of the nation that soon followed.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman bibliography

2011-04-08T06:33:00.000-07:00

I've posted a new bibliography for Charlotte Perkins Gilman: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/gilmanbib.htm.

Updates to the Sui Sin Far bibliography

2011-03-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

Updates to the Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) bibliography at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/farbib.htm , including several from 2010 and some not found in the MLA Bibliography.

Updates to Frances E. W. Harper Bibliography

2011-02-18T09:36:00.000-08:00

I've updated the Frances E. W. Harper page and Bibliography http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/harbib.htm.

Also updated: Charles W. Chesnutt bibliography: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/chesbib.htm.

MLA Calls for Papers

2011-02-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

The list for MLA 2012 Calls for Papers (Seattle, WA) is available here:

http://www.mla.org/cfp_search

David Graham Phillips in the New York Times

2011-01-17T08:03:00.000-08:00

I'm updating the David Graham Phillips page to include a link to a (rare) New York Times article on the author. Excerpts:

David Graham Phillips, the author in question, had just been christened by H. L. Mencken as “the leading American novelist.” Now largely forgotten, he was a star of the first decade of the 20th century, a sort of Progressive Era Tom Wolfe — right down to his white suits that set him apart in the newspaper offices where he first made his mark.

Like Wolfe, Phillips was a biting social critic who used his journalistic renown to mount a successful fiction career, churning out some two dozen page-turning novels that wrapped exposés of the worlds of insurance, finance and politics into tales of romantic love. And like Wolfe, who laid out his complaints in the much debated 1989 essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Phillips believed that too many American novels were “largely imitative of ideals and methods that are narrow and that are totally inadequate as a description of life as it is in America today,” and instead set out, as The Saturday Evening Post put it, to “master” America, “to learn her by heart, inspired by the task of expressing and interpreting her.”

As a journalist, Phillips was the quintessential crusader. In 1906, he wrote a famous series of articles on several United States senators who he alleged (in language “longer on adjectives than facts,” Upton Sinclair said) were corrupted by the likes of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Carnegie. The series inspired President Theodore Roosevelt to attack Phillips as “The Man With the Muck Rake” in a speech at the Gridiron Club, introducing the term “muckraker” into the language. (In a private letter, Roosevelt went further, calling Phillips a “foul-mouthed coarse blackguard.”) The articles, for which Phillips was paid handsomely by William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine, helped secure the passage of the 17th Amendment, which, to the lament of some Tea Partiers today, ended the role of state legislatures in selecting senators.

But in Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, Phillips found an enemy even more formidable than Roosevelt. Goldsborough hailed from the gilded aristocracy that Phillips regarded as so destructive to America. The Goldsboroughs of Maryland were venerable. An ancestor was a delegate to the Continental Congress who just missed out being a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Another was a commander in the War of 1812 who later became a senator. Fitzhugh’s father, a doctor and Civil War veteran, relocated the family to Washington, D.C., where Fitzhugh was raised in a home a few blocks from the White House.

New stories by Zora Neale Hurston discovered

2011-01-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

At The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The three stories are important because they provide fuller insight into Hurston's engagement with urban black life. They show us that Harlem was of more than just passing interest to the author, and ask us to dig deeper into the phase of her life before she became so identified with Eatonville. The first story we found is a different, somewhat funnier version of "Book of Harlem," with the subtitle "Chapter I.," suggesting that Hurston may have envisioned it as the beginning of a longer migration tale. The second story, "Monkey Junk: A Satire on Modern Divorce," adheres to mock-biblical storytelling to satirize urban divorce, with the duped husband going back to Alabama at the end. It closes with the exclamation "Selah," an equivalent of "Amen" or "so sayeth the Lord" from the Book of Psalms and an ending that Hurston also used as a tongue-in-cheek valediction in a 1927 letter in which she expressed hope for a large automobile.

Jean Toomer and passing

2010-12-27T12:01:00.000-08:00

H. L. Gates's new Norton Critical edition of Jean Toomer's Cane: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/books/27cane.html

A note about Google's e-bookstore

2010-12-06T11:45:00.000-08:00

Google's e-bookstore is now online, and it provides readable online copies as well as links to independent bookstores. This is good news for many of the in-copyright books that it provides.

Note, however, that pre-1923 texts, which are generally out of copyright, are still available at http://books.google.com and Project Gutenberg. You do not have to purchase the repackaged ones through the e-bookstore. For example, Edith Wharton's early short stories can be found at Project Gutenberg for free, whereas a repackaged and printed version of the same Project Gutenberg texts through Google's e-books store costs $15.63. If you don't have a printer or want a book form of a free text, you may want to consider the printed version.

You can find links to all Wharton's stories legally available online here for free, by the way:
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/shortstories.htm

Poetry, Fiction, and Drama Terms

2010-12-02T13:51:00.001-08:00

I've updated and moved the pages devoted to brief definitions of poetry, fiction, and drama terms. They have links to test-yourself quizzes, too, including one on scanning poetry.

Updates to the author sites; Sedgwick site

2010-11-29T08:49:00.000-08:00

I've updated the queries pages at the Wharton and Crane Society sites. Also, I've corrected the links on some other pages, including the Catharine Maria Sedgwick page.

Among the changes to the latter was the removal of all those links to texts in Palm (.pdb) file format at the University of Virginia e-text site. The digital formats available are multiplying, and persistent links can't be established any more.

Updates to Nella Larsen page

2010-11-24T10:35:00.001-08:00

Updates to the Nella Larsen page in preparation for next semester's English 309 course on women writers.

Updates to Charlotte Perkins Gilman page & Jewett bibliography

2010-10-07T20:03:00.000-07:00

I've made some updates to the Charlotte Perkins Gilman page and have updated the Sarah Orne Jewett bibliography.

Site updates to Wharton, Crane, and Howells queries

2010-10-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

I've just updated the queries pages at the Howells, Crane, and Wharton Society sites. A sample:

Howells and Howard Pyle, the illustrator.
Karl Harriman and Kenneth Herford at the Crane Society site.(See also the new call for papers for ALA 2011)
Was Edith Wharton related to Joseph Wharton (of the Wharton School)?

Updates to Wharton, Howells, and Crane Queries

2010-08-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

I've updated the queries pages at the Howells, Crane, and Wharton sites. The questions are good, and so are the answers, which are from from respected scholars.

Updated and new bibliographies: Dos Passos, Anderson, Larsen, Loos,

2010-08-23T09:07:00.001-07:00

I'm updating the bibliographies at the site and adding new ones: Dos Passos, Anderson, Loos, Larsen, McKay, etc. You can see them at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/biball.html.

Edith Wharton Review issues online (free)

2010-08-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

The Edith Wharton Society has made back issues of its journal, the Edith Wharton Review, available for free online at this link, which also includes a list of the contents of the issues:

http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/1999tab.htm

Thanks to Gary Totten for undertaking the scanning project.

If you find any bad links, please let me know (campbelld@wsu.edu)

Emily Dickinson Bibliographies updated

2010-07-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

I've been working on updating the Emily Dickinson bibliographies. I've weeded out some duplicates (and the "Fifty Immortal Poems" types of references) from all of them and have created a new bib for 2007- present, which will be up later this afternoon. Here's where you can find them:

Go to Extended Bibliography on Emily Dickinson, 2007- present
Go to Extended Bibliography on Emily Dickinson, 1996-2006
Go to Extended Bibliography on Emily Dickinson, 1980-1995
Go to Extended Bibliography on Emily Dickinson, beginnings to 1979

New queries at the author society sites

2010-07-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

I haven't finished updating the bibliographies yet, but there are new and interesting queries at the author society sites: the W. D. Howells Society, the Edith Wharton Society, and the Stephen Crane Society.

Mark Twain on Americans

2010-06-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

Mark Twain, from "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us," North American Review (1895), a response to Bourget's Outre Mer:

I think M. Bourget meant to suggest that he expected to find the great "American soul" secreted behind the ostentations of Newport; and that he was going to get it out and examine it, and generalize it, and psychologize it, and make it reveal to him its hidden vast mystery: "the nature of the people" of the United States of America. We have been accused of being a nation addicted to inventing wild schemes. I trust that we shall be allowed to retire to second place now.

There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled "American." There isn't a single human ambition, or religious trend, or drift of thought, or peculiarity of education, or code of principles, or breed of folly, or style of conversation, or preference for a particular subject for discussion, or form of legs or trunk or head or face or expression or complexion, or gait, or dress, or manners, or disposition, or any other human detail, inside or outside, that can rationally be generalized as "American."

Whenever you have found what seems to be an "American" peculiarity, you have only to cross a frontier or two, or go down or up in the social scale, and you perceive that it has disappeared. And you can cross the Atlantic and find it again. There may be a Newport religious drift, or sporting drift, or conversational style or complexion, or cut of face, but there are entire empires in America, north, south, east, and west, where you could not find your duplicates. It is the same with everything else which one might propose to call "American."

(Later in the essay, he thinks he's found a defining characteristic: Americans universally like ice water, and Europeans don't.)

Onoto Watanna bibliography

2010-05-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

I've updated the bibliography and page on the author Onoto Watanna.

Watanna's books are listed under a variety of names, including the following:

Babcock, Winnifred Eaton.
Eaton, Winnifred.
Reeve, Winifred.
Reeve, Winnifred.
Watanna, Onoto.

Edith Wharton Review table of contents; back issues to be put online

2010-05-14T09:09:00.000-07:00

The tables of contents for all issues of the Edith Wharton Review are available here: http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/1999tab.htm. Future issues of the EWR will be available from EBSCO, but back issues will soon be available online at the link above.

Stephen Crane Bibliography, 1996--present

2010-05-11T20:52:00.000-07:00

I've substantially updated the Stephen Crane bibliography 1996-present; it's at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/crane/cranebib.htm. There's an old version at bibpage.html, but that has been changed to auto-refer to the updated page.

Ethan Frome bibliography

2010-04-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

I've updated the Ethan Frome bibliography and will be updating others on Wharton's works. The list is here:
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/whartbib.htm

Good news about Studies in American Fiction

2010-04-22T08:49:00.001-07:00

From the comments on an earlier post:

I'm the English and American Lit librarian here at Northeastern, and wanted to send you a quick update: we now have articles from a few recent Studies in American Fiction issues up at
http://iris.lib.neu.edu/saf/.

We're really proud to be hosting these back issues and hope to include more articles in the future, so many thanks for the blog mention.
--Amanda Rust

Archive of 19th Century Novels (British)

2010-04-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

The University of Illinois has made 6,000 "triple-decker" novels from its extensive collection available on archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/19thcennov

Melville Society Extracts Archive online

2010-04-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

Caleb Crain reports that the archives of Extracts, the publication of the Herman Melville Society, are online: http://people.hofstra.edu/John_L_Bryant/Melville_Extracts/archives.html. He also asks where the old index to this resource might be; does anyone reading this know?

I'll be adding this to the Melville page this morning.

New MLA Citation format, 7th ed.

2010-03-21T16:16:00.000-07:00

Since the MLA, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the URL no longer needs to be included in a Works Cited page, I've updated the citation formats on the Literary Movements pages as follows:

*************

To cite this page on a Works Cited page according to current MLA guidelines, supply the correct dates and use the suggested format below. If you are quoting another author quoted on this page, either look up the original source or indicate that original quotation is cited on ("Qtd. in") this page. The following is drawn from the examples and guidelines in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed. (2009), section 5.6.2.

Campbell, Donna M. "Page Title." Literary Movements. Dept. of English, Washington State University. Date of publication or most recent update (listed above as the "last modified" date; you don't need to indicate the time). Web. Date you accessed the page.

**************

The information is found on p. 186 of the new MLA Handbook.

Mississippi Plantation Diary That Inspired Faulkner is Found

2010-02-12T08:08:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel “Go Down, Moses” comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

I think it’s one of the most sensational literary discoveries of recent decades,” said John Lowe, an English professor at Louisiana State University who is writing a book on Faulkner. He was one of a handful of experts who met Dr. Francisco at the hand-hewn log house in Holly Springs last month. There they saw the windowpane where a cousin, Ludie Baugh, etched the letters L-U-D-I-E into the glass while watching Confederate soldiers march by — a scene that appears in several Faulkner works.
During the gathering Dr. Francisco, known in childhood as Little Eddie, described how Faulkner stood in front of that window and said, “ ‘She’s still here,’ like she was a ghost,” Professor Lowe recalled.
Dr. Francisco, speaking by telephone from his home in Atlanta, remembered hearing Faulkner rant as he read Leak’s pro-slavery and pro-Confederacy views: “Faulkner became very angry. He would curse the man and take notes and curse the man and take more notes.”

Sally Wolff-King, a scholar of Southern literature at Emory University who uncovered the connection between the author and the journal, called it “a once-in-a-lifetime literary find.”
“The diary and a number of family stories seem to have provided the philosophical and thematic power for some of his major works,” she added.

Names of slaves owned by Leak — Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Mollie, Edmund and Worsham — all appear in some form in “Go Down, Moses.” Other recorded names, like Candis (Candace in the book) and Ben, show up in “The Sound and The Fury” (1929) while Old Rose, Henry, Ellen and Milly are characters in “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936). Charles Bonner, a well-known Civil War physician mentioned in the diary, would also seem to be the namesake of Charles Bon in “Absalom.”

Scholars found Faulkner’s decision to give his white characters the names of slaves particularly arresting. Professor Wolff-King said she believes he was “trying to recreate the slaves lives and give them a voice.”

Harold Frederic bibliography, updates to author sites

2010-02-12T08:05:00.000-08:00

I've updated the Harold Frederic bibliography, the Charles W. Chesnutt bibliography and page, the Rose Terry Cooke page, and the Howells, Wharton, SSAWW, and Crane Society sites.

Poe portrait

2010-01-18T16:34:00.001-08:00

New portrait of Poe found: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100118/ap_on_en_ot/us_poe_portrait.

Blithedale Romance bibliography

2010-01-18T15:33:00.000-08:00

I've updated the bibliography on Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.

Updates to Queries pages

2010-01-18T13:28:00.000-08:00

Updates to the Queries pages at the Edith Wharton Society, the W. D. Howells Society, and the Stephen Crane Society. There are a lot of interesting questions being raised there, so if you think you might have answers, please send them to me.

Updates to Mary E. Wilkins Freeman bibliography

2009-11-21T13:44:00.000-08:00

I've update the bibliography on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and will be updating her page with new links to Jeff Kaylin's Freeman site.

Studies in American Fiction starting up again

2009-10-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Good news for Americanists: The journal Studies in American Fiction, which had shut down in the fall of 2008, is starting up again under the auspices of Johns Hopkins University Press and Project Muse.

Although the Northeastern University web site says that back issues may be available through IRIS (http://www.lib.neu.edu/libraries_and_collections/iris/), they aren't there yet. You can find SAF online for free (some issues) at findarticles.com and for a fee at Questia.com ($) and Highbeam Research via Encyclopedia.com or AccessMyLibrary ($).

Updates to bibliographies

2009-10-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

I've updated the bibliographies and queries pages at the Howells Society and Wharton Society sites.

Updates to the Stephen Crane bibliography

2009-09-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

I've updated the current bibliography at the Stephen Crane Society site. Several new entries for 2008 turned up in the search as well.

More Constance Fenimore Woolson Letters

2009-09-26T09:40:00.001-07:00

Although a list isn't yet available, Sharon Dean has found twenty-five additional letters to Samuel Mather, Jr., privately owned, on microfilm at Western Reserve Historical Society. I've updated the Constance Fenimore Woolson letters page accordingly and will post more as information becomes available.

Updated main site

2009-09-10T20:39:00.000-07:00

I've updated my main site at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/index.html and have added a navigation bar. This makes it easier to find the literary crossword puzzles and quizzes, bibliographies, discussion questions, and so on, which were (sorry) unintentionally difficult to find before.

If you haven't tried any of the crossword puzzles and aren't usually a fan of them, don't worry: the clues aren't tricky if you know the author's works.

Stephen Crane Studies: New Articles

2009-09-09T07:52:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in Twitter, the new issues (all of 2008, vol. 17) of Stephen Crane Studies arrived yesterday, with several very interesting articles. I'd especially recommend Stanley Wertheim's "The New York Topography of Maggie and George's Mother" for anyone who studies or teaches either of Crane's so-called "Bowery Tales." Wertheim, a lifelong resident of New York as well as a renowned Crane scholar, argues convincingly that although the setting of these tales has (mis)identified as the Bowery, they largely take place in other areas of New York.

Stephen Crane Studies isn't available online, but I hope that it will be some time.

Civil War

2009-08-31T13:32:00.001-07:00

I've updated the 1860 page of the Timeline to reflect the dates of more battles.

A critical perspective from 1883

2009-08-10T12:07:00.000-07:00

It is the women of a novel which determine its truthfulness. The very subtlety of the sex makes any delineation a test of the writer’s truthfulness in art; for while a writer who is a law to himself will make this subtlety an excuse for drawing characters which transgress all known laws, an artist will employ the same subtlety to bring into distincter light the obedience to law which underlies subtlety. “The East and the West in Recent Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1883, pp. 704-705.

Updates: Concord and Margaret Fuller

2009-08-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

I've updated the Concord Chronology page with more information (some items are from John Matteson's Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father) and have also updated the Margaret Fuller page.

Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa)

2009-08-06T10:07:00.000-07:00

I've found several new essays online by Charles Eastman at Google Books and have added them to the page; also, the bibliography on Eastman has been updated.

Constance Fenimore Woolson Society

2009-08-06T08:17:00.001-07:00

The Constance Fenimore Woolson Society site has a new address & updates: link at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/woolson.htm

Updates to author society pages

2009-08-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

I've updated the queries pages at the Howells and Wharton sites; also I've updated the brief definition of Gothic on the Literary Movements site: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/novel.htm.

Edith Wharton Bibliographies

2009-06-26T19:45:00.000-07:00

I've updated and reorganized all the bibliographies at the Edith Wharton Society site, http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/newbib.htm.

Harvard Digital Collections

2009-05-11T09:09:00.001-07:00

I'll be adding a link to the Harvard Digital Collections site on the Sites page:

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/expeditions/.

Although it focuses more on international than U.S. explorations, there's a section on Mexico and the South. http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/expeditions/palmer.html

New page: Ellen Glasgow

2009-04-28T08:29:00.000-07:00

I've added a page about Ellen Glasgow, although it's still a work in progress: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/glasgow.htm.

Portrait Gallery of American women writers

2009-04-27T12:22:00.001-07:00

If you have a chance, visit the new portrait gallery of American women writers at the Legacy site. It includes pictures and copyright information, as well as a bibliography of related articles published in Legacy.

Updates to author society pages

2009-04-26T11:19:00.001-07:00

I’ve posted more queries and the panel information to the Crane Society, Howells Society, and Wharton Society pages.

Links to crossword puzzles, quizzes corrected

2009-04-05T22:31:00.000-07:00

Some of the links to the page with the crossword puzzles and online test-yourself quizzes were broken, so I've fixed them. Also the old English 102 page had a lot of broken links which have been corrected.

Mary N. Murfree Bibliography

2009-02-24T13:43:00.001-08:00

I've created a bibliography for Mary N. Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock).

New journal: Transnational American Studies

2009-02-24T13:17:00.000-08:00

Shelly Fisher Fishkin recently announced to the Mark Twain discussion list that a new (free) journal was available online, The Journal of Transnational American Studies, at http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc/jtas/ . In addition to some work on Twain's "The War Prayer" that has been difficult to get, this journal has a number of new articles by major critics in transnational studies.

Stephen Crane's short stories

2009-02-22T12:48:00.000-08:00

I've revamped the page on Crane's short stories at the Crane Society. All the broken links have been removed, and the page now contains links to texts at the Crane Society, at the University of Virginia, and at Google Books. This expands the number of Crane stories available.

I also cleaned up (eliminated excess spaces) some of the stories at the Crane Society site.

Updates to Onoto Watanna, Mary Hallock Foote bibs

2009-01-14T09:02:00.001-08:00

Updates to the bibliographies of Onoto Watanna and Mary Hallock Foote, with others to follow.

David Graham Phillips

2008-11-29T21:17:00.001-08:00

I've updated the David Graham Phillips page and bibliography to include links to all the books of his that are available, including the anonymously published The Mother-Light It's now possible to read almost all of his books online. Many of them are available through Google books, but a good number are not available except through archive.org.

If you haven't read Phillips but would like to, Susan Lenox is by far the best, although some of the others are enjoyable, too.

Finding full versions of books

2008-11-24T10:01:00.000-08:00

I've updated the Sites page as follows:

Google Books. This site has full versions in .pdf format of a lot of out-of-copyright books; it's a great resource. To find the full version, use Advanced Search. Note: for-profit print-on-demand publishers have locked up some of these these out-of-copyright books so that Google can't provide a full view. If you can't find them at Google Books, try archive.org or Project Gutenberg.

Archive.org. This site has books as well as sound and film media, including some that are not available at Google Books.

Although its search function can be frustrating sometimes, Archive.org is an excellent source for books, especially those that have been locked up in Google. Also, if you have a good internet connection, the "flip book" function is a great way to read books and a nice break from reading in .pdf format. See, for example, this version of Crane's The Black Riders:
http://www.archive.org/stream/blackridersother00cran

Updates to author sites, etc.; Paul Laurence Dunbar bibliography

2008-10-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

First of all, I don't know where to put this on my site, but the Brief Timeline site is now on the NEH's Edsitement list of web sites: http://edsitement.neh.gov/websites_all.asp.

I've updated the Sites page, various pages (including New Books and queries) at the Wharton site,, updated the Crane Society and Howells Society queries pages, and made the Paul Laurence Dunbar bibliography appear on the All Bibliographies page. There's a new collection on Dunbar out, so the bibliography will need to be updated soon.

Constance Fenimore Woolson Catalogue of Letters

2008-09-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

The list of Constance Fenimore Woolson's letters is now available, thanks to Sharon L. Dean and RALS. It's available as a link from the Woolson page, too.

SSAWW conference, Constance Fenimore Woolson

2008-09-17T09:50:00.000-07:00

I've posted a lot of calls for papers for the upcoming Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference (SSAWW 2009) recently, although the other sites haven't been updated as much.

Also, I will soon be posting a listing of Constance Fenimore Woolson's letters, courtesy of Sharon Dean and Resources for American Literary Scholarship, which holds the copyright on the article from which Sharon has graciously made the list available.

The Making of America site's edition of Woolson's "Miss Vedder" is missing p. 590, so I have made that page available on the Woolson page, too.

Updates to the SSAWW page

2008-09-12T09:57:00.001-07:00

The SSAWW page at http://www.ssaww.org now has more calls for papers.

Regionalism bibliography, Melville page

2008-08-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

I've added some items to the regionalism bibliography and need to add some more; also, there's a new link to an annotated edition of Moby-Dick on the Melville page.

Bibliography: Jack London's Martin Eden

2008-07-23T08:06:00.000-07:00

I've posted a new bibliography on Jack London's novel Martin Eden.

SSAWW site now live

2008-07-21T10:34:00.000-07:00

The SSAWW site is now live at http://www.ssaww.org (and .com and .net as well).

Caveat emptor: buying print-on-demand books

2008-07-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

On a less formal note, I recently went looking for books on eBay and found the site inundated with what appeared to be Project Gutenberg and other texts from public domain sites reformatted and offered for sale by print-on-demand publishers for $40-50 apiece. Scholarly books are also offered for sale in print-on-demand version, many for two to three times what the book would cost used. (For example, Michael Anesko's Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells is $128 in a print-on-demand version on eBay and Amazon.com and $36 from used booksellers on abebooks.com.)

The "caveat emptor" part of the message is this:

(1) If you need a scholarly book, WorldCat can tell you if a nearby library has it. (You can also find a WorldCat search box on my home page at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/index.html and can add one to your own page or weblog, if you want to; it's free.)
(2) Unless you are eager to pay two to three times what the used booksellers charge for a scholarly book, try them first. You can still find original editions and used books on eBay, too, but since the big online stores don't push them, you may have to scroll through several pages of print-on-demand repackaging to find them.
(3) If you're reading primary texts for enjoyment and don't mind reading texts online, check the various books online sites first, including Google books.
(4) The old editions of a less-famous author (like W. D. Howells) are often more reasonably priced than the print-on-demand versions.
(5) With print-on-demand versions of primary texts, it's not always clear what edition you're buying.

New SSAWW site and various

2008-07-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

I'll be managing the SSAWW (Society for the Study of American Women Writers) site now. The old site is here (www.ssaww.org) and the new and redesigned site is here: www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/ssaww/index.html. The domain name will soon refer people to the new site.

Also, I've been doing some updates, adding materials to the Thoreau page and others. I am trying to keep the size of the pages down (in terms of KB) so that people with iPhones and other portable media can use them. I don't have one of these devices but would welcome any suggestions from those who access the site on them.

Edith Wharton's Short Stories

2008-07-12T20:44:00.001-07:00

I finally completed a list I've been meaning to compile for some time; it's a list of Edith Wharton's short stories with bibliographic information from R. W. B. Lewis's collected edition and information on the original publication places and dates (from Barbara White's Edith Wharton: Short Fiction.

It took a surprisingly long time to compile this, but here's the list:

http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/edithwhartonstories.htm

Updates to bibliography on Crane's "The Monster"

2008-05-22T09:54:00.001-07:00

Updates to the bibliography on Stephen Crane's "The Monster."

Captivity narratives

2008-03-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a query I received, I've updated the Captivity Narratives page and the bibliography on those narratives.

Joaquin Murieta: Discussion Questions

2008-02-28T16:53:00.001-08:00

I've added a set of reading and discussion questions for John Rollin Ridge's Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit to the site.

Jack London's voice and the voices of American authors

2008-02-20T09:21:00.001-08:00

Jack London historian Clarice Stasz recently alerted the Jack London listserv to this article:

Call of the past

By Bob Norberg
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Scientists using cutting-edge technology have brought Jack London back to life.

The voice of the famed author can be heard in a 2½-minute recording, the only recording of London known to exist. It was made almost a century ago and just now recovered from a wax recording cylinder.

"Just a rush letter, ere I sail for Hawaii," London says in the scratchy recording. "I merely want to tell you that everything concerning California prisons in the Star Rover is true."

Star Rover was a London novel deploring conditions at San Quentin.

The letter, dated Dec. 2, 1915, the year before London died, was written to Max Ehrmann, an Indiana lawyer, philosopher and poet, and goes on to deplore the conditions of the state's prisons and the execution of Jake Oppenheimer for assault and battery.

London dictated the letter into a Dictaphone, probably in his cottage den in Glen Ellen. The voice on the recording is slow and halting, the sound of a man in declining health who would die 11 months later.

"It is exciting," said John Crossman, state parks superintendent. "I still have the words ringing in my ear about the prison, that it was really that bad."

(go to the link for more)

[Note: Someone who had heard the recording described the voice as being somewhat like that of the actor Pat O'Brien, for those of you familiar with old movies.]

At the Wharton Society site, people often ask whether recordings exist of Wharton's speaking voice; there aren't any, as far as I know. I'll try to add to this list below and then post it somewhere on the American Authors site, for which I will be developing an FAQ.

Many or most of the modernists (T. S. Eliot, etc.) seem to be available on recorded media, but recordings of earlier authors aren't usually available. A sample list of 19th- and early 20th-century American authors' voices on recorded media (best information available at this point):

Walt Whitman: yes, purportedly. You can listen to it at the Walt Whitman Archive.
Mark Twain: no.
Charles W. Chesnutt: no or probably not
Frank Norris: no
W. D. Howells: no
Jack London: yes
Paul Laurence Dunbar: no or probably not
Edith Wharton: no
Willa Cather: no or probably not
Sarah Orne Jewett: no or probably not
F. Scott Fitzgerald: yes.

Not an update but a remembrance: Jim Zwick

2008-02-17T11:14:00.000-08:00

Those interested in Mark Twain have undoubtedly used Jim Zwick's sites on Twain and anti-imperialism at the turn of the century. According to the H-Amstdy listserv, Jim Zwick passed away recently.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin's tribute at the link above says it much better than I ever could, but Jim was incredibly generous with his time and knowledge about Twain and other 19th-century figures. When I began creating websites in 1997, his were among the first I found on American literature. His site was the first site to feature Howells's "Editha," for example, and his commentary on Twain was incredibly helpful. On a personal note, we exchanged a few e-mails over the years, and he generously allowed the use of some of his scans of photographs on the American Authors site (such as the page on Charles Dudley Warner). He was a pioneer in showing what could be done with American literature on the web, and as Fishkin says, he will be missed.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

2008-02-04T11:17:00.001-08:00

I've just posted a new bibliography on Paul Laurence Dunbar and another on his novel The Sport of the Gods.

Updates to Jonathan Edwards, Kate Chopin, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson pages

2008-01-30T20:58:00.000-08:00

I've updated these pages by adding links: Jonathan Edwards, Kate Chopin, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

Stephen Crane bibliographies

2008-01-16T17:14:00.000-08:00

Updates to bibliographies for Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and "The Monster".

Wharton bibliographies

2008-01-16T14:58:00.000-08:00

I've updated the Edith Wharton bibliographies, or most of them, at this page: http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/whartbib.htm.

Frank Norris bibliography

2008-01-02T22:30:00.001-08:00

Updates to the Frank Norris page and the Frank Norris bibliography.

Updates to the Wharton Society site

2008-01-01T20:20:00.000-08:00

I've been updating the bibliographies and links to Wharton's texts at the Edith Wharton Society site. Among these updates are links to Wharton's books available through Google books.

One annoyance is that the publishers (like Kessinger) who make a profit packaging and reselling free content come up first on any search, even though their so-called "editions" only provide snippets instead of the whole text. This is particularly annoying because the entire edition is available for free elsewhere.

To get to the real first editions instead of the useless clutter of for-profit print-on-demand editions, you need to click on the "Full Content" link. If only eBay could also provide a way of cutting out the spamlike "packaging free content for profit" publishers, their results would be better.

Ida B. Wells

2007-11-10T12:18:00.001-08:00

I've been updating links on the 1890 and 1920 pages and have noted many that have gone dead or retreated behind subscription walls. The latest is the the free online version of Ida B. Wells's "THE REASON WHY The Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition," which used to be at http://womhist.binghamton.edu/moving.html but is now gone since the "Women and Social Movements in the United States" has become a subscription-only site. Fortunately, the Wells piece is available for free here: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/wells/exposition/exposition.html

Rose Terry Cooke bibliography

2007-10-01T07:40:00.001-07:00

I've added a secondary bibliography on Rose Terry Cooke and have been updating the Rose Terry Cooke page to get rid of dead links and add new stories.

Emily Dickinson bibliography

2007-09-29T16:22:00.001-07:00

I updated the Emily Dickinson bibliographies today and broke them into three parts, since they're really too long for a single file:

Extended Bibliography on Emily Dickinson, 1996-present
Extended Bibliography on Emily Dickinson, 1980-1995
Extended Bibliography on Emily Dickinson, beginnings to 1979

Updates to the Timeline pages

2007-09-19T19:28:00.000-07:00

I've changed the design on all the Timeline pages and have included the Music, Movies, and Literature links on each one. They're now much cleaner looking and can be printed easily. I've also been updating the links to the songs on those pages, since many of the previous sites no longer have those links. Archive.org is a great resource for songs and films; however, you're better off if you search under an artist's name, since searching by title sometimes gets no results.

Updates to the Holley and Chesnutt pages

2007-09-19T10:09:00.000-07:00

I've updated the Marietta Holley and Charles W. Chesnutt pages, along with the bibliographies linked there.

Stephen Crane's poems

2007-08-16T09:54:00.001-07:00

I've corrected the text and improved the format for War is Kind and The Black Riders at the Crane Society site and have posted a selection of Crane's poems (including a printable .pdf) for use in the classroom.

Frederick Douglass Page

2007-08-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

Updates to the Frederick Douglass page include information on a conference this September in Rochester and a link to a great new resource, the Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress. These exhibits at the Library of Congress sometimes include just an index of what's there, but this includes the documents as well.

New bibliography on The Awakening

2007-07-05T09:53:00.001-07:00

I've posted a new bibliography on Kate Chopin's The Awakening, though I still need to check it for books, which the MLA bibliography doesn't always include.

Updates to the Jewett bibliography

2007-06-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

I've updated the Sarah Orne Jewett bibliography and page.

Rebecca Harding Davis

2007-06-26T14:30:00.001-07:00

I'm in the process of updating the Rebecca Harding Davis page and bibliography, including adding this anecdote from Bits of Gossip:

I remember listening during one long summer morning to Louisa Alcott's father as he chanted pæans to the war, the "armed angel which was wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before."

We were in the little parlor of the Wayside, Mr. Hawthorne's house in Concord. Mr. Alcott stood in front of the fireplace, his long gray hair streaming over his collar, his pale eyes turning quickly from one listener to another to hold them quiet, his hands waving to keep time with the orotund sentences which had a stale, familiar ring as if often repeated before. Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his arms folded on the back, his chin dropped on them, and his laughing, sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery.

I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done in my cherry-tree when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders debouching in the misty fields.

Mr. Hawthorne at last gathered himself up lazily to his feet, and said quietly: "We cannot see that thing at so long a range. Let us go to dinner," and Mr. Alcott suddenly checked the droning flow of his prophecy and quickly led the way to the dining-room.

Early that morning when his lank, gray figure had first appeared at the gate, Mr. Hawthorne said: "Here comes the Sage of Concord. He is anxious to know what kind of human beings come up from the back hills in Virginia. Now I will tell you," his eyes gleaming with fun, "what he will talk to you about. Pears. Yes. You may begin at Plato or the day's news, and he will come around to pears. He is now convinced that a vegetable diet affects both the body and soul, and that pears exercise a more direct and ennobling influence on us than any other vegetable or fruit. Wait. You'll hear presently."

When we went in to dinner, therefore, I was surprised to see the sage eat heartily of the fine sirloin of beef set before us. But with the dessert he began to advocate a vegetable diet and at last announced the spiritual influence of pears, to the great delight of his host, who laughed like a boy and was humored like one by the gentle old man.

Whether Alcott, Emerson, and their disciples discussed pears or the war, their views gave you the same sense of unreality, of having been taken, as Hawthorne said, at too long a range. You heard much sound philosophy and many sublime guesses at the eternal verities; in fact, never were the eternal verities so dissected and pawed over and turned inside out as they were about that time, in Boston, by Margaret Fuller and her successors. But the discussion left you with a vague, uneasy sense that something was lacking, some back-bone of fact. Their theories were like beautiful bubbles blown from a child's pipe, floating overhead, with queer reflections on them of sky and earth and human beings, all in a glow of fairy color and all a little distorted.

Mr. Alcott once showed me an arbor which he had built with great pains and skill for Mr. Emerson to "do his thinking in." It was made of unbarked saplings and boughs, a tiny round temple, two storied, with chambers in which were seats, a desk, etc., all very artistic and complete, except that he had forgotten to make any door. You could look at it and admire it, but nobody could go in or use it. It seemed to me a fitting symbol for this guild of prophets and their scheme of life.

Kate Chopin page

2007-06-24T11:17:00.000-07:00

Updated birth and death dates on the Kate Chopin page; updates to the bibliography.