The Lily-White Boys

William Maxwell (1908–2000)
From William Maxwell: Later Novels & Stories

Interesting Links
Two interviews: Christopher Carduff on William Maxwell’s early writings and later writings (PDFs, Library of America)

An interview with William Maxwell (Audio, NPR’s Fresh Air)

Previous Christmas selections from Story of the Week:
• “The Christmas Dinner,” Washington Irving
• “The Christmas Fireside (for Good Little Boys and Girls),” Mark Twain

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The author of dozens of short stories and six novels (including the National Book Award–winning So Long, See You Tomorrow), William Maxwell worked at The New Yorker for four decades, beginning in 1936. By the 1950s, comments Christopher Carduff, “he was coming into his own” as a fiction editor at the magazine, which “under its second editor-in chief, William Shawn, was transformed into something more daring and inclusive and, for Maxwell, congenial than it had been under Harold Ross.” Among the many writers Maxwell shepherded during his career were Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Mavis Gallant, Harold Brodkey, John Cheever, and John Updike, who described Maxwell’s editorship as “one of the wisest and kindest in American fiction.”

“Although he wrote several superb short stories,” Carduff notes, “the story was never Maxwell’s favorite form.” But his duties as a magazine editor and as father of two daughters made it difficult for him to write novels, and Shawn encouraged him instead to write prose pieces for the magazine. He continued writing and publishing stories and sketches, and re-reading his favorite books, right up until his death in 2000, at the age of 91. In his essay, “Nearing Ninety,” he wrote that he was “not concerned about” the prospect of dying, comparing it “to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity. . . . What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead, they don’t read books. This I find unbearable.”

Often included on annual lists of classic Christmas stories, “The Lily-White Boys” was written when Maxwell was in his late seventies and originally appeared in a special 100th issue of The Paris Review. In a review of holiday tales for the online magazine Untitled Books, Viola Fort hails Maxwell’s story as “brief and perfect” and describes its effect on the reader:

Like picking up a book and turning to a page at random, these lives, one feels, will continue whether we’re witness to them or not. The story itself is a flash of lightning illuminating a particular episode. Maxwell’s skill is in hinting at whole lifetimes in the space of five pages. . . . Maxwell cuts through the tinsel and the pitch-perfect carolling to a moment of quiet reflection on the years that have passed and the years to come, and there lies Christmas.

Maxwell biographer Barbara Burkhardt agrees, writing that the “tension between the piercing beauty and haunting sadness of human existence provides drama that courses beneath Maxwell’s spare, restrained, yet graceful prose.”

Note: The lyrics on the first page of the story are from the traditional English carol, “Green Grows the Rushes, O.”

*   *   *

The Follansbees’ Christmas party was at teatime on Christmas Day, and it was for all ages. Ignoring the fire laws, the big Christmas tree standing between the two front windows in the living room of the Park Avenue apartment had candles on it. . . . 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 Country Doctor

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
From Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men

Interesting Links
Capsule biography by Ray E. Boombower, commemorating Dreiser’s 2003 induction into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame

Previous Story of the Week selections by Theodore Dreiser:
• “W. L. S.” (also from Twelve Men)
• “A Certain Oil Refinery”

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Winter in the Ravine, c. 1912, by Indiana painter Theodore Clement Steele (1847-1926).

The indispensable Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia tells us that in 1902 Dreiser began work on a story with the preliminary title of “A Samaritan of the Backwoods.” A friend of his wife had asked him to publish a profile of her father, who was a doctor, and Dreiser agreed. But, unable or unwilling to write about a man he didn’t know, he eventually shifted gears and wrote instead about Amos Wooley, the country doctor from his own teenage years in the mid-1880s, when Dreiser’s family lived in Warsaw, Indiana. The resulting profile of “Dr. Gridley,” then, is really a work of fiction: a composite panegyric that blends anecdotes from the lives of two rural doctors, both beloved for making home visits, practicing folk medicine, and dispensing soothing advice.

He fussed with the story for more than fifteen years, and it was finally published as “The Country Doctor” in Harper’s Magazine in 1918—but only after Dreiser turned down the magazine’s first two offers ($275 and $300, according to his diaries, which don’t reveal the final sum paid to the author). The following year he included the story in his collection Twelve Men, which gathered two decades’ worth of sketches of people he had admired.

Note: The last page of the selection includes four lines from “The Beacon”, a poem written by English banker Paul Moon James (1780–1854), often misattributed to the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852). Dreiser has changed the phrase “seraph of mercy” to read “angel of mercy.”

*   *   *

How well I remember him—the tall, grave, slightly bent figure, the head like Plato's or that of Diogenes, the mild, kindly, brown-gray eyes peering, all too kindly, into the faces of dishonest men. . . . 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 Colored Cooper

Clifton Johnson (1865–1940)
From The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Interesting Links
Battle of Fredericksburg History (National Park Service)

Photos of Fredericksburg, 1862 (HistoryNet)

The Clifton Johnson Collection (Jones Library, Amherst, MA)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “An Hour,” Louisa May Alcott
• “Our Beleaguered City,”
Judith W. McGuire
• “A Woman’s Recollections of Antietam,” Mary Bedinger Mitchell

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J. G. Keyser. Lithograph, 1863. “Charge of Kimball's Brigade in the Battle of Fredericksburg, Saturday Dec. 13th 1862,” showing Union infantry charging up field at Marye’s Heights toward Confederate positions. Courtesy Brown University Library.

A century ago, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, Massachusetts travel writer Clifton Johnson interviewed fifty-four civilians about their wartime experiences and published their narratives as Battleground Adventures: The Stories of Dwellers on the Scenes of Conflict in Some of the Most Notable Battles of the Civil War.

One of his subjects was Joseph Lawson, identified by Johnson only as “The Colored Cooper,” who was present for the Battle of Fredericksburg, which occurred 150 years ago this week (December 11–15, 1862). At the battle the Union forces, led by Ambrose Burnside, suffered a devastating defeat to the Confederate army commanded by Robert E. Lee. With a humor and dismay hardly diminished by his eighty-two years, Lawson’s recollections convey the terror and confusion of the conflict from the point of view of a free black man living in the town.

Johnson’s book also includes an interview with Fannie Dawson, a slave who lived through the same battle. Before the war, her brother and three sisters had been sold “down in Alabama”; the brother had been whipped to death by his new master for preaching: “the gen'leman that owned him did n’t want him to preach and would n’t have no meetin’s or preachin’ on the place at all.” Dawson recalled that when the North lost the battle she “couldn’t believe it” and yet confidently told her mistress, “I tell yo’ we’re goin’ to be a free people. You-all will be gittin’ yo’ pay sho’ for the way you've done treated us pore black folks.” In response, “the white people stood there and laughed” at her.

Two weeks later, on January 1, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Note: Colonel [David] Lang (p. 665) was acting commander of the 8th Florida (Confederate) infantry.

*   *   *

Me and my wife was both free born. We could have gone away befo’ the battle, but we had a house hyar in Fredericksburg and four small chil’en, and I had work in town makin’ barrels. . . . 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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Knight to Move

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992)

Interesting Links

Fritz Leiber's 1982 introduction to his science fiction classic, The Big Time (Library of America)

Biography of Fritz Leiber (Library of America)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Try and Change the Past,” Fritz Leiber
• “The Refugee,” Jane Rice
• “Midnight,” Jack Snow

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Cover illustration for Fritz Leiber's The Big Time (Ace, 1967) by German American artist Hoot von Zitzewitz (1927–1979).

In an appreciation published two years ago on the centennial of Fritz Leiber’s birth, jazz critic and music historian Ted Gioia listed just a few of the popular writer’s many jobs and avocations: movie actor (appearing in the 1936 film Camille, with Greta Garbo and Lionel Barrymore), writer for the Buck Rogers comic strip series, minister, student of psychology and philosophy, Shakespearean stage actor, inspector for the aerospace industry, expert fencer, and Occidental College speech instructor.

Leiber was also a chess enthusiast, winning the Santa Monica Open in 1958; over the course of the following decade he served as president of the Santa Monica Chess Club and his name appeared frequently among the top-ranked competitors at tournaments throughout southern California. And in the late 1930s he and a friend designed a three-dimensional board game called “Lahkmar” (the setting for seven of Leiber’s future fantasy books); in 1976, a simplified version of the game was released commercially as Lankhmar by TSR, the legendary publishers of Dungeons and Dragons.

It’s little wonder, then, that chess and other board games play pivotal roles in much of his fiction, such as “Knight to Move,” one of the so-called Change War stories Leiber wrote after publishing the Hugo Award–winning novel, The Big Time. Set in the middle of an interplanetary chess tournament, the agents of two armies, the Spiders and the Snakes, engage in an intricate match of double-crossing and intrigue that mirrors the “slow game” taking place on the competition floor.

(Another Change War story, the comic time-travel tale “Try and Change the Past,” was offered as a Story of the Week selection earlier this year.)

Bonus material: Story of the Week readers should visit The Library of America’s American Science Fiction online companion, featuring new essays by such acclaimed writers as Michael Dirda, William Gibson, Nicola Griffith, James Morrow, Tim Powers, Kit Reed, Peter Straub, and Connie Willis. The Fritz Leiber section features (in addition to an essay by best-selling novelist Neil Gaiman): a slideshow, a biography of Leiber, other Change War stories, audio for three 1950s adaptations of Leiber's stories from the NBC radio program X Minus One, and more.

*   *   *

The tall, long-haired girl in the trim olive uniform with the black spiral insignia was tapping very lightly in a dash-dot-dot rhythm on the gallery’s golden rail where her elbows rested. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

You can also read this week’s story at the American Science Fiction online companion.

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

The Moonstone Mass

Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835–1921)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links
“To the Ends of the Earth, Painting the Polar Landscape”: paintings from an exhibit at Peabody Essex Museum (New Scientist)

Adventurers return home after historic trip through Northwest Passage (CTV News)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Striding Place,” Gertrude Atherton
• “The Domain of Arnheim,” Edgar Allan Poe
• “To Build a Fire,” Jack London

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Polar Sea (The Cathedral), 1867, oil on canvas by American painter George Curtis (1830–1910). Courtesy WikiMedia Commons.

Although her career spanned sixty years and she published dozens of stories in America’s leading national magazines, Harriet Prescott Spofford is hardly known to readers today—except, perhaps, as a footnote in Emily Dickinson’s biography. Both authors shared a literary mentor, Thomas Higginson, who recommended Spofford’s fiction to the reclusive Amherst poet. After Dickinson read her debut story, which appeared in the February 1860 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, she became a fan and asked her friends to send along other works by this new author. In fact, when Spofford had originally submitted that first story, Atlantic editor James Russell Lowell didn’t believe an unknown young woman could have written it, and Higginson stepped forward to confirm the provenance. Upon reading a second story by Spofford, Dickinson wrote to Higginson, “I read ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me in the Dark – so I avoid her.” Still another story moved her to write, “It is the only thing I ever read in my life that I didn’t think I could have imagined myself.”

“The Moonstone Mass” is one of many Gothic-tinged tales Spofford published during the first decade of her career. The nameless narrator is challenged by his wealthy uncle (who is, notably, a “misogynist”) to seek the elusive Northwest Passage and thereby earn his inheritance; by agreeing to this journey the young man puts off the possibility of marriage to his would-be fiancée, Eleanor. The meat of the story shows the influence of such eerie adventure tales as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and “MS. Found in a Bottle,” both of which based their plots around contemporary theories of hidden wonderlands to be found at either pole of the earth. Yet, contends literary scholar Alfred Bendixen, in spite of Spofford’s apparent debt to these and similar tales, her story repudiates their underlying themes, proposing instead “a rejection of the male quest for power (as expressed in the treasure hunt and other references to senseless greed) in favor of the world of feminine love and contentment (as represented by Eleanor).”

Note: At the end of the story, the phrase per si muove (Italian, eppur si muove) refers to Galileo’s alleged utterance after the Inquisition forced him to disavow his belief that the earth moves around the sun.

*   *   *

There was a certain weakness possessed by my ancestors, though in nowise peculiar to them, and of which, in common with other more or less undesirable traits, I have come into the inheritance.

It was the fear of dying in poverty. . . .If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Three Poems

Signs of the Times, Compensation, & When Malindy Sings
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906)
From American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century

Interesting Links
Paul Laurence Dunbar archives (Wright State University)

William Dean Howell’s introduction to Dunbar’s Lyrics of a Lowly Life (Archive.org)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban Seasonings,” Ana Menéndez
• “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain
• “Story in Harlem Slang,” Zora Neale Hurston

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Born in Dayton, Ohio, seven years after the end of the Civil War to two former Kentucky slaves, Paul Laurence Dunbar was initially educated by his mother, who encouraged his early interest in literature. (His father, who escaped to Canada before the war and served with the Massachusetts 55th Regiment, divorced his mother soon after his birth and died when Paul was only twelve.) Dunbar was the only black student in his class at Dayton’s Central High, where he was editor of the school paper and the class poet. While he was still in school, he founded a paper, the short-lived Dayton Tattler that supported the Republican Party and covered the concerns of African Americans. The friend and classmate who operated the printing press was none other than future aviator Orville Wright.

Over the next few years, Dunbar worked as an elevator operator and, briefly, as a clerk to Frederick Douglass in Chicago. In 1893 Dunbar self-published his first collection of poems; he hand-sold every copy, and earned back his investment. Two years later, this time sponsored by white patrons, his second book, Majors and Minors, was published by a regional printer and eventually fell into the hands of William Dean Howells, the influential editor, novelist, and critic. Howells wrote an appreciation in Harper’s Magazine, praising Dunbar as “the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically.” (Many commentators made much of the fact that Dunbar’s ancestry was wholly African rather than multiracial.)

The review made Dunbar suddenly—and unexpectedly—famous. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the young poet wrote Howells:

Now from the depths of my heart I want to thank you. You yourself do not know what you have done for me. I feel much as a poor, insignificant, helpless boy would feel to suddenly find himself knighted. . . .

In the collection that Howells reviewed, the “majors” were the poems written in standard English; the “minors” were dialect pieces, many of them humorous. When Howells revised his essay for the introduction of Dunbar’s third book, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), he made clear which he preferred:

In nothing is his essentially refined and delicate art so well shown as in these [dialect] pieces. . . . Some of [the poems in literary English] I thought very good, and even more than very good, but not distinctively his contribution to the body of American poetry. What I mean is that several people might have written them; but I do not know any one else who could quite have written the dialect pieces.

The result of Howell’s recommendation was popular demand for Dunbar’s trademark dialect poems; he soon found it difficult to publish anything else. Nevertheless, before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three, he managed to publish a dozen volumes of poetry, four collections of short stories, and four novels, and he wrote the lyrics for In Dahomey, a minstrel- and vaudeville-influenced comedy that was the first full-length Broadway musical composed and performed by African Americans.

Below we present three of Dunbar’s poems: the Thanksgiving poem “Signs of the Times,” which a contemporary reviewer described as “an excellent example of Mr. Dunbar’s roguish humor”; “Compensation,” a superlative example, in two short stanzas, of his verse in non-dialect English; and one of his most famous poems, “When Malindy Sings,” a tribute to his mother, Matilda.

If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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An Autumn Holiday

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

Interesting Links

Four poems by Sarah Orne Jewett (Poetry Foundation)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Tom’s Husband,” Sarah Orne Jewett
• “A Winter Walk,” Henry David Thoreau
• “After the Winter,” Kate Chopin

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Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields in their drawing room at 148 Charles Street, Boston. Courtesy of The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project.

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When Jewett first submitted “An Autumn Holiday” to Harper’s Magazine, the story was called “Miss Daniel Gunn.” The editors nixed the original title, which hints (not very subtly) that the story is not what readers might think after skimming its opening pages. The story, as Marjorie Pryse summarizes in a recent essay, “appears, like much of Jewett’s work, to lack form . . . a roundabout effect of the narrator’s ‘tour of exploration and discovery’ and her unexpected visit with Polly Marsh.” The transition from one part of the story to the next is bewildering enough that readers might miss the parallels and themes common to both halves.

In the first section, the narrator ambles through the fields and woods on a gorgeous autumn day, employing pastoral descriptions that will remind readers of the nature writing of Henry David Thoreau or John Muir. Along the way, she describes how she likes to leave the main roads and explore “new fields.” Then the story veers into its second part, a comic tale that (like Jewett’s “Tom’s Husband” a previous Story of the Week selection), contemplates gender roles in society. We visit the home of Miss Polly Marsh, an older and somewhat eccentric neighbor, who (like the narrator) is unmarried. Inside, Miss Marsh and her sister Mrs. Snow, both in the “autumn” of their lives, are working at their spinning wheels. The two women break from spinning yarn to spin a yarn, so to speak—sharing the local gossip and then relating the odd tale of “Cap’n Dan’el Gunn” and how his neighbors came to accept and accommodate his unconventional behavior. At the very end, Mrs. Snow whispers a secret to the young visitor: revealing the decision Miss Marsh made earlier in life that kept her peripheral to society—just as Cap’n Gunn might have been treated had he been “some poor flighty old woman.”

Significantly, this story was written the year Jewett met Annie Fields, with whom Jewett would live in a “Boston marriage” for the rest of her life. Rather than a simple pastoral tale, then, “An Autumn Holiday,” writes Josephine Donovan in A Companion to the American Short Story, is a “powerful rejection of normalization.”

Note: On page 581, there is a mention of “Canterbury New,” a hymn composed by Henry John Gauntlett in the middle of the nineteenth century. (The “old” Canterbury hymn was composed by Orlando Gibbons during the 1600s.)

*   *   *

I had started early in the afternoon for a long walk; it was just the weather for walking, and I went across the fields with a delighted heart. . . . . 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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Running for Governor

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

Other Election Day fare by Mark Twain
“A Presidential Candidate”

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“Who Stole the People’s Money?”—Do Tell. N. Y. Times. / ’Twas Him. Boss Tweed and the Tammany Ring, caricatured by Thomas Nast. Harper’s Weekly, August 18, 1871.

The 1870 New York gubernatorial election pitted the Democratic incumbent, John T. Hoffman, against the Republican, Stewart Lyndon Woodford, a decorated Civil War veteran and former lieutenant governor. Previously the mayor of New York City (the last to become governor of the state), Hoffman was closely connected with Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall political machine and won the election with over 52% of the vote. Two years later, however, Hoffman would be drummed out of office after The New York Times ran a series of exposés on Tweed’s corrupting influence over regional politics and the embezzlement of tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.

What’s not as well known about the 1870 election is Mark Twain’s brief entry into the race for governor—at least in an imaginative piece published shortly after the election. “Running for Governor” appeared as his monthly column for Galaxy magazine and in the local Buffalo Express newspaper, and it was thereafter widely reprinted. (In some versions, the names of the major party candidates were changed to “John T. Smith” and “Blank J. Blank.”) It would not be the only time Twain mocked Governor Hoffman in his writing. The following year he published Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, which included illustrations that had nothing to do with the text: caricatures of various robber barons and politicians (including Hoffman) captioned with lines from the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built.” Two years later Twain had second thoughts about the book as a whole, considering it one of his lesser efforts, and had the plates destroyed.

A surprising consequence of Mark Twain’s column about his fictional candidacy for state governor is how, in recent decades, it perpetuated his fame in mainland China. Literary scholar Guiyou Huang writes: “ ‘Running for Governor’ was translated and filtered down into the high school textbooks throughout the country as a model piece of critical realism that exposes the so-called false democracy in a capitalist country. In other words, all high school graduates [in China] know who Mark Twain is.”

Notes: Page 491 contains several New York City historical references. The Five Points, a Tammany stronghold, was the slum district in the center of the most densely populated part of Manhattan. Kit Burns was the owner of a saloon and boxing ring on Water Street, which occasionally hosted sham “evangelical Christian” meetings run by John Allen, a notorious underworld criminal known as “The Wickedest Man in New York.”

*   *   *

A few months ago I was nominated for Governor of the great State of New York, to run against Stewart L. Woodford and John T. Hoffman, on an independent ticket. I somehow felt that I had one prominent advantage over these gentlemen, and that was, good character. . . . 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 the Zone

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953)
Reprinted in Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1913–1920

Previous Story of the Week selection:
“Tomorrow,” Eugene O’Neill

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Left to right: Eugene Lincoln, Robert Strange, Frederick Roland, Jay Strong, Arthur Hohl, and Rienzi De Cordova in The Washington Square Players production of In the Zone, 1917. Photograph by the White Studio. Museum of the City of New York.

Between 1914 and 1917 Eugene O’Neill wrote four one-act plays featuring several of the same characters, all sailors on a tramp steamer. The plays—Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees—were not originally conceived as a “cycle.” In 1917 two of the plays premiered within two days of each other, performed by different troupes at different New York theaters: In the Zone opened October 31 by The Washington Square Players at The Comedy Theatre; The Long Voyage Home, on November 2 by The Provincetown Players at The Playwrights’ Theatre. Not until 1924, when O’Neill had two Pulitzers under his belt, were the plays staged together as a series (with the author’s approval) under the title S.S. Glencairn. Although In the Zone was the second play to be written and staged, it is chronologically last in the cycle.

Based on O’Neill‘s own experiences aboard the British ship S.S. Ikala, all four plays feature the character of Driscoll, whom literary critic Jeffrey H. Richards describes as “a hard-living, hard-drinking, dominating but good-hearted, superstitious, and ignorant man.” The spotlight of In the Zone is shared by the quiet and sensitive Smitty, whose furtive activities are regarded warily by the rest of the crew. The only one of the Glencairn plays set in wartime, In the Zone debuted just months after the American entry into World War I, when war fervor was at its height. The play proved to be O’Neill’s first real financial success, and a vaudeville company took it on tour the following year. “Paid me good royalties—on which I got married!” he recalled a decade later.

Critics ever since have singled out In the Zone as a tense, even melodramatic, psychological drama with an emphasis on plot that is unique among O’Neill’s early seafaring plays. In fact, those very aspects caused O’Neill (often the severest critic of his own work) to later disparage it. In 1919 he wrote in rebuttal to a reviewer who published an appreciation of the play: “It is too facile in its conventional technique, too full of clever theatrical tricks. . . . Smitty in the stuffy, grease-paint atmosphere of In the Zone is magnified into a hero who attracts our sentimental sympathy.” He especially felt that “the spirit of the sea” is missing: “In the Zone might have happened just as well, if less picturesquely, in a boarding house of munitions workers.” Other letters suggest that he was also embarrassed by the play’s success on the vaudeville circuit. Nevertheless, this one-act play continued to be popular during O’Neill’s lifetime and, today, it is still frequently staged by community theater companies. In the Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, Robert M. Dowling calls it one of O’Neill’s “stronger early works” and notes, “Scholars generally do not share O’Neill’s grim estimation of In the Zone’s artistic merit. . . . Even his most unforgiving critics have been drawn to the play’s ‘smooth and effective’ tempo and technical strengths.”

One bizarre biographical irony is that O’Neill and his friend Harold DePolo were arrested as German spies in Provincetown in spring 1917, when the two little-known newcomers were seen by local residents taking long walks along the beach, occasionally toting a black box (which was almost certainly O’Neill’s typewriter). Yet O’Neill and his friends insisted that he had finished the play, with its eerie parallels, before this real-life incident occurred—further proof that life does imitate art.

SCENE—The seamen's forecastle. On the right above the bunks three or four portholes covered with black cloth can be seen. On the floor near the doorway is a pail with a tin dipper. A lantern in the middle of the floor, turned down very low, throws a dim light around the place. Five men, Scotty, Ivan, Swanson, Smitty and Paul, are in their bunks apparently asleep. It is about ten minutes of twelve on a night in the fall of the year 1915. . . . 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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Free Fall

from The Man Who Rode the Thunder
William H. Rankin (1920–2009)
Reprinted in Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight

Interesting Links
Thunder Drop: Life Inside a Thunderstorm; includes a video documentary about Rankin’s experience (Eccentric Orbits)

10 Spectacular Aircraft Ejections (collection of videos, Urban Ghosts)

Previously Story of the Week selections:
• “The Day I Sprouted Wings,” J. Herman Banning
• “The Flying Fool,” Waverly Root

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Sixty selections, ranging from the era of balloon flight to the Space Age

The illustration for the cover of the 1961 Pyramid paperback edition of The Man Who Rode the Thunder

Most Story of the Week readers probably heard of last week’s [October 2012] daredevil stunt by Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner, who jumped from a capsule in a pressurized suit twenty-four miles above the sea level, plunged to the earth for ten minutes (including more than four minutes in free fall), and broke through the sound barrier with a peak velocity of 834 mph (Mach 1.24).

Baumgartner’s feat reminded us of the extraordinary story of Lieutenant Colonel William H. Rankin. Half a century ago, Rankin was flying solo in a jet fighter when the plane malfunctioned while traveling in excess of 500 miles per hour. He ejected from his plane without a pressure suit about nine miles above sea level—that’s more than three miles higher than the peak of Mt. Everest. Worse, he plummeted straight into “one of the most violent storms ever recorded on the East Coast,” turning what should have been a ten-minute fall into forty horrifying minutes.

Rankin wrote about his experiences as a pilot in a book called The Man Who Rode the Thunder, which has been long out of print and has become fairly difficult to find. This week’s selection is the section describing his fall from the stratosphere.

Rankin died on July 6, 2009, in Oakdale, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh.

Postscript: This selection was, far and away, our most widely read Story of the Week offering to date and elicited appreciative, delighted, and (above all) astonished reactions from readers. Since we posted the story, many readers have written, wondering what happened to Lt. Col. Rankin after his extraordinary nine-mile, forty-minute fall from the stratosphere.

The sequel is surprisingly anticlimactic: After he landed on the ground, Rankin walked until he came to a country road, where he flagged down a car and was driven to the small town of Ahoskie, NC. (Several cars passed by without helping—one can only imagine the sight he presented to drivers!) When he and his rescuer arrived at the town store, an ambulance was called. He spent the next several weeks in the hospital, recovering from various internal injuries and frostbite and receiving visits from journalists. International media coverage included a feature story in Time and a photograph in Life of Rankin smiling cheerfully in his hospital bed. He eventually returned to duty.

His plane crashed harmlessly in a field.

*   *   *

I was not panicky. Mentally, I was fully prepared to eject. By training, by experience, by instinct, I knew exactly what to do and did it rapidly but deliberately. . . . 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 Man Who Came to Dinner With George Kaufman Directing

Morton Eustis (1905–1944)
From The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner

Interesting Links

Laurence Maslon on Kaufman & Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner (Reader’s Almanac)

What George S. Kaufman learned from the Marx Brothers (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selections:
• “Audience Tomorrow: Preview in New Guinea,” Elia Kazan
• “Stage Struck,” Channing Pollock

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Pullman Company advertisement featuring Alexander Woollcott, 1940.

---

Seventy-three years ago this week, on October 16, 1939, one of Broadway’s most successful comedies made its debut. The Man Who Came to Dinner was supposed to have premiered at the Music Box a week earlier, on October 10, but the opening was delayed while George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart hurriedly rewrote the third act, adding a new scene. Although the play—as well as its subsequent film and radio adaptations—continues to delight audiences, modern-day theatergoers may not be aware that various characters in the play are satirical portraits of real-life celebrities, including such household names as Harpo Marx and Noël Coward. As Laurence Maslon explains:

Its main character, Sheridan Whiteside, was transparently based on one of the most dramatic, infuriating, and improbable celebrities of the era between the wars: Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott was a drama critic, raconteur, radio host, essayist, and charter member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, but that barely suggests his influence then on middlebrow culture. He was a tastemaker of popular fiction on a scale that would have made Oprah Winfrey’s encomiums seem like fortune cookie messages. His barbed wit would have sliced Simon Cowell for breakfast. . . .

Famous coast-to-coast by 1938 as the host of a radio show called The Town Crier, Woollcott regaled his audience with an idiosyncratic mix of stories, reviews, and personal predilections. Although he could be quite vicious, Woollcott had a wide sentimental streak and often devoted broadcasts to wrongly convicted murderers, war veterans, seeing-eye dogs—and, of course, Christmas. Eventually, Woollcott fancied himself an actor and demanded that his pals Kaufman and Hart concoct a play for him. It wasn’t difficult to put the melodramatic Woollcott on stage—what to do with his character once he got there was another matter.

Although the idea for a play based on Woollcott’s “character” came from Woollcott himself, he eventually removed himself from the production. Hart and Kaufman were wondering how to pursue the project when Woollcott visited Hart’s home for an overnight stay, treating the members of the household abhorrently and complaining the entire time. Aghast, Hart described the nightmarish guest to Kaufman and wondered aloud how horrible it would have been if the Woollcott had been injured and had to stay there the whole summer.

Thus was born the central premise of what became the final play. The show would prove to be a huge hit, featuring Monty Wooley in the lead role and running on Broadway for 739 performances—“an exceptionally long run in 1939–40,” notes Jared Brown in his biography of Hart.

And what did Woollcott think of Kaufman and Hart’s biting portrait of him as an unbearably cantankerous misanthrope? In short, he loved it. When the play went on its West Coast tour, he even stepped into the lead role, treating audiences to the sight of a celebrity acting as a satirical version of a character based on his own public persona. At the end of one performance, cheered on by repeated curtain calls, Woollcott riffed off one of his character’s signature lines from the play and announced to the audience that he planned to sue the authors for $150,000.

*   *   *

‘All right, Mr. Kaufman?’ the stage manager asks. . . . ‘Yes, any time you’re ready.’ . . . George S. Kaufman has a whispered colloquy with Monty Woolley. He stands centre stage surveying the green living-room-hall in Mesalia, Ohio, which Donald Oenslager has designed for The Man Who Came to Dinner. . . . 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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Hetch Hetchy Valley

John Muir (1838–1914)
From John Muir: Nature Writings

Interesting Links
Hetch Hetchy: Preservation or Public Utility: includes resources for teachers and students (Rich Thomas, In Time & Place)

Hetch Hetchy Valley: a visitor’s guide (PDF, National Park Service)

“Putting Bay Area’s Water Source to a Vote” (The New York Times)

John Muir’s “long moment of ecstasy,” My First Summer in the Sierra (Reader’s Almanac)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Art of Seeing Things,” John Burroughs
• “A Wind-Storm in the Forests,” John Muir

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The Hetch-Hetchy Valley, California, 1870s, oil on canvas by German-American artist Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), currently at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In 1912 John Muir published his collection The Yosemite, which included “Hetch Hetchy Valley,” his essay singing the glories of the “other” Yosemite Valley and an argument against the construction of a dam that would flood the basin in order to provide water for San Francisco. The city had originally requested permission from the federal government to build a dam within the boundaries of Yosemite National Park in 1903 and again in 1905. The initial applications had the support of Gifford Pinchot, who became chief of the newly established United States Forest Service and who asserted that the impact of the dam would be minimal. When Muir first heard that his old friend was in favor of the idea he responded with dismay, “I cannot believe Pinchot, if he really knows the valley, has made any such statements.” The dispute would destroy their friendship, pitting Muir, the preservationist, against Pinchot, the conservationist, for the next decade.

The city’s initial requests were turned down, but the matter received renewed attention when the water supply was disrupted by the devastating 1906 earthquake. City officials again applied to the federal government and this time administration officials, led by Secretary of the Interior James Garfield, were more sympathetic to Pinchot’s lobbying and approved the plan, subject to Congressional approval. Muir, along with the Sierra Club he had founded a decade earlier, began a campaign against the proposal, and he published an early version of the following essay in the Sierra Club Bulletin. The measure stalled in Congress due to both the public outcry and the opposition of the new president, William Howard Taft, who would visit the valley in 1909. Muir, serving as the presidential guide, would argue to Taft that San Francisco could find alternative water supplies outside of the park’s boundaries, and the project was again shelved.

The battle resumed when Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913. The new Secretary of the Interior, Franklin K. Lane, supported the dam, and once again Muir and the Sierra Club rallied their troops to oppose the proposal. Before the year was out, however, a bill granting San Francisco permission to flood Hetch Hetchy Valley passed. The strain of the effort to oppose the dam had taken its toll on Muir (he fell ill several times during this latest campaign), and he died a year later. O'Shaughnessy Dam, named after the project’s chief engineer, was completed in 1923, and the first water reached the city via aqueduct in 1934.

The story of Hetch Hetchy Valley is not quite over. For the last one hundred years, various groups have lobbied to remove the dam, and next month a measure is on the ballot in San Francisco to approve a study of how the valley might be restored and replaced with alternative sources of water and power. [Update: The ballot measure was rejected in November 2012.]

*   *   *

Yosemite is so wonderful that we are apt to regard it as an exceptional creation, the only valley of its kind in the world; but Nature is not so poor as to have only one of anything. Several other yosemites have been discovered in the Sierra that occupy the same relative positions on the Range and were formed by the same forces in the same kind of granite. . . . 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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An Hour

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
From American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation

Interesting Links
Biography of William G. Allen (BlackPast.org)

How Louisa May Alcott revolutionized the “book for girls” with Little Women (Reader's Almanac)

Previously Story of the Week selections:
• “The Doll,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Désirée’s Baby,” Kate Chopin

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Detail of “One hand stirred gruel for sick America, and the other hugged baby Africa,” a drawing of Civil War nurse Tribulation Periwinkle, the alter ego of Louisa May Alcott in Hospital Sketches. Reprinted from an 1880 edition of Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories, which included “An Hour.”

In 1853 William G. Allen, a professor at New York Central College who was one-quarter black, became engaged to Mary King, a white student. While visiting friends in a nearby town, he was attacked by a mob armed “with tar, feathers, poles and an empty barrel spiked with shingle nails.” He escaped, injured but alive, and the couple hastily married and then fled to England. Professor Allen was a friend of Louisa May Alcott’s uncle, and he would send him inscribed copies of two booklets he published that described the ordeal: The American Prejudice Against Color: An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily the Nation Got into An Uproar (1853) and A Personal Narrative (1860). In late 1859 or early 1860 the twenty-seven-year-old Alcott submitted to The Atlantic Monthly “M. L.,” a tale that was almost surely inspired by Allen’s life and the first of three “abolitionist stories” she would publish during the early 1860s.

The magazine rejected the story. She wrote in her journal, “Mr. —— won’t have ‘M. L.’ as it is antislavery, and the dear South must not be offended.” (The unidentified staff member was probably the editor of The Atlantic himself, James Russell Lowell.) Three years later Alcott submitted her second antislavery story, called “My Contraband,” and the new editor, James F. Fields, accepted it (“with much approbation,” Alcott noted in her journal); the magazine published it as “The Brothers.” But when she sent in a third (and final) antislavery story to Fields’s business partner, William Davis Ticknor, for his new magazine Our Young Folks, she again met resistance. “Ticknor accepted a fairy tale I sent him but refused ‘An Hour,’ because it was about slavery I suppose.”

Both of the rejected stories—“M. L.” and “An Hour”—would ultimately find a home at The Commonwealth, a local abolitionist magazine edited by a friend. (The magazine would also publish Alcott’s first “hospital sketches,” based on her arduous duties as a Civil War nurse in Georgetown, where she contracted typhoid fever after only a month.) Yet Alcott’s supposition—that two of the three stories were rejected because of their antislavery views—was probably correct only in a general sense, especially since, during the height of the Civil War in 1863, Northern editors were hardly concerned about the attitudes of “the dear South.” Instead, what all three stories have in common is their sympathetic portrait of interracial couples. While “My Contraband” hints at a white nurse’s attraction to a former slave who works alongside her, the other two stories are not as subtle: “M. L.” describes an interracial romance in straightforward terms and “An Hour” hardly disguises the shared electric passions between the young “master” Gabriel and the defiant slave Milly. Certain elements of “An Hour”—the Gothic melodrama, the stereotypical portrayals, the sentimental homilies—might seem dated and overdone to modern readers, but the story’s themes and characters would have scandalized many nineteenth-century readers while it simultaneously solicited their sympathies.

*   *   *

The clock struck eleven.
“Look again, Gabriel; is there no light coming?”
“Not a ray, mother, and the night seems to darken every instant.”
“Surely, half an hour is time enough to reach the main land and find Dr. Firth.” . . . 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 Shell of Sense

Olivia Howard Dunbar (1873–1953)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links
Five Poems by Ridgely Torrence (Poetry Magazine, November 1939)

Previous Story of the Week selections:
• “The Little Room” (1895), Madeline Yale Wynne
• “Luella Miller” (1902), Mary Wilkins Freeman
• “Golden Baby” (1910), Alice Brown
• “The Eyes” (1910), Edith Wharton
• “The Shadowy Third” (1916), Ellen Glasgow

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In the June 1, 1905, issue of The Dial, the lead essay pondered “The Decay of the Ghost in Fiction.” Its author, Olivia Howard Dunbar, argued that “ever since literature began . . . what we call ‘the supernatural’ has been the staple material of the tellers of tales.” She discussed how ghosts were ubiquitous in English folklore and ballads and how, during the mid-1800s, ghost stories were commonplace in American magazines and especially in Christmas annuals. “But suddenly, and it must surely have seemed mysteriously, the magazine ghost vanished; nor were its eerie footprints traced.” She did note as an exception to this decline the stories of Henry James, particularly “The Turn of the Screw,” but “his work is probably too esoteric to stand as typical.” In sum, she hoped for “the renaissance of the literary ghost.”

Three years earlier, in 1902, Dunbar had quit her job as editor at The New York World; she would spend the rest of her life as a professional writer of stories and articles for leading American magazines. When she wasn’t writing fiction and essays, she was active in the woman suffrage movement, and in 1914 she married Ridgely Torrence, the future poetry editor of The New Republic. He would also become, in 1917, the first American playwright to feature an all-black cast in a non-minstrel production on Broadway: the seminal Three Plays for a Negro Theater. An ebullient James Weldon Johnson hailed Torrence’s staging of these plays at the Garden Theater at Madison Square Garden as “the beginning of a new era.” (Unfortunately, the production ended after only ten performances when America declared war on Germany.)

Olivia Dunbar’s hope for a revitalization of supernatural fiction was realized during the decades after her article appeared, as a number of writers—many of them women—published stories featuring phantoms of various kinds. She herself contributed to that renaissance, writing several psychological ghost stories that also display her interest in marriage roles and women’s lives. Appearing three years after her essay, “The Shell of Sense” is unique in that the narrative is from the point of view of the ghost, a dead woman who observes her surviving husband with both jealousy and concern. Jeffrey Weinstock, an expert on gothic fiction, notes in his study of supernatural tales that Dunbar’s story resembles “A Dead Vashti,” an 1877 tale by Louise Stockton; in both stories, the dead woman initially “feels stunned and betrayed by the course of events she observes.” But in Dunbar’s story the ghost’s realization that her marriage was not what it seemed results in greater acceptance and understanding of both her own life and her husband’s.

*   *   *

It was intolerably unchanged, the dim, dark-toned room. In an agony of recognition my glance ran from one to another of the comfortable, familiar things that my earthly life had been passed among. . . . 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 Woman’s Recollections of Antietam

Mary Bedinger Mitchell (1850–1896)
From The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Interesting Links
Women at War (The New York Times)

Previous Story of the Week selections on the Civil War
• “Our Beleaguered City,” Judith W. McGuire
• ““Attack on Fort Donelson,” Lew Wallace

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A Crucial Delay, one of five paintings by Union infantry captain James Hope, completed during the years following the war and based on sketches he made while sidelined by illness at Antietam. Severely damaged by floods in the 1930s, the twelve-foot-wide panoramas were recently restored by the National Parks Service. You can see all five paintings at the NPS site.

September 17, 2012, marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, the first major conflict of the Civil War on Union soil and the bloodiest single day in American history, with more than 3,600 dead and 17,000 wounded. Days before the conflict, the residents of Shepherdstown, Virginia, waited nervously as starving, straggling soldiers began showing up, looking for food and a moment’s rest. A mere ten miles away, Confederate forces under Stonewall Jackson had just captured Harpers Ferry on Monday, September 15, 1862. Closer to home, across the Potomac, General Robert E. Lee was reassembling his army outside Sharpsburg, Maryland, alongside Antietam Creek, while General George B. McClellan prepared Union forces to drive the Confederates back to Virginia.

But to Mary Bedinger, who had just turned twelve the previous month, the precise maneuvers of the armies amassing across the river were barely more than hearsay. Throughout the week, the area was overwhelmed with thousands of Confederate casualties. The dead and the wounded continued to pour into the town until Saturday, September 20, when Confederate forces repulsed an incursion by Union soldiers at the Battle of Shepherdstown.

Twenty-five years later, Mary was married to a former Union officer, John Mitchell, and living in Flushing, New York. She learned that General McClellan was preparing an account of the Battle of Antietam for Century magazine. Historian Sarah E. Gardner recounts in Blood and Irony (a book on Civil War narratives by women) that Mrs. Mitchell wrote to the editors and offered her “personal experiences” of the battle, which “may not be without interest to your readers.” The magazine accepted her submission, paying her a respectable sixty dollars, and it appeared under the pseudonym Maria Blunt—the name she also used to publish works of short fiction in various magazines.

One of the tensest moments of Mitchell’s harrowing narrative (on pages 520–21) describes a nurse “who had no thought of leaving her post” but wanted to get her sister “out of harm’s way.” That “nurse” was, in fact, twelve-year-old Mary herself and it was her own eight-year-old sister, Caroline, that she tried to trick into going home and staying there. Readers will be interested to know that the brave Caroline not only survived the war but eventually became a prominent author herself, publishing under the name Danske Dandridge several volumes of poetry and history and more than two hundred magazine articles on gardening.

Notes: “Sheridan’s ride” (page 512) refers to a later event in the war. On October 19, 1864, Confederate troops surrounded Union forces and drove them from their positions. Major General Philip Sheridan, returning from Washington, heard of the attack and rode to the front in time to rally his troops and direct a counterattack—a feat immortalized in a poem by Thomas Buchanan Read.

*   *   *

September, 1862, was in the skies of the almanac, but August still reigned in ours; it was hot and dusty. The railroads in the Shenandoah Valley had been torn up, the bridges had been destroyed, communication had been made difficult, and Shepherdstown, cornered by the bend of the Potomac, lay as if forgotten in the bottom of somebody’s pocket. . . . 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.