Aunt Cynthy Dallett

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909)
From Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories

Interesting Links
Sarah Orne Jewett, “unsurpassed chronicler and interpreter of women’s lives” (Reader's Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selection
“Going to Shrewsbury,” Sarah Orne Jewett

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Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories
Deephaven • A Country Doctor • The Country of the Pointed Firs • Dunnet Landing stories • other stories and sketches • 937 pages

When Sarah Orne Jewett published this week’s selection in an early January issue of Harper’s Bazaar 115 years ago, its title was the seasonally appropriate “The New-Year Guests.” She changed the title four years later when the story was reprinted in a book-length collection—an implicit acknowledgment of a heroine whose type appears often in her fiction: a New England woman living alone in her home. Such a character appears in a previous Story of the Week selection, “Going to Shrewsbury,” in which Mrs. Peet loses her home to an unscrupulous relative; we noted in our introduction how Jewett depicts the precariousness of solitude for women. Similarly, this week’s story, “Aunt Cynthy Dallett,” portrays how, for two women, such isolation can become unstable due to more benign reasons.

Still, Aunt Cynthy and her niece, while sometimes lonely, value their isolation and their respective homes. Margaret Farrand Thorp, in her 1966 study of Jewett’s fiction, notes (using this story as a paramount example), “Misanthropy has nothing to do with this state of mind. Most of the solitaries like to mix with people and like to talk, but there are other things they value more, independence, the pleasure of being surrounded by their own possessions, freedom to order their lives and do things in their own way.” The tension in “Aunt Cynthy Dallett” results when the two women, one growing older and the other poorer, are faced with the possibility that they can no longer sustain the households they have grown to love. But, since it’s New Year’s Day, Aunt Cynthy ultimately follows the tradition established by her father, who “made a good deal of it; he said he liked to make it pleasant and give the year a fair start.”

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“No,” said Mrs. Hand speaking wistfully,—“no, we never were in the habit of keeping Christmas at our house. . . .” If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Horsefeathers Swathed in Mink

A. J. Liebling (1904–1963)
From A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings

Interesting Links

“Reporting It All: A. J. Liebling at one hundred,” David Remnick (The New Yorker)

“A. J. Liebling Saw This Coming,” John Lingan (Splice Today)

“W. H. Auden, A. J. Liebling: September 1 writings frame World War II in Europe” (Reader's Almanac)

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A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings
The Sweet Science | The Earl of Louisiana | The Jollity Building | Between Meals | The Press | 1,057 pages
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“The names of those who came under Liebling’s assault are now mainly forgotten, but their bigotry and jingoism and fakery all have resonant equivalents today,” wrote David Remnick in a 2004 New Yorker essay memorializing the magazine’s former star columnist on the centennial of his birth. One of A. J. Liebling’s frequent targets was the media, particularly the newspapers of New York. In a monthly feature called “Wayward Press,” he exposed shoddy reporting, sensationalist or fabricated stories, and—a favorite object of scorn—headline writers. Between the end of World War II and his death in 1963, Liebling wrote more than eighty columns on the press, which proved to be one of the magazine’s most popular features. Summarizing Liebling’s contribution to the field of media criticism, John Lingan reminds us “that the issues concerning our current newspaper ‘crisis’—perceived journalistic bias, a relative dearth of proper foreign reportage, charges of elitism, the financial tenuousness of newspaper operation—are nothing new.” Indeed, Liebling himself often conceded the unoriginality and futility of his critiques. (“The longer I criticized the press, the more it disimproved,” he once quipped.)

One doesn’t have to look far in “Horsefeathers Swathed in Mink” to find today’s “resonant equivalents” referred to by Remnick. Liebling opens the piece by juxtaposing the still-common “neediest cases” articles that appear annually in the back sections of newspapers with the year-round front-page attacks on the “Undeserving Poor.” As an example of the anecdotal “welfare cheat” used to criticize poverty relief programs, the largely fictionalized “Woman in Mink” (soon promoted to “Lady in Mink”) dominated the front pages of every newspaper in New York City for a brief period in 1947. In his column Liebling revealed the truths behind the myth (or, one might say, the mange behind the mink), and he particularly directs his debunking efforts at the usually staid New York Times. Although he is careful to acknowledge that “exposures of maladministration can only be welcomed by the citizenry,” he insists that “such inquiries must be conducted on the basis of fair play and sound judgment” and, above all, with a regard for the facts.

Notes: The “report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights” referred to on page 751 recommended an end to segregation in the military and the passage of other significant civil rights measures. The “young American actor” Penrod Schofield, mentioned on page 756, is a fictional character in a novel by Booth Tarkington. Tommy Manville (page 758) was a wealthy New York socialite perhaps most infamous for his thirteen marriages to eleven women. PM was a liberal daily newspaper in New York, published from 1940 to 1948.

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There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

(Because Liebling incorporated this essay in his collection The Press, the story begins down near the bottom of the first page of the PDF.)

This selection is used by permission.
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The Christmas Fireside (for Good Little Boys and Girls)

Mark Twain (1835–1910)
From Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852–1890

Interesting Links
Cases of Mistaken Identity: Mark Twain and His Lookalikes (TwainQuotes)

Mark Twain and William Dean Howells: the friendship that transformed American literature (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selections:
• “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain
• “An Interview with Mark Twain,” Rudyard Kipling
• “Queen Victoria’s Jubilee,” Mark Twain

Buy the book
Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1852–1890
Nearly 200 stories, sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, tall tales, speeches, and satires • 1,076 pages
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The year 2010 has become, somewhat unexpectedly, the Year of Mark Twain. And so, for this holiday season, we present a Christmas story that only he could write, about the wicked boy who got everything.

When Twain arrived in San Francisco in 1864, he quickly landed a job writing for a newly launched literary weekly called The Californian, which was co-edited by Bret Harte (future author of “The Outcast of Poker Flat”) and Charles Henry Webb. With their encouragement and guidance, he honed his skills as a satirist and within a few months he was paid $50 a month to write one piece per issue—a respectable amount at the time, although never enough for the young Samuel Clemens, whose financial woes were a recurrent theme in his journals and letters. The newspaper was a success, but turnover among owners and editors led to its eventual demise. Before the periodical ceased publication in 1868, it had also introduced Ambrose Bierce to its readers.

Published two days before Christmas in the newspaper’s first year, “The Christmas Fireside” features a character familiar to readers of Mark Twain: the naughty boy. Compared with the affably mischievous Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, however, “Jim” is a downright monster. But Twain’s satire isn’t really about boyhood. If anything, Twain has written what might be called an “anti-story”—less about what does happen to Jim and more about what does not. He has two targets: the laughably implausible Sunday school catechisms of the era and (particularly in the closing paragraphs) the American propensity for rewarding corruption and vice among members of its political and entrepreneurial class. “Bah, humbug!” one might think, but what keeps the young Mark Twain from being the Californian Scrooge is a sense of impishness to mitigate the cynicism.

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Once there was a bad little boy, whose name was Jim—though, if you will notice, you will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James in your Sunday-school books. It was very strange, but still it was true, that this one was called Jim. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

All Parrots Speak

Paul Bowles (1910–1999)
From Paul Bowles: Collected Stories & Later Writings

Interesting Links

The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site

Paul Bowles centennial year: A tribute sparks a memory (Reader's Almanac)

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Paul Bowles: Collected Stories & Later Writings
The Delicate Prey | A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard | The Time of Friendship | Things Gone and Things Still Here | Midnight Mass | The Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue | Up Above the World | selected later stories
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Paul Bowles with parrot. Photograph by Roy Round for the back jacket cover of the US edition of Up Against the World (1966)

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During the early 1960s the New York poet and photographer Ira Cohen lived in Morocco for four years and, while there, he became friends with Paul Bowles (who was born 100 years ago this month). Cohen interviewed Bowles in 1965* and mentioned the author’s famous predilection for pet animals, resulting in a lengthy exchange about parrots, including the following bits:

Cohen: I somehow always think of you as a scorpion, with a cat somewhere in the background, a parrot maybe on its shoulder.

Bowles: I used to carry the green parrot around on my shoulder. I carried him all over the Sahara. They’re good to travel with. They’re happy, they’re not miserable traveling. You try to travel with a cat, and it’s miserable. . . .

My gray parrot lives in the kitchen in [Bowles’s wife] Jane’s apartment downstairs. It’s better for her to be with people and they worship the bird, talk to it, give it things. . . . It won’t let anyone touch it at all except Cherifa and me.

Cohen: I know it pecked a real piece out of my finger one day.

Bowles: Well, it bites everybody.

Bowles’s fondness for parrots (and his guests’ terror of them) dated back nearly three decades, when he first encountered the birds during his and his wife’s honeymoon in Costa Rica in 1938; afterward he was rarely without one or more of them. Although his household could sometimes be filled with exotic animals (the story below mentions an armadillo, an ocelot, and a tejon), he was particularly proud of his parrots, complaining in a letter to a friend about a “libelous” article that painted him “as distant, chilly, and eccentric, and, even worse, describing my parrot as skinny and featherless, which is certainly not the case.”

In 1956 he gathered some of the more memorable of his adventures as an avian aficionado in “Parrots I Have Known,” which was published in the popular travel magazine Holiday; he later retitled the piece when he included it in the 1963 travel writing collection Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue.

* Some of the interview was lost, and part of the extant portion was published in Conversations with Paul Bowles (1993).

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Parrots are amusing, decorative, long-lived, and faithful in their affections, but the quality which distinguishes them from most of God’s other inventions is their ability to imitate the sounds of human speech. A parrot that cannot talk or sing is, we feel, an incomplete parrot. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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I’ll Be Waiting

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
From Raymond Chandler: Stories & Early Novels

 Interesting Links
“The case for Raymond Chandler,” Allen Barra (Salon)

Raymond Chandler bus tours of Los Angeles (Esotouric)

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Raymond Chandler: Stories & Early Novels
The Big Sleep • Farewell, My Lovely • The High Window • 13 pulp stories
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In the 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler described the type of crime fiction that he and his idol, Dashiell Hammett, had been writing during the past two decades:

. . . there are still quite a few people around who say that Hammett did not write detective stories at all, merely hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini.

By the time Chandler wrote “I’ll Be Waiting” in 1939, however, he had pretty much dispensed with the olive. All the other ingredients of a great noir martini are there: the hotel detective, the deceptively vulnerable girl, shady underworld figures, menacing shadows, an ominous threat of violence. The only thing lacking is a murder mystery for the “paunchy” hero Tony Reseck to solve.

“I’ll Be Waiting” is the shortest of Chandler’s stories; it is also the first—and only—one published in a “slick” magazine. Nearly all his previous works of short fiction had been published in the pulps Black Mask and Dime Detective, but Chandler wrote one for the Saturday Evening Post at the behest of his agent and was motivated primarily by the money such magazines paid.

Afterward, he seems to have worried that he sold out. That year he expressed disappointment in a letter to another pulp writer, George Harmon Coxe: “I didn’t think much of the story when I wrote it—I felt it was artificial, untrue and emotionally dishonest like all slick fiction.” Even twenty years later, in a letter to detective writer William Gault, he acknowledged that while “I’ll Be Waiting” had been “anthologized to death” and the “story was all right,” he preferred the free-spirited form of the pulps to the constraints in tone and substance imposed by glossy magazines:

I’m an improviser, and perhaps at times an innovator. Some slick writing is very good, on the surface, but it seems to lack something for me. . . . But perhaps I have a different idea about writing and shouldn’t be saying this.

In their anthology of hardboiled fiction, editors Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian regard the story as “a superbly atmospheric night-piece” and respond, “Chandler was a perceptive critic of others’ work, although less so of his own.” Indeed, still frequently included in anthologies, the story today is considered by many readers and critics as among his best and most polished (with a superb twist ending), and it has even been adapted for film twice, most recently in 1993 as an episode of Showtime’s Fallen Angels directed by Tom Hanks.

Notes: On page 570, Goodman refers to musician Benny Goodman. One page 572, there are several contemporary cultural references: The Last Laugh is a 1924 movie starring Emil Jannings; “Spring, Beautiful Spring” (also known as “Chimes of Spring”) was a song written by Paul Lincke in 1903; The Blue Bird was Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1909 allegorical play, which became a movie in 1918.

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At one o’clock in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the last of three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windermere Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew back into remoteness. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Success in Entertaining

Ward McAllister (1827–1895)
From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

Interesting Links

Opulence in the “Gilded Age,” 1890 (Eyewitness to History)

“Evander Berry Wall, King of the Dudes” (Ciaran Conliffe, HeadStuff)

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American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes
Paperback • 753 pages
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Caricature of Ward McAllister as “an ass”
telling Uncle Sam to imitate “an English
Snob.” Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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As we enter the holiday season and fret over the fêtes and dinners we may be planning to host or attend, it is amusing to ponder the lengths to which wealthy Americans (and especially their servants) went to prepare society dinners during the Gilded Age. Their improbable chronicler was Ward McAllister, a Gold Rush millionaire who married an heiress and quickly attached himself to “the Mrs. Astor,” Caroline, whose husband, William, had inherited the vast estate of his brother John Jacob Astor III.

McAllister, who earned the sobriquet “Make-a-lister,” formulated New York’s A-list, which he dubbed the “Four Hundred,” a reference to the number of guests who could comfortably fit into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. Notably lacking at these events were artists and intellectuals; Edith Wharton attended once and was chagrined to note, in A Backward Glance, that instead of the “Bohemians” she had been led to expect, “the tiara-ed heads and bulging white waistcoats of the most accredited millionaires glittered between gold plate and orchids.” Evander Berry Wall, an heir to a fortune and the most famous of the New York “dudes,” quipped, “Remember that Broadway only cuts across Fifth Avenue—it never parallels it.”

In Who Killed Society?, Cleveland Amory summarizes, “without the slightest hint of a sense of humor, [McAllister] imparted such seriousness to his ideas, as well as to himself, that in the socially insecure times in which he lived he was soon taken extremely seriously even by people who should have known better.” But eventually this artifice imploded, and the fuse was his book Society As I Have Found It (1890). On its publication, William Dean Howells wrote in Harper’s, “It is always and everywhere amusing to see a plutocracy trying to turn into an aristocracy, and that is what Mr. McAllister shows us with no apparent sense of its comicality.” That the nation’s readers were suddenly laughing at McAllister’s prosperous peers did little for his standing among them, and he soon found himself persona non grata among the very society he thought he had made.

Yet, as a reviewer of his book in The New York Times noted, “our leader of society is not weak on all points. The man seriously knows something about eating and drinking. Being a cousin of Sam Ward must count for something.” The mention of McAllister’s cousin, Samuel Cutler Ward, brings us full circle, for not only was he a famous gourmet who ruled the Washington, DC, dinner circuit but he also married Emily Astor, the sister-in-law of “the Mrs. Astor.” The following selection makes reference to Ward McAllister’s “distinguished cousin” and his culinary authority as it describes with (mostly unintentional) comical aplomb the protocol for preparing a proper society dinner.

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The first object to be aimed at is to make your dinners so charming and agreeable that invitations to them are eagerly sought for, and to let all feel that it is a great privilege to dine at your house, where they are sure they will meet only those whom they wish to meet. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Hunting the Deceitful Turkey

Mark Twain (1835–1910)
From Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1891–1910

Interesting Links

“A Voice from the Vault” (Benjamin Griffin, Granta)

Mark Twain tells all in “new” autobiography, with PBS NewsHour video (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selections:
• “An Interview with Mark Twain,” Rudyard Kipling
• “Queen Victoria’s Jubilee,” Mark Twain

Buy the bookMark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1891–1910
80 stories, sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, tall tales, speeches, and satires • 1,050 pages
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Pencil sketch of Mark Twain by Samuel Johnson Woolf, 1906. From S. J. Woolf, Drawn from Life (1932). 

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This selection has been reposted with an updated and expanded introduction here.

As Americans get ready to prepare their traditional Thanksgiving dinners, it seems only appropriate to offer Mark Twain’s humorous yarn about turkeys of yore. The twist: first you had to catch (and, it should go without saying, kill) them. Filled with Twain’s trademark exaggeration and self-deprecation, this autobiographical childhood memory of the one that got away was eventually meant to be part of a chapter in a much larger undertaking that remained unfinished at his death.

During the late 1890s, Twain began gathering his recollections in a manuscript with the title, “My Autobiography (Random Extracts of It).” The project was very much on his mind; he told the London Times in 1899 that the memoir would not be published until a century after his death. In 1906 be began dictating his reminiscences more energetically and that same year he decided to publish fragments of the work-in-progress in twenty-five issues of the North American Review, with the disclaimer, “No part of the autobiography will be published in book form during the lifetime of the author.”

After Twain’s death, in spite of his wishes for a century-long embargo, his estate allowed various parts of the unfinished work to be published in a number of abridged and cobbled-together versions. But, finally, just a few weeks ago, the first of three volumes of the complete and unexpurgated autobiographical fragments and chapters was published by the University of California Press—and it immediately debuted in the #2 spot on The New York Times Best–Seller List.

The same year that Twain began publishing excerpts in the North American Review, he allowed Harper’s to print “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” which was an excerpt from the “Random Extracts” manuscript. (Those who own the Autobiography will find the text on pages 218–20, under the heading “Chapter”; what appears below is the minimally edited 1906 magazine version.) Over the years it has proved to be one of Twain’s most popular stories. Weeks after its publication in 1906, an anonymous reviewer in the Literary Digest wrote, “If the account which he gives is authentic, there are grounds for the belief that the mama-turkey is almost as much of a humorist as Mark Twain himself.”

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When I was a boy my uncle and his big boys hunted with the rifle, the youngest boy Fred and I with a shotgun—a small single-barrelled shotgun which was properly suited to our size and strength; it was not much heavier than a broom. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Account of the Battle of Monmouth

George Washington (1732–1799)
From George Washington: Writings

Interesting Links

The American Revolution Month-by-Month: June 1778 (Sons of the American Revolution)

George Washington returns General Howe’s dog after the Battle of Germantown (Reader’s Almanac)

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George Washington: Writings
Over 440 letters, addresses, and other documents | 1,149 pages
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Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth, c. 1852, oil on canvas by German American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816–1868). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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“The father of our country remains a moving target for historians,” Janet Maslin writes in a review of Washington: A Life, the blockbuster biography by Ron Chernow. Jill Lepore agrees, “No biographer of George Washington has failed to remark on his inscrutability.” Although Chernow endeavors, in his own words, “to make him vivid and immediate, rather than the lifeless waxwork he has become for many Americans,” he admits that Washington “joined in this conspiracy to make himself unknowable.” Yet Washington’s famously dispassionate prose often made him an ideal chronicler of the details of a military campaign.

In mid-June 1778 Washington discovered that the British troops commanded by General Henry Clinton in Philadelphia were preparing to abandon the city and move their command to New York. The dilemma for Washington and his staff was whether the exhausted Continental army could take advantage of the opening to attack a retreating force. The majority of the generals (scorned as a “most honorable society of midwives” by Alexander Hamilton) favored caution over engagement, but Washington decided to send four thousand men against the British. He offered the command to General Charles Lee, who was recently released in a prisoner exchange. Opposed to the decision to attack the British and convinced it would fail, Lee turned the offer down as unworthy of his status. The young Lafayette, eager to prove himself, accepted command. Then Lee, apparently fearful of losing the laurels of victory to an upstart, changed his mind, so Washington forged a compromise and named him as Lafayette’s nominal superior for the battle, which occurred on June 28.

It was a recipe for confusion and, as nearly always happens in warfare, little went according to plan. The British, expecting an attack, posted their best soldiers in the rear. In the stifling summer heat, Lee sent his troops on an obligatory but feeble attack and Washington soon discovered to his dismay that Continental forces were in retreat. Several eyewitnesses, including Lee himself, attest that one of the rare moments when Washington lost his self-control during the war was when he encountered the fleeing general. (“Never have I enjoyed such swearing before or since,” one later recalled.) In his biography, Chernow makes special note of this display of “the temperamental side of Washington that he ordinarily kept well under wraps.” It was at that moment Washington took personal command, rallied the retreating forces, and turned them around—all while enduring enemy fire and having his own horse die under him from the heat.

Although the Battle of Monmouth was basically a draw, both sides were able to claim victory: Washington averted a near-catastrophe and showed that his ragtag troops were the equal of the enemy on the battlefield, while the British achieved their ultimate objective and reached New York. As for Lee, the battle was hardly over before he began telling others that Washington had “sent me out of the field when victory was assured” and that any successes that day were “entirely owing” to his own command. Washington responded with a written, angry rebuke, after which Lee virtually dared his commander to court-martial him—a challenge that Washington wrathfully fulfilled. Among the many things remarkable about his subsequent report to the president of the Continental Congress is how minimally he describes “the peculiar Situation of General Lee,” how scrupulously he assigns credit and praise to his senior staff, and how steadfastly he avoids mentioning his own bravery and conduct on the field.

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English Town, July 1, 1778
Sir: I embrace the first moment of leisure, to give Congress a more full and particular account of the movements of the Army under my command, since its passing the Delaware, than the situation of our Affairs would heretofore permit. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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A Journey

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
From Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1891–1910

Interesting Links
Moved by a story, Henry James writes to Edith Wharton for the first time (Reader's Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selection:
“Kerfol,” Edith Wharton

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Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1891–1910
The Touchstone • Sanctuary • The Eyes • 35 others • 928 pages
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The period between Edith Wharton’s marriage in 1885 at the age of twenty-three and the publication of The Greater Inclination, her first collection of stories, in 1899 is, biographer Hermione Lee confirms, “more obscure to us than her later years as a famous novelist.” We do know that, after her marriage, Wharton was quite often afflicted with various ailments; we also know that she was disappointed by the lack of passion and intellectual affinity in her marriage (Lee agrees with other biographers that the union was a “disaster”). The formidable Wharton scholar R.W.B. Lewis attributes the recurrent illnesses not only to the unsatisfactory relationship with her husband, but also to “society’s and her mother’s distrust of a person of good family who took seriously to writing. One can only employ the phrase ‘severe identity crisis’ to describe the terrible and long-drawn-out period Edith Wharton was passing through.”

The upshot was that it took the author more than five years (rather than the six months promised to her editor) to complete her first book—a period of hesitation and self-doubt that virtually vanished afterward, when, Lewis notes, “her fiction-writing energy never let up.” She later wrote in A Backward Glance:

I felt like some homeless waif who, after trying for years to take out naturalization papers, and being rejected by every country, has finally acquired a nationality. The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my country, and I gloried in my new citizenship. The publishing of The Greater Inclination broke the chains which had held me so long in a kind or torpor. For nearly twelve years I had tried to adjust myself to the life I had led since my marriage. . . .

Although, Lee reminds us, some of Wharton’s illnesses were “real enough” and certainly didn’t vanish with her newfound respect as an author, there is little doubt that the success of her first book of fiction—which received strong reviews and sold a respectable 3,000 copies—served as an turning point in her life.

It is not surprising, then, that of the handful of stories written during the 1890s, three were tales of marital misery. “A Journey” features a wife traveling with her terminally ill husband by train to New York. (Lewis suggests that there may be a bit of wishful thinking here on Wharton’s part.) The journey itself becomes a metaphor for an unhappy marriage: “Life had a grudge against her; she was never to be allowed to spread her wings.” If there’s an epilogue to this story, perhaps it’s to be found in the increasing distance in subsequent years between Edith and Edward Wharton, leading to their inevitable divorce in 1913.

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As she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Artemus Ward on His Visit to Abe Lincoln

Artemus Ward (1834–1867)
From The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now

Interesting Links

Abraham Lincoln’s White House (The Lincoln Institute)

Abraham Lincoln: The path to the Emancipation Proclamation (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selection:
Tolstoi Holds Lincoln World’s Greatest Hero
Leo Tolstoy, as told to Count S. Stakelberg

Buy the book
The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now
110 selections by 95 writers, from William Cullen Bryant to E. L. Doctorow • 1,000 pages

Caricature by H. L. Stephens (1860)

Saturday, November 6, 2010, marks the 150th anniversary of the election of Abraham Lincoln. During his first year in office, he would be confronted with crises that would test the very existence of the United States, but during the first few days he faced chaos of an entirely different nature. Years later, Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward (who had been appointed by his father, Secretary of State William H. Seward) recalled the opening month of the Lincoln’s presidency in Reminiscences of a War-time Statesman and Diplomat, describing

the swarm of office-seekers that beleaguered the White House, filling all the halls, corridors, and offices from morning till night. The patient good humour and the democratic habits of the new President led him to give audience to everybody, at all hours. Even the members of his Cabinet, sometimes had to force their way through the crowd and get the private ear of the President in the corner of a roomful of visitors, before they could impart to him grave matters of state.

Such scenes had become de rigueur for new administrations during the nineteenth century and, immediately after the election, the humorist Artemus Ward (whose real name was Charles Farrar Browne) imagined hordes of applicants invading and occupying Lincoln’s home in Springfield, before the President-elect had even left for Washington. Ward’s satirical pieces, narrated by an uneducated traveling entertainer with a special knack for malapropism, were enormously popular and would sometimes acquire the aura of fact; the Daily Illinois State Register claimed that Ward had actually advised Lincoln to appoint to his cabinet “showmen, as showmen ain’t got nary darned principle”—a line lifted nearly verbatim from the following story.

But perhaps the greatest accolades for Ward’s satire came from Lincoln himself, who esteemed the humorist, often welcomed him to the White House, and even opened the September 22, 1862, meeting in which he announced the Emancipation Proclamation by reading to the mostly appalled cabinet members a chapter from Ward’s latest book. According to Judge Hamilton Ward, who claimed to have heard the story from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, it was on this occasion that Lincoln allegedly delivered the now-famous (but probably apocryphal) quote, “Gentlemen, why don't you laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh, I should die.”

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I hiv no politics. Nary a one. I’m not in the bisniss. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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In Goldman, Sachs We Trust

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006)
From John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society and Other Writings 1952–1967

Interesting Links

Commanding Heights: An Interview with John Kenneth Galbraith (September 2000, PBS)

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John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society and Other Writings 1952–1967
American Capitalism | The Great Crash, 1929 | The Affluent Society | The New Industrial State | 1,066 pages

This week (October 24–29) marks the anniversary of the Great Crash, a cataclysm pushed to the foreground by events of recent years—although for many Americans, the cause of the 1929 calamity is at best an incomprehensible, nebulous “house of cards” or “Ponzi scheme” (which, to great extent, it was). In his enduringly popular account,The Great Crash, 1929, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith explains, in very clear terms, exactly what happened. In one now-famous chapter, he describes how, during the late 1920s, it seemed everybody in the nation was buying stocks to get rich quick. Rather than wondering if the run-up was fueled by little more than unbridled imagination and misguided optimism, some Wall Street experts sincerely worried “that the country might be running out of common stock,” a problem they believed was a major cause of stocks’ high prices. So various ways to increase investment opportunities were invented and offered to the public.

One method of increasing the number of stocks, relatively new in the U.S., was the creation of the investment trust. Such companies did not really produce anything or foster new enterprises; instead, they “merely arranged that people could own stock in old companies through the medium of new ones”; that is, the trust’s sole purpose was to invest its funds in the stocks of other companies. The problem, however, was that there was often no relation to the amount of money invested in the trust to the amount of money the trust invested, in turn, in stocks. “The difference,” Galbraith writes, “went into the call market, real estate, or the pockets of the promoters.”

The investment trusts succeeded largely because the “product” they sold to the average trader was expertise: “One might make money investing directly in Radio, J. I. Case, or Montgomery Ward, but how much safer and wiser to let it be accomplished by the men of peculiar knowledge, and wisdom.” And the trusts were not really new companies; instead, most of them were sponsored by existing companies—for example, J. P. Morgan was behind the investment trust United Corporation. Furthermore, it almost goes without saying, investment trusts would sponsor investment trusts that would, in turn sponsor investment trusts; each of these companies issuing stocks that they would often sell to each other or to other investment trusts. Many of these companies learned quickly that through the “the miracle of leverage” (the degree to which borrowed money is used), they could “swing a second and larger [trust] which enhanced the gains and made possible a third and still bigger trust.”

Which brings us to Goldman, Sachs and Company. In the final section of his chapter on investment trusts, Galbraith describes the unique and outsized role the company had in the inevitable debacle, with total losses that, in today’s dollars, would equal about $475 billion.

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Goldman, Sachs and Company, an investment banking and brokerage partnership, came rather late to the investment trust business. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Little Room

Madeline Yale Wynne (1847–1918)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links
The grave site of Madeline Wynne and her son, Philip (Find a Grave)

“Re-entering 'The Little Room'”: A blogger hears from the couple who purchased a strangely configured house once owned by Madeline Yale Wynne's aunt and uncle (I've Been Reading Lately)

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The reputations of some authors endure through the ages, even though (and sometimes because) they wrote only one memorable book. John Kennedy Toole, Harper Lee, and Margaret Mitchell are a few of America’s more famous one-hit wonders, but if readers today know of Madeline Yale Wynne at all, it is because of the six short pieces of fiction gathered in The Little Room and Other Stories—or more precisely, because of the collection’s title story, which continues to appear in anthologies more than a century after its initial publication in Harper’s in 1895.

Yet, had Wynne never written “The Little Room,” she would still be noted by a small cadre of regional historians and art scholars as a prominent leader of the Arts and Crafts movement in Massachusetts. The daughter of Linus Yale, who invented several types of locks and founded the Yale Lock Manufacturing Company, she became well known as an accomplished metal-smith and president of The Society of Deerfield Industries, a collective of local artisans, mostly women. After a revival of sorts during the 1970s, Wynne’s creations (ranging from shoe buckles to an iron-and-oak chest) are eagerly sought after today by collectors and museums.

The Little Room would not be Wynne's only publication. Her expertise as an artisan led her to write essays for home and style magazines, such as “Clay Paint and Other Wall Finishings” (The House Beautiful, 1902). The year before she died, Si Briggs Talk, a short book of humorous but unexceptional country-folk doggerel, would appear. An Ancestral Invasion and Other Stories is a posthumous anthology of uncollected and unpublished work selected and edited by Annie Putnam, her companion for more than three decades, and introduced by Edward Waldo Emerson (the youngest son of Ralph).

But it is “The Little Room” that remains Wynne’s most influential story, recently praised by literary scholar Alfred Bendixen as “one of the most effective ‘puzzle stories’ ever written.” Featuring a space whose contents anticipate the quantum quandary of Schrödinger’s cat, the mystery is set in a house inhabited by two unmarried aunts, who seem unperturbed by the different accounts they hear from visitors concerning what’s behind a particular door. The story’s themes have also invited modern feminist readings, such as Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s appraisal in Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women: “What haunts in this story, and what women are never able to find in the presences of their husbands, is an intimate feminine space—a space of refuge, healing, and play.” For some visitors, it becomes a “room of one’s own”; for others, it is a closet of domestic confinement.

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‘How would it do for a smoking-room?’ . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Baxter’s Procrustes

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932)
From Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays

Interesting Link
“The Book Boys: One woman peeks inside Cleveland's most controversial men's club” (Cleveland Magazine, February 2005)

Previous Story of the Week selection:
“The Bouquet,” Charles W. Chesnutt

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Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, & Essays
The Conjure Woman | The Wife of His Youth & Other Stories of the Color Line | The House Behind the Cedars | The Marrow of Tradition | 939 pages
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In 1899 the Rowfant Club of Cleveland, an exclusive association of book collectors, issued a deluxe limited edition of the story collection The Conjure Woman, which had been written by city resident Charles W. Chesnutt and published earlier that year by Houghton, Mifflin. The author himself hoped to join the club and three years later applied for membership, only to be denied because “one or two members thought the time hadn’t come” for admitting black members to their ranks.

So Chesnutt did what any self-respecting author would do when confronted by such an injustice: he wrote a story satirizing the members of the club. Published in 1904, “Baxter’s Procrustes” would prove to be one of his most successful stories and is still considered among his best, in large part because Chesnutt’s mockery is, for the most part, even-tempered; in biographer William L. Andrew’s words, although the club’s “vulnerable idiosyncrasies” are tenaciously exposed, “the satiric underthrust is deftly made but well concealed indeed.”

The Rowfant Club’s members must not have been too offended by Chesnutt’s riposte; in 1910, they reconsidered their decision and admitted him as the first African American member of the club. (A century later, the club still exists, but it remains resolutely men-only.) Helen Chesnutt, in her biography of her father, recalled the pleasure he took in “Saturday nights at the Rowfant Club. . . . There he basked in the warm rays of friendship for which his lonely heart had yearned in the days of his youth in North Carolina.” Over the course of the next decade, he delivered lectures on Alexander Dumas, George Meredith, and other literary figures.

But there’s a delightful coda to this real-life happy ending: in an assessment of “Baxter’s Procrustes,” Chesnutt scholar Charles Duncan relates that, in 1966, the Rowfant Club itself reprinted the story in a limited edition of 150 copies. Understanding fully the irony of publishing a rare collector’s edition of a story mocking collectors of rare editions, the author of the book’s introduction admits that Chesnutt delivers “a soft-spoken ribbing of all whose hearts belong more to the physical world of rare tomes than to their spiritual and intellectual contents.”

Notes: Procrustes is the name of a mythical highwayman who tied victims to a bed, fitting them to its length by stretching them or cutting off their legs. Thus, something is Procrustean if it is senselessly made to fit some arbitrary standard. Joseph Jefferson, entioned in the first paragraph, was a famous American actor of the late nineteenth century. Doublures, referred to twice in the story, are ornamental linings on the inner side of a book cover.

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Baxter’s Procrustes is one of the publications of the Bodleian Club. The Bodleian Club is composed of gentlemen of culture, who are interested in books and book-collecting. It was named, very obviously, after the famous library of the same name, and not only became in our city a sort of shrine for local worshipers of fine bindings and rare editions, but was visited occasionally by pilgrims from afar. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Train

Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964)
From Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works

Interesting links

Flannery O'Connor: the writer versus the believer (Reader's Almanac)

Interview with Brad Gooch, author of Flannery (PDF, The Library of America)

Andalusia: The Home of Flannery O'Connor (Andalusia Foundation)

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Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works
Wise Blood | A Good Man Is Hard to Find | The Violent Bear It Away | Everything That Rises Must Converge | essays and letters

“The Tennessean: Washington–Memphis Streamlined Train via Lynchburg, Bristol, Knoxville and Chattanooga | Through Sleeping Cars Between New York and Memphis | Southern Railway System.” Postcard and photograph c. 1945–47 by E. C. Kropp Co. (Wikimedia Commons)

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Readers of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood will recall Haze Motes, a soldier who, after returning to his family home only to find it abandoned, travels by train to locate his preacher-grandfather and establishes his own “church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified.” For this week’s selection, we present Haze in his previous incarnation, Hazel Wickers, in the story that brought O’Connor to the attention of the authors and editors who would champion her.

O’Connor enjoyed enviable success soon after finishing her studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1947. On the basis of her student work and a draft of her novel-in-progress, she received the Rinehart-Iowa Award of $750 and an option for her first book. “The Train,” the last of six stories in her MFA thesis (titled The Geranium), was accepted by the respected quarterly Sewanee Review, which published it as simply “Train” in the April 1948 issue.

She was invited to stay at Yaddo, the renowned artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she befriended the poet Robert Lowell, who regarded her as a favorite protégé. In his recent biography Brad Gooch describes the transformation of her story into the novel’s first chapter:

She was making progress, thinning out and pacing the opening. “Well I can’t sustain that,” she told Sally [Fitzgerald] when her friend praised “The Train.” “I have to tone it down.” Haze Motes, in his “glaring blue” suit and “hat that an elderly country preacher would wear,” was coming into focus as a slightly demented saint in the making, a shift in direction that Sally thought perhaps “due to criticism by [Robert] Lowell.”

Another recent arrival at Yaddo was Alfred Kazin, who immediately took note of O’Connor’s work and alerted Robert Giroux, a junior editor at Harcourt Brace. When Lowell finally introduced her to Giroux in New York, O’Connor was faced with a dilemma rare for a first-time author: she had two publishers vying for her unfinished book. Angered by Rinehart’s criticisms (which she regarded as “addressed to a slightly dim-witted Camp Fire Girl”), she refused to agree to their extensive editorial changes. Rinehart ultimately released O’Connor from the option on her book, allowing Harcourt to publish Wise Blood in 1952.

In “The Train,” as in the novel, Haze is traveling to Taulkinham, but the story’s final destination is a night in the train itself. Instead of a “slightly demented saint in the making,” Haze is a nineteen-year-old youth, alone and nervous and clumsy and haunted by the death of his mother. His thoughts are disturbed by the resemblance of a black porter to someone back home, by a chatty woman sitting near him on the train, and by the prospect of spending the night in the coffin-like sleeper berth.

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Thinking about the porter, he had almost forgotten the berth. He had an upper one. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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You Could Look It Up

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings and Drawings

Also of Interest

“A Can of Beer, a Slice of Cake—and Thou, Eddie Gaedel” (excerpt from Bill Veeck’s memoir)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Lady on the Bookcase,” James Thurber
• “Baiting the Umpire,” George Jean Nathan

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Eddie Gaedel at his only at-bat appearance for the St. Louis Browns, August 19, 1951. His jersey, bearing the uniform number 1/8.

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While playing with a toy bow and arrow, William Thurber accidentally shot his seven-year-old brother, James, in the left eye. A local doctor bandaged it, but a few days later the eye began to cause pain again and a specialist determined it would have to be removed. Later in life, Thurber’s remaining eye began causing him problems and he underwent five operations in 1940 and 1941. (The operations were a failure, and he would eventually become nearly blind.) During this period he found it difficult to work, but somehow, after the first operation, he managed to finish one of his most famous pieces, which, his wife later recalled, was the result of the “fact that he couldn’t read” and instead listened to baseball. He finished the story too late for the 1940 baseball season, however, so The Saturday Evening Post published it in April 1941.

Many of Thurber’s fans have noted the similarity between the barely literate dialect employed by the narrator of “You Could Look It Up” and the vernacular of athletes portrayed in Ring Lardner’s stories. But, as Thurber biographer Harrison Kinney writes, “nothing by Lardner matches Thurber’s wild plot.” The story acquired additional notoriety in 1951, when Bill Veeck became owner of the ill-fated St. Louis Browns, a team that ranks, in his own words, “in the annals of baseball a step or two ahead of Cro-Magnon man.” During that lamentable season, Veeck hired Eddie Gaedel, who at 3 feet 7 inches tall remains the shortest player in the history of major league baseball and whose career lasted for all of a single at-bat in a game against the Detroit Tigers on August 19. Veeck denied that he got the idea from Thurber’s story, although he admitted he suddenly recollected it, with more than a little nervousness, during the game itself. As to what happened to Gaedal, whether he struck out, walked on balls, or even succumbed to the temptation of swinging at a pitch—well, you could look it up.

Note: “Damon and Phidia” refers to the legend of Damon and Pythias (symbolizing true friendship); “Pope-Hartford” was a motor vehicle manufactured during the first decade of the twentieth century.

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It all begun when we dropped down to C’lumbus, Ohio, from Pittsburgh to play a exhibition game on our way out to St. Louis. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Désirée’s Baby

Kate Chopin (1850–1904)
From Kate Chopin: Complete Novels and Stories

Interesting Links

Commonly asked questions about “Désirée’s Baby” (The Kate Chopin International Society)

Previous Story of the Week selection
“A Respectable Woman,” Kate Chopin

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Kate Chopin: Complete Novels & Stories
At Fault | Bayou Folk | A Night in Acadie | The Awakening | uncollected stories
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In January 1893, Vogue published the up-and-coming writer Kate Chopin for the first time, featuring two of her stories in their January 14 issue. Both stories proved popular with readers, and Vogue would ultimately publish nineteen of her stories during the coming decade. One of the two debuts, “Désirée’s Baby” marked a change for an author that had become known for her pleasant “Creole tales.” Set in a slave-owning plantation household, with a master whose “rule was a strict one,” Chopin’s bold treatment of race deliberately inventories the differences among the inhabitants: negroes, dark, yellow, quadroon, fair, La Blanche, white—arbitrary distinctions that would lead inexorably to the story’s tragic outcome.

A sensation upon its publication, “Désirée’s Baby,” has remained her most critically acclaimed, commonly anthologized, and widely known story until the present day. As early as 1906, the author of the Library of Southern Literature called it “one of the most perfect short stories in English.” Fred Lewis Pattee, in his ground-breaking 1915 survey, History of American Literature since 1870, compared Chopin to such French writers as Maupassant and Flaubert and exclaimed that the story, “with its culminating sentence that stops for a moment the reader’s heart, is well nigh perfect.” Daniel Rankin, who in 1932 would write the only full-length book on Chopin until her “rediscovery” in the 1960s, agreed, “Perhaps it is one of the world’s best short stories.” And in 1978, Cynthia Griffin Woolf concluded that it is “a superb piece of short fiction—an economical, tight psychological drama.”

Note: A corbeille is a basket of gifts from a groom to his bride; cochon de lait ("milk pig") is a piglet.

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As the day was pleasant, Madame Valmondé drove over to L’Abri to see Désirée and the baby. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Kindling

Raymond Carver (1938–1988)
From Raymond Carver: Collected Stories

Interesting Links

Interview with Tess Gallagher, William L. Stull, and Maureen P. Carroll about Carver (PDF)

An essay about Beginners, the manuscript version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, including Carver's letter to Gordon Lish (PDF)

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Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? | What We Talk About When We Talk About Love | Cathedral | other stories | Beginners | essays | 1019 pages
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“And he propped the chunk up and, with a blow of the ax, split the wood into two pieces.” Photo by Markus Spiske (Pixabay)

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In a recent interview, William Stull and Maureen Carroll, the editors of the Library of America edition of Raymond Carver’s Collected Stories, summarized the fiction that remained unavailable to readers when Carver died:

Four stories uncollected and five unpublished at the writer’s death . . . That’s not a bursting cupboard, compared to the dozens of uncollected stories by John Cheever, say, or the shelf of posthumous books by Charles Bukowski. In life and literature, Raymond Carver didn’t hold much back. “I’ve always squandered,” he liked to say.

In her introduction to Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose, Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, recalls what led to the discovery of three of the five unpublished stories:

Early in 1998, as the tenth anniversary of Ray’s death approached, Jay Woodruff phoned to say he wanted to do something to honor Ray in Esquire. “There are these folders in the desk,” I said. “There may be nothing whole or worthwhile,” I told him. “But I could look sometime.” I suspect Jay heard the hesitation. At any rate he said, “Tess, when you get ready to look at those things I’ll be happy to come out and help you.”

Woodruff and Gallagher met in March 1999 at Tess’s home in Port Angeles, and Salon contributor Craig Offman spoke to Woodruff soon thereafter:

After rummaging through a drawer of notes, fragments and false starts, the two pretty much gave up on the idea of a “eureka!” file. “I felt discouraged,” he [Woodruff] says. "Many of the stories Tess and I found began well but fell off the cliff. But then, toward the end of the day, I heard her say, ‘Oh!’”

By coincidence, just a few months later, Stull and Carroll found the other two stories in Carver’s papers at the Ohio State University Library.

One of the three stories found in Port Angeles, “Kindling,” “hark[s] back movingly to that time in 1979,” writes Gallagher, “when Ray and I began our lives together in El Paso and he made his own fresh start at writing after a ten-year bout with alcoholism.” Requiring virtually no editing beyond obvious errors (like the regularization of names and spelling), the story was published in Esquire almost immediately after its discovery—in the July 1999 issue—and it became the sixth of Carver’s stories to win an O. Henry Award.

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It was the middle of August and Myers was between lives. The only thing different about this time from the other times was that this time he was sober. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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