“Like a Sea of Blood”

Anonymous (A Kentucky Soldier)
From The War of 1812: Writings from America’s War of Independence

Interesting Links
“How America’s ‘forgotten’ war shaped our young nation” (Donald Hickey, Reader’s Almanac)

“America’s ‘forgotten war’ ended on Christmas Eve 1814, and few people knew” (Constitution Daily, National Constitution Center)

Previous Story of the Week selections about the War of 1812
“Dear sister, I must leave this house” (August 1814), Dolley Madison
“Storming the Capital” (August 1814), George R. Gleig
“Defence of Fort M‘Henry” (September 1814), Francis Scott Key

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The War of 1812: Writings from America’s Second War of Independence
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Two hundred years ago, on Christmas Eve 1814, British and American diplomats signed the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812. Yet the war continued unabated because the news took six weeks to cross the Atlantic. The treaty arrived in New York on February 11, the Senate ratified it unanimously a week later, and fighting and skirmishes flared across the United States until the end of February, as word of the truce and treaty gradually reached combatants.

And so the war was officially over when one of its bloodiest battles took place. The previous summer, the British had begun planning an invasion of the Gulf Coast, and by mid-September Andrew Jackson knew something was afoot—but he wasn't sure where it would happen. When he and his soldiers dislodged enemy forces from Pensacola in early November, he learned from a merchant who had just arrived from Jamaica that New Orleans was the target. Jackson rushed to the city, reaching it on December 1, and mobilized its defenses.

Three weeks later, after delays navigating heavy barges in the shallow waters of Lake Borgne, British forces completed their landing on December 23 and established their headquarters eight miles below New Orleans on the Mississippi. A series of confrontations occurred during the next two weeks. The very night the British landed, Jackson led eighteen hundred men in a surprise attack that ended with a couple of hundred casualties on each side. Over the next two days additional British forces arrived, including Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, who assumed command and who launched an abortive attack on December 28. Another clash took place on New Year’s Day, but ended when the British ran out of ammunition.

The British forces vastly outnumbered the Americans, yet Pakenham did not seek to press his advantage, preferring instead to wait on artillery laboriously brought up from Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane’s ships. The delay allowed Jackson to establish formidable lines of defense below the city, and the inevitable cataclysm, which finally took place on January 8, ultimately cost Pakenham his life and resulted in a devastating loss to the British army. Our Story of the Week selection, written by one of Jackson’s Kentucky riflemen, is a spellbinding and sometimes giddy account of this last major battle of the War of 1812.

In his preface to The Library of America’s collection, The War of 1812, Donald R. Hickey summarizes the significance of the American victory:

Jackson emerged from the war as an outsized hero, and his commitment to democracy and slavery as well as to territorial expansion and Indian removal epitomized the jarring forces that would shape the nation in the postwar era.

The victory at New Orleans was no less important because it transformed how the war was remembered. Americans boasted how they had defeated “Wellington’s invincibles” and “the conquerors of the conquerors of Europe.” They forgot the causes of the war and lost sight of how close the nation had come to military defeat and financial collapse. They remembered instead that they had beaten back an attempt to re-colonize the nation, that they had decisively defeated the conqueror of Napoleon and the Ruler of the Waves.

Note: One of the American soldiers in this account promises vengeance for “River Raisin.” In January 1813 American militia forces from Kentucky, led by Brigadier General James Winchester, attempted to protect settlers on the River Raisin in Michigan Territory but were defeated at the Battle of Frenchtown. Winchester surrendered his entire force. The British commander, unprepared to deal with so many prisoners, left the wounded under the protection of a small retinue. The next day Indians killed approximately thirty Americans; the slaughter became known as the River Raisin Massacre and served as a rallying cry for Kentucky soldiers for the remainder of the war.

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Col. Smiley, from Bardstown, was the first one who gave us orders to fire from our part of the line; and then, I reckon, there was a pretty considerable noise. . . . 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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Christmas Eve

Washington Irving (1783–1859)
From Washington Irving: History, Tales and Sketches

Interesting Links
“How Christmas Became Merry” (Andrew Burstein, The New York Times)

“Santa Claus Was Made by Washington Irving” (Patrick Browne, Historical Digression)

Previous Story of the Week selections for Christmas
• “The Christmas Dinner,” Washington Irving
• “The Lily-White Boys,” William Maxwell
• “A Christmas Story,” Katherine Anne Porter

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Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. • Salmagundi • A History of New York • The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • 1,144 pages
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“The company, which was assembled in a large
old-fashioned hall,” by British artist R. Caldecott
(1846–1886), from an illustrated edition of Old
Christmas: from the Sketch Book of
Washington Irving (London, 1875).

Washington Irving has been widely (and not unreasonably) credited with importing Christmas to the United States. In a recent blog post, museum director Patrick Browne finds the source of the American Santa Claus in Irving’s satirical History of New York (1809): “By inventing a false tradition of Dutch settlers venerating St. Nicholas, Irving inadvertently gave rise to a very real tradition of Americans venerating St. Nick.” In addition, biographer Andrew Burstein remarks that Irving “had discovered disappearing holiday traditions among the English, and he thought they were too beautiful to lose,” and so he included several Christmas stories alongside such tales as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–20). “Within a decade,” Burstein concludes, “New Yorkers were greeting each other with Christmas wishes, and stores on Broadway extended their hours to accommodate shoppers.”

In 1875, sixteen years after Irving’s death, all four Christmas stories (with their prefatory essay) were published as a separate volume, Old Christmas, and the collection is still known to readers through the dozens of editions with that title—many illustrated by such distinguished artists as Randolph Caldecott, Cecil Aldin, George Hand Wright, and Peter Burchard. In the story sequence, the narrator Geoffrey Crayon has traveled from New York to England and meets Frank Bracebridge, who extends an invitation to enjoy an old-fashioned Christmas hosted by his father, “the Squire” of Bracebridge Hall. (One of Irving’s other holiday stories, “The Christmas Dinner,” was featured several years ago as a Story of the Week selection.)

A number of the “old-fashioned” traditions mentioned in “Christmas Eve” have survived until today: Christmas caroling from house to house, hanging mistletoe from the rafters, and burning a Yule log (or clog). Yet they were unfamiliar to Americans in 1820, so Irving had to explain them in the text or in footnotes. Irving’s story lists a number of games that have been forgotten or transformed—some of which seem potentially painful. “Hoodman blind” is now familiar to us as blind man’s bluff (or buff). In “shoe the wild mare” each participant sat on a suspended plank and tried to hammer its underside a given number of times without falling off. The victim in “hot cockles” was struck while blindfolded and then had to guess who did it. In “steal the white loaf,” a chunk of bread or cake was placed on the table and a designated person sat facing the table while others tried to steal the loaf without being caught or identified. “Bob apple” differs from the modern version: instead of floating in a tub, the apples were hung by strings from the ceiling. And in “snap dragon” revelers grabbed raisins from a plate of blazing brandy and extinguished the burning fruit in their mouths.

Irving also mentions a proscription that might strike some readers as peculiar: he is delighted that “minced pie” is available at the feast, “perfectly orthodox” so that he “need not be ashamed of my predilection.” Because mince pie (or “Christmas pie”) was long considered a Catholic tradition, many conservative Protestants considered it anathema; it was actually banned in 1657 during the English Civil War by Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Council and it was still frowned on by some British citizens when Irving published his book. Within a few years such reservations were set aside by virtually everyone on both sides of the Atlantic, and mince pie became a popular addition to the Christmas meal.

Notes: The epigraph is from William Cartwright’s comedy The Ordinary (c. 1635). Also on the opening page, the Squire is said to prefer The Compleat Gentleman (1622) by Henry Peacham to the more recent Letters to His Son (1774) by Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield. Both books concern manners, education, and (particularly the latter) keeping up appearances. The quote on page 926 about mongrels is from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield; the lines following, about little dogs, are from King Lear. The footnote on page 929 contains a stanza from “Ceremonies for Christmas” (1648) by Robert Herrick, whose “The Night Piece, to Julia” is included in full a few pages later. On the last page, the narrator falls asleep to the sound of waits, or Christmas carolers accompanied by musicians.

*   *   *

It was a brilliant moonlight night, but extremely cold: our chaise whirled rapidly over the frozen ground; the post boy cracked his whip incessantly, and a part of the time his horses were upon a gallop. “He knows where he is going,” said my companion, laughing, “and is eager to arrive in time for some of the merriment and good cheer of the servants’ hall.” . . . If you don't see the full selection 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.

Union Looters

Mary S. Mallard (1835–1889)
From The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Interesting Links
“150 Years Later, Wrestling with a Revised View of Sherman’s March” (Alan Blinder, The New York Times)

“General Sherman's Surprise Christmas Present for President Lincoln” (Rebecca Onion, Slate)

Previous Story of the Week selections for Civil War 150
• “Our Visit to Richmond” (July 1864), James R. Gilmore
• “The Armies of the Wilderness” (May 1864), Herman Melville
• “Meeting ‘Father Abraham’” (February 1864), Lois Bryan Adams

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Available as a boxed set
The Civil War Told by Those Who Lived It
All four volumes • 3,624 pages

“Sherman’s ‘Bummers’ foraging in South Carolina.” Originally published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, early 1865, and reprinted in Famous Leaders and Battle Scenes of the Civil War (1896). Image courtesy of ClipArt ETC.

This coming week (December 15–21) marks the 150th anniversary of the culmination of General William Sherman’s “March to the Sea.” On November 2, 1864, after Sherman captured Atlanta, he received Grant’s approval to proceed to the port city of Savannah, 250 miles to the east. Sherman’s army burned much of Atlanta and began the trek on November 15 with 62,000 troops, feebly opposed by no more than 13,000 Confederates, many of them state militia.

As Union forces worked their way across Georgia, few people outside the region knew much about their progress. President Lincoln told a crowd on December 6: “We all know where he went in at, but I can’t tell where he will come out at.” Sherman reached the outer defenses of Savannah on December 10 and captured Fort McAllister south of the city three days later. Confederate troops evacuated Savannah on December 20, and Union forces occupied the city the next day.

In the wake of Sherman’s army were groups of foragers and looters who became known as “bummers.” A series of engravings made after the war includes this description of the marauders:

All Sherman’s troops were not bummers, though the name has been made mistakenly to cover all. The “Bummers” were raiders on their own account, really deserters from their own proper ranks, made up of contributions by nearly every corps, division and brigade, who went off on independent foraging and plundering expeditions lasting from a day or two to several weeks. . . . Their conduct was irregular and punishable; but they were not molested by the officers because of their great usefulness.

One Georgia resident, Mary S. Mallard, left an eyewitness account of the bummers in her journal, which often reads like a page-turning thriller. At the time, Mallard was staying with her mother at the Montevideo plantation and her account conveys the terror, frustration, and anger of civilians who endured waves of intrusions by looting troops. While it is true that African Americans in the area suffered greatly at the hands of the bummers, Mallard’s assertion that none of the household slaves wanted to leave should be set against her husband’s petition to the Confederate commander at Savannah two years earlier, complaining that hundreds of slaves had already fled the county for the Union-held barrier islands or elsewhere and should be executed “for furnishing the enemy with aid and comfort and for acting as spies and traitors.”

Mallard’s father, who had died the previous year, was Rev. Charles C. Jones, a Presbyterian clergyman and the owner of three plantations, including Montevideo. He was also well known for his writings on religion, including an influential volume titled The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (1842), which posited the theological correctness of the institution of slavery, advocated the teaching of a Christian catechism to slaves, and warned against separate congregations for black and white worshipers. “The moral and religious improvement of two millions eight hundred thousand persons, must be identified with our individual peace and happiness, and with our national prosperity and honor,” he concluded. The family’s journals, letters, and other papers were published in 1972 as The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, from which this week’s selection is reprinted.

Notes: On page 524, Mallard mentions her brother Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Jones (1831–1893), a Confederate artillery officer, and her niece Mary Ruth. Colonel Jones had been the mayor of Savannah at the beginning of the war. The Liberty Independent Troop (p. 526) was a mounted militia organized in Liberty County, Georgia, in 1778.

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Thursday, December 15th. About ten o’clock Mother walked out upon the lawn, leaving me in the dining room. In a few moments Elsie came running in to say the Yankees were coming. . . . 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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Passages in the Life of a Slave Woman

Annie Parker (fl. 1852–1853)
From American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation

Interesting Links
“Anne P. Adams, 'An Orphan Girl of New England': The Search for Annie Parker” (Jeffery A. Duvall, Indiana University)

“A Partnership in the Abolition Movement” (Erwin Palmer, University of Rochester Library Bulletin)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Lover,” Harriet Ann Jacobs
• “Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln,” Frederick Douglass
• “Madison Washington,” William Wells Brown

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Autobiography, fiction, children’s literature, poetry, oratory, & song • 970 pages
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After the Sale: Slaves Going South (1853), oil on canvas by English painter Eyre Crowe (1824–1910). Courtesy of Chicago History Museum.

After Frederick Douglass established the weekly paper North Star in 1847, he struggled to keep it afloat. The business was saved when Julia Griffiths, whom he had met in England several years earlier, arrived in Rochester in 1849 to help manage the funds for the publication. Within two years the number of subscribers had doubled to 4,000 and Douglass was able to pay off his debts, including a mortgage, and separate his personal finances from those of the business. That year he also changed the name of the periodical to Frederick Douglass’ Paper. There was no other person to whom he was more “more indebted for financial assistance than to Mrs. Julia Griffiths,” he acknowledged in his Life and Times.* “She came to my relief when my paper had nearly absorbed all my means.”

Yet the close relationship between the publisher, who was married, and his business manager, who was not, was cause for gossip. Douglass angrily wrote an ally, “When the city, which you allege to be full of scandalous reports implicating Miss Griffiths and me, shall put those ‘REPORTS’ into a definite shape and present a responsible person to back them it will be time enough for me to attempt to refute them.” As Douglass’s political views increasingly diverged from those of former mentor William Lloyd Garrison, the latter published an attack filled with innuendos and condemned Griffith’s “pernicious influence upon him.” (Garrison later regretted “having implied anything immoral.”)

As William S. McFeely writes in his authoritative biography of Douglass, “there can be little question that the breaching of racial lines, rather than the breaching of conventional marital ones, was what caused the decibel range among antislavery people to reach the level of a screech. . . . Simply the sight of a black man escorting white women on the street was enough to raise hackles.” In one instance in New York, when Douglass was seen walking with Griffiths and her sister Eliza, he was attacked by a gang of white men and escaped serious injury only when a police officer came to his rescue.

Undaunted—and perhaps even emboldened—by the gossipmongers and critics, Griffiths stayed on for more than six years as Douglass’s assistant and proved to be a mainstay of Rochester social circles. She became one of six cofounders and the secretary of the influential Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. To help raise funds for the organization, she came up with the idea for a gift annual, Autographs of Freedom, which collected stories, poems, and essays by antislavery writers. (Each piece was followed a facsimile of the author’s signature—thus the title.) Two volumes were published before Griffiths returned to England, and the books included original works by such dignitaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Theodore Parker, William Wells Brown, Catherine M. Sedgwick, William H. Seward, and Horace Greeley. Douglass himself contributed The Heroic Slave—a novella about slave revolt leader Madison Washington and the only work of fiction Douglass ever published.

Also included in Autographs were two pieces—a story and a poem—by Annie Parker, about whom little else is known. [Update: In a paper published in 2020, Jeffery A. Duvall, an associate editor of The Frederick Douglass Papers, revealed that Parker’s real name was Anne P. Adams, a schoolteacher born circa 1821 and living in New York.] The poem, “Story Telling,” was a reprint from Douglass’s weekly and described a white mother telling her daughter a bedtime story about a “Southern maiden, with a skin of sable hue” who returned to an empty hut one evening and discovered that her five-year-old child had been sold. When she has finished her tale, the white woman looks at her own daughter, also five years old, and says she could “guess the anguish of that lone slave-woman’s heart.” Here we present “Passages in the Life of a Slave Woman,” Parker’s only known short story, which was written expressly for Autographs of Freedom.

* Griffiths was actually still single at the time; she would marry Henry Crofts in England in 1859.

Note: Readers might be confused by the slightly unorthodox use of quotation marks in the first paragraph. The story opens in media res with a sentence of dialogue spoken by Aunt Phillis and then employs a single open quotation mark (“She was never a favorite . . . ) to indicate that the remainder of the story is composed entirely of the rest of her narrative.

*   *   *

“The slaves at Oak Grove did not mourn for poor Elsie when she died,” said aunt Phillis, continuing her narrative. . . . If you don't see the full selection 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.

The Mourners

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986)
From Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1940s & 50s

Interesting Links
“Bernard Malamud at 100: The Wrong Writer for Our Age” (Boris Fishman, Jewish Book Council)

Interview (1974): “Bernard Malamud, The Art of Fiction” (Daniel Stern, The Paris Review)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Bernard Malamud
• “The First Seven Years”
• “Idiots First”

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Bernard Malamud:
Novels and Stories of the 1940s & 50s
The Natural | The Assistant | 25 stories
List price: $40.00
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Interior of a tenement apartment, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, May 26, 1939. Image courtesy of the New York City Housing Colloection / LaGuardia and Wagner Archives.

In an essay written four decades after the event, Alfred Kazin recalls when Bernard Malamud won the 1958 National Book Award for his story collection The Magic Barrel: “Not for the first time I was seeing a Malamud story unfold.” Philip Davis describes the evening in his biography:

Malamud refused to pose for newspaper and television cameras vulgarly holding up a copy of his book; forgot his winner’s $1,000 cheque and left it on the podium; and delayed by a reporter in getting to the dinner in his honour, was told by a waiter, looking him up and down, that the table was full and there was no place for him.

Yet, in spite of the evening’s inauspicious moments, Malamud was modestly jubilant. Since the award’s founding a decade earlier, it had only been bestowed on a story collection once before, to William Faulkner. In his acceptance speech, Malamud recognized the rarity of the honor, saying that “a small miracle has come to pass. . . . The short story, as you know, is strong and accomplished in American fiction, and I hope that some of its expert practitioners, especially those who come rarely if ever to the novel, will be recognized by you in the future.”

In an interview two years before he died, Malamud specifically acknowledged Faulkner, along with Henry James, as an American author who had influenced his story-writing “technique.” “Two points are essential,” he argued “First, you have to be a good writer; second, you are influenced by the literature of the past and the present.” Various commentators have noted other antecedents. Davis writes that The Magic Barrel “was like a Jewish Brooklyn version of Joyce’s Dubliners”; another scholar calls “The Mourners,” our current Story of the Week selection, “a twentieth-century Jewish version of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’”

In his oft-quoted Paris Review interview, however, Malamud cautioned against reading too much into the ethnicity of his characters:

I’m an American, I’m a Jew, and I write for all men. A novelist has to, or he’s built himself a cage. I write about Jews, when I write about Jews, because they set my imagination going. . . . Sometimes I make characters Jewish because I think I will understand them better as people, not because I am out to prove anything. . . . [T]he point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience.

Agreeing with this self-assessment, Mark Schechner, in The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story, writes: “Malamud was a moralist and an insistent one, though the law in which he bound his characters has little in it of specifically Jewish content. It is the law of simple charity and compassion.” Or, as Malamud himself said, “The notions of hope, of redemption are essential to my work.”

Audio excerpt: Bernard Malamud reads “The Mourners.” This three-minute excerpt from the story begins in the middle of page 540 (“Arriving at the top floor. . .”) and ends at the very top of page 542 (“dispossessed goods.”).

This free excerpt is provided by Calliope Audio Readings, which offers recordings of Malamud, Nelson Algren, James Baldwin, James Jones, Philip Roth, William Styron, and John Updike reading from their own works.

*   *   *

Kessler, formerly an egg candler, lived alone on social security. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Eating American

Sheila Hibben (1888–1964)
From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

Interesting Links
“Sheila Hibben” (Jon Michaud, The New Yorker)

“The First Kitchen: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Austerity Drive” (Laura Shapiro, The New Yorker)

“Cecile (Sheila) Craik Hibben” (Find a Grave)

Previous Story of the Week selection
“Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban Seasonings,” Ana Menéndez

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First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (right), with Mrs. Hugh Easley of St. Louis and her 3-year-old daughter, eat a five-cent subsidized “relief” meal at the Daughters of the American Depression conference, Washington, DC, May 14, 1950. Harris & Ewing Photographers. Library of Congress.

In the waning days of the Great Depression, LIFE magazine commissioned a lengthy profile of Eleanor Roosevelt, which appeared in its February 5, 1940, issue. The article recounted when, during her first year in the White House, the First Lady brought Sheila Hibben to Washington to share recipes for classic American regional specialties with the staff. Hibben, who became a writer out of necessity after the death of her husband in 1928, had just published The National Cookbook, a best seller in 1932, and would soon become The New Yorker’s first food critic. During Hibben’s tenure at the White House there was a bit of a kerfuffle when Major, the Roosevelts’ German Shepherd, bit her on the ankle. Upon hearing of the attack, the First Lady sternly addressed the maid. “Mamie, that settles it. From now on we will have iodine kept in this room.”

The incident with the dog proved to be an omen: Hibben would face an even more intractable adversary in the First Lady herself, whose primary concern was to promote an aura of practical austerity. According to the LIFE reporter, Hibben failed to convince Mrs. Roosevelt, “whose one idea seemed to be to expound the recipes at her press conferences, that the dishes were meant to be eaten rather than printed.” Laura Shapiro, in a 2010 New Yorker article, adds, “Hibben had a culinary sensibility that was half a century ahead of its time”: she advocated locally grown ingredients, convenience cooking, and well-prepared yet simple recipes for savory dishes. “To Eleanor, the disadvantages of this approach were clear,” Shapiro continues. “Such a project didn’t carry any of the larger messages about agriculture, the food industry, proper diet, and sensible parenting.” So Hibben and the First Lady parted ways—and for the next twelve years White House visitors, and the President himself, endured the regime of “dreary cuisine” that became an unfortunate part of the Roosevelt legend.

Hibben was far ahead of her time in another way. In 1937 Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was greeted by mostly negative notices and poor sales. The novel wouldn’t become a commercial and critical success for another half century, but the month it appeared Hibben wrote for The New York Herald Tribune one of the few unreservedly favorable reviews, in part because the novel appealed to her own interest in American regional and ethnic diversity:

Here is an author who writes with her head as well as with her heart, and at a time when there seems to be some principle of physics set dead against the appearance of novelists who give out a cheerful warmth and at the same time write with intelligence. . . . There are homely, unforgettable phrases of colored people . . . ; there is a gigantic and magnificent picture of a hurricane in the Everglades country of Florida; and there is a flashing, gleaming riot of black people, with a limitless exuberance of humor, and a wild, strange sadness. . . . Mostly, though, there is life—a swarming, passionate life.

This Story of the Week selection showcases Hibben’s love of “back-to-the-country cooking,” as well as the humor and liveliness readers will find in all her writing. As a bonus, the last page features her recipe from The National Cookbook for “Cape Cod Turkey”—which, our readers will quickly learn, doesn’t contain a smidgen of turkey.

Notes: The opening lines of the selection refer to Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, who together began a movement of literary criticism in the 1890s known as the New Humanism.

*   *   *

Regional cooking has struck New York. And with such a bang that soon nobody will be left to say, when the subject is brought up: “You mean regional planning?” . . . 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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You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings

Philip Roth (1933–2018)
From Philip Roth: Novels & Stories 1959–1962

Interesting Links

“Philip Roth Goes Home Again” (Scott Raab, Esquire)

“Separating Fact from Fiction in Philip Roth’s Latest Novel” (Robert Wiener, New Jersey Jewish News)

“Philip Roth’s Eightieth-Birthday Celebration” (David Remnick, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week Selection
• “The First Seven Years,” Bernard Malamud

Buy the book
Philip Roth: Novels & Stories 1959–1962
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories | Letting Go | 913 pages
List price: $35.00
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Philip Roth, with a photo of Franz Kafka in the background. Bob Peterson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

Sixty years ago Chicago Review, a small but prestigious literary quarterly published by the University of Chicago, accepted a story by a twenty-one-year-old graduate student who had just begun attending the school on a scholarship. “The Day It Snowed” was Philip Roth’s first published work of fiction—if one doesn’t count the five stories he wrote for the literary magazine he cofounded while an undergraduate at Bucknell College. The following year his second story (“The Contest for Aaron Gold”) appeared in Epoch, a literary review published by Cornell University—and that story was selected for inclusion in the 1956 edition of Best American Short Stories.

Then, in 1957, Roth’s literary career took a dramatic turn when he sent his next story, unsolicited, to Commentary magazine, and Norman Podhoretz, still a relatively new assistant editor, championed its publication. Years later Podhoretz recalled:

In reading “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” when I had fished it out of the slush pile, I, too, was amazed by how extraordinarily accomplished this young writer already was. . . . [In the stories included in his first book] Roth demonstrated that no one, not even Bellow himself, had so perfectly pitched an ear for the speech of the first two generations of Jews who had come to America from Eastern Europe, or so keen an eye for the details of the life they lived, or so alert a perception of the quirks and contours of their psychological makeup.

“You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” was Roth’s first story in a national magazine. Additional stories, as well as essays and reviews, soon appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Esquire, and The New Yorker. In 1959 Roth gathered six of his early works of short fiction (including “You Can’t Tell a Man . . .”) in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, the first of twenty-nine volumes of fiction—and his only story collection. The book received the first of Roth’s two National Book Awards.

During a career spanning more than fifty years, Roth returned again and again to the unnamed Newark school that provides the setting for “You Can’t Tell a Man”—right up to his final novel, Nemesis, which describes a “fictionalized but plausible” polio outbreak at Weequahic High in 1944. And, perhaps most famously, his alma mater serves as the backdrop of Portnoy’s Complaint, which includes the school’s unofficial chant:

Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam
We’re the boys who eat no ham
We play football, we play soccer—
And we keep matzohs in our locker!
Aye, aye, aye, Weequahic High!

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Notes: In 1950–51 the Kefauver Committee (mentioned on page 185) was headed by Estes Kefauver, Democratic senator from Tennessee, to investigate the infiltration of organized crime into interstate commerce. The Ancient referred to on the same page is Heraclitus (c. 540 – c. 480 BCE), who wrote, “A man’s character is his fate.”

This Story of the Week selection was suggested by Greg Martinez, of Gainesville, Florida.

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It was in a freshman high school class called “Occupations” that, fifteen years ago, I first met the ex-con, Alberto Pelagutti. . . . 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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Friday Night Tykes

Bryan Curtis (b. 1977)
From Football: Great Writing about the National Sport

Interesting Links

“The Brutal Beauty of Our National Game: Talking with John Schulian” (Alex Belth, Deadspin)

“Injury Lists Grow Longer, and High School Seasons Are Cut Short” (John Branch & Billy Witz, The New York Times)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Whistle-Stop School with Big-Time Talent,” Jerry Izenberg
• “The Strongest Lady in the World,” Red Smith

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Paperback | 484 pages
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Photograph of the Allen Hawks, posted September 22, 2012, on the team’s Facebook page.

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For many youngsters—and their parents—Friday nights in the fall are dominated by high school football. Yet the national sport is under pressure from bad publicity due to serious injuries, media coverage of long-term health issues such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and declining student enrollment. According to a recent article in The New York Times, tightened injury protocols at schools have sidelined more and more players in the past few years, and “high school football games and seasons have been canceled over concerns about dwindling numbers of healthy players.” Minnesota high school coach Justin Bakkethun acknowledged to the Times reporter, “With so many concussion cases, people are more concerned. I’ve talked to other coaches who have lost some kids from the concussions scares.”

Nevertheless, football remains the American high school sport with the highest number of participants, with well over a million players. In the city of Allen (as in the rest of Texas) devotion to football shows no sign of flagging. Bryan Curtis’s highly praised account, originally published in Texas Monthly, focuses on the city’s youth league, which hosts flag football programs for children as young as four years old until they complete the second grade, when they move up to tackle football teams for third- through sixth-graders. The selection, which was included in the recently published anthology Football: Great Writing about the National Sport, is preceded here by John Schulian’s brief biographical note about Curtis.

“Friday Night Tykes” contains a section describing the city’s new controversial $60 million football stadium, built for its high school team and inaugurated in August 2012. Even before Curtis’s essay was published, “countless cracks, some as wide as three-quarters of an inch,” began appearing in the concrete of the stadium’s elevated concourse, and the condition worsened until the structure was declared unsafe for use and closed for restorative work in February 2014. A subsequent engineering appraisal uncovered flaws affecting “the concourse framing, retaining walls, press box support columns and structure, single-story structures, the main scoreboard and the overall durability of the stadium.” The structure reopened in late May 2015.

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Preteen football players are usually described by other preteen football players with one of three words: “nice,” “funny,” or, the highest possible compliment, “awesome.” Celdon Manning, a running back with the Allen Hawks, is the rare athlete who makes his teammates reach for the Scholastic Children’s Thesaurus. . . . 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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The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
From Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales

Interesting Links

“Charles Dickens Bicentennial, and His Link to Poe” (Raymond M. Lane, The Washington Post)

“Take a Trip Through Edgar Allan Poe’s America” (Natasha Geiling, Smithsonian)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Poe
• “The Cask of Amontillado”
• “The Domain of Arnheim”
• “Hop-Frog”

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Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales
1,408 pages
List price: $45.00
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“Mentally ill patients in the garden of an asylum” (c. 1829–34). Engraving by K. H. Merz, based on the painting Irrenhaus [Madhouse] by German artist Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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This past week Stonehearst Asylum, a feature film directed by Brad Anderson and starring Kate Beckinsale, Michael Caine, and Ben Kingsley, premiered in theaters and on premium cable services. The movie is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” which had already been adapted for the screen several times, most notably as the 1973 Mexican film The Mansion of Madness and the 2005 Czech film Lunacy, and had even been the inspiration, in 1976, for the debut single—and first Top 40 hit—by the recording act The Alan Parson Project. The latest adaptation is tame compared to other recent American thrillers; in the words of one reviewer, “Kingsley and Caine compete to give the hammiest performance.” Moviegoers unfamiliar with the original, however, wouldn’t know that Poe’s story is not one of his Gothic tales of horror but is instead a rather offbeat, if dark, comedy describing one of the wackiest dinner parties in all of American literature.

Like the latest movie adaptation, Poe’s story is set in a mental hospital turned upside down. A number of Poe experts have argued that the asylum imagined by Poe is American democracy gone mad (several of the inhabitants seem to share characteristics of certain nineteenth-century politicians), or that the story is—in the words Italian writer Alessandro Portelli—“a satire of the revolutionary utopia of popular self-government.” Other scholars have contended that the story, with its references to the South and its tuneless orchestra playing “Yankee Doodle,” satirically depicts a slave rebellion and reflects Poe’s hostility to Northern abolitionist rhetoric.

Still other critics have asserted that Poe might have been inspired by Charles Dickens. The two writers met in Philadelphia in 1842 and shared correspondence about literary concerns. That same year Dickens visited the newly opened Boston Lunatic Asylum, where the resident physician announced the facility’s guiding principle: “Evince a desire to show some confidence, and repose some trust, even in mad people.” Soon thereafter, Dickens published the travelogue American Notes for General Circulation and included comments about the “conciliation and kindness” he witnessed during his visit to the hospital: “Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a knife and fork. . . . Once a week, they have a ball, in which the Doctor and his family, with all the nurses and attendants, take an active part.” Yet still another commentator insists that the inspiration for the story came not from Dickens, but from Nathaniel Parker Willis’s story “The Madhouse of Palermo,” which is based on a visit to an asylum in Sicily.

Modern readers can easily enjoy “Tarr and Fether” for its own unique merits, regardless of whether Poe meant it as a satire on democracy, an invective against abolitionism, or a parody of writing by Dickens and Willis—or, as seems quite possible, all of these. As the esteemed Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott wrote over half a century ago, “This story seems to me one of Poe’s best humorous pieces. . . . There is obviously (as in most of Poe’s stories) an undercurrent of serious thought, but it is not clinical.”

Notes: On page 703, Poe uses the phrase vielle cour (correctly, vieille cour) to mean “the old court.” Most of the other French phrases concern types of food and wine, or they should be clear from context. Nil admirari (p. 705) is a Latin expression referring to the state of being unsurprised, or equanimity. “Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum” (p. 706) is Virgil’s description in The Aeneid of the blinded Cyclops: “a monster horrendous, misshapen, and vast, whose eye is removed.”

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“During the autumn of 18—, while on a tour through the extreme Southern provinces of France, my route led me within a few miles of a certain Maison de Santé, or private Mad House, about which I had heard much, in Paris, from my medical friends. . . .  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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The Curse of Everard Maundy

Seabury Quinn (1889–1969)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links
Review: The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin (Georges T. Dodds, SF Site)

“Weird Tales: The Unique Magazine” (The Pulp Magazines Project)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Weird Tales authors
• “The Jelly-Fish,” David H. Keller
• “The Music of Erich Zann,” H. P. Lovecraft
• “The Refugee,” Jane Rice
• “Midnight,” Jack Snow

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American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
746 pages
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Portraits of Jules de Grandin and
Dr. Trowbridge, by illustrator
Virgil Finlay, from the October 1937
issue of Weird Tales.

When pulp fiction aficionados reminisce about the “golden years” of Weird Tales and similar fantasy and horror magazines, they usually highlight the works of Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith from the 1920s and ’30s and Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, and other celebrated names from the 1940s and early ’50s. But—far and away—the most popular and prolific author during the magazine’s original three-decade run was the now-forgotten Seabury Grandin Quinn.

After serving in the army during World War I, Quinn moved to New York, where he specialized in mortuary law (he published a Syllabus of Mortuary Jurisprudence in 1933) and edited Casket and Sunnyside and other periodicals for funeral directors. Quinn’s experiences from his day job pervade all his fictional writings and, under the pen name Jerome Burke, he wrote nearly 150 biographical stories for Dodge, a still-thriving magazine for embalmers. He had already published several pieces in various pulp magazines when “The Horror on the Links” appeared in the October 1925 issue of Weird Tales and introduced French detective Jules de Grandin and his sidekick Dr. Trowbridge. Readers couldn’t get enough; between 1925 and 1951, more than half of the magazine’s issues carried Quinn’s stories, including ninety-three episodes featuring his pair of paranormal investigators. An entry in the Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers summarizes the series:

Readers loved Quinn’s fast, colorful, easily digested fiction, and the magazine was always eager to promote the newest case from the “hellfire files” of Jules de Grandin, occult detective, a Frenchman with grammatical peccadillos in English, his adopted language, needlelike mustaches, and a rational and fearless approach to the worst that “supernature” could fling against him, from ghosts and zombies to mummies and werewolves. . . . The erudite, fearless Frenchman remains in America and moves in as permanent guest of the admiring Dr. Trowbridge, beginning the series’ long-running relationship which echoes Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and his aide-de-camp Hastings (itself derivative of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes–Watson relationship).

Nearly all the Jules de Grandin adventures take place in Harrisonville, New Jersey, which in reality boasted, at the time, a population of about 250—considerably fewer than the total number of residents who appear and often horrifically die in Quinn’s collected stories. In a review of the complete Jules de Grandin tales (1,400 pages in all!), Georges T. Dodds notes, “The vast majority of the supernatural and occult elements in Quinn’s stories are ultimately resolved to be the work of people, sick and twisted people perhaps, but not trans-dimensional beings or spell-casting wizards.” But not always. Occasionally de Grandin and Trowbridge would confront the unfathomable forces of otherworldly demons and ritualistic voodoo, as in “The Curse of Everard Maundy,” one of the earliest Weird Tales entries, which was selected by Peter Straub for inclusion in The Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales.

Notes: Detective de Grandin scatters exclamations in French throughout his dialogue; a number of these take the form mort d’un ——! (death of a cat, pig, toad, etc.) or nom d’un ——! (name of a duck, cabbage, cauliflower, etc.), meant comically to evoke the untranslatable nom d’un chien (name of a dog). Similar English expressions would include son of a gun or for goodness’ sake. On page 538, Trowbridge is reading The Wanderer’s Necklace (1914), a short adventure novel by Sir Henry Rider Haggard. “But that is another story” (p. 552) became a catchphrase in the 1890s due to Rudyard Kipling’s frequent use of it in his early fiction. The lines of poetry reprinted on page 563 are from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Eden’s Bower” (1868)—not Eden Bowers.

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“Mort d’un chat! I do not like this!” Jules de Grandin slammed the evening paper down upon the table and glared ferociously at me through the library lamplight. . . . 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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Playing Courier

Mark Twain (1835–1910)
From Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, Other Travels

Interesting Links
“Mark Twain’s Debts as Paid” (March 12, 1898, The New York Times, via Twain Quotes)

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

Previous Story of the Week selections by Mark Twain
“Queen Victoria’s Jubilee”
“Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn”

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1,145 pages
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Detail from “The Author’s Memories,” drawing by American illustrator True Williams (1839–1897) for the first edition of Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad (1880). Click on image to see the full drawing.

By the early 1890s the publisher Charles L. Webster and Company, founded in 1884 by Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), was deeply in debt. The outfit had not been able to repeat the extraordinary success of its first two bestsellers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. The firm’s bookkeeper embezzled tens of thousands of dollars. Charles Webster, the director of the press (and Clemens’s nephew) was replaced in 1888 and died in April 1891. In addition, Clemens’s numerous investments in patents and machines worsened his financial situation. He sunk approximately $300,000 in a failed invention called the Paige Compositor, a typesetting machine its inventor hoped would help automate the publishing industry. He also lost $50,000 on the Kaolatype, a new (and equally unsuccessful) method for printing illustrations.

At the time of Webster’s death, Clemens was suffering from rheumatism in his right arm (which made it difficult to write), his wife Livy was ailing from chronic heart-related illnesses, and they could no longer afford the maintenance of their Hartford home. In May William Dean Howells wrote to Clemens after seeing a newspaper report that his longtime friend was “going to Europe for [his] few remaining years.” He wished he “was sick or sorry enough to go” with them, and Clemens responded:

For her health’s sake, Mrs. Clemens must try some baths somewhere, & this it is that has determined us to go to Europe. The water required seems to be provided at a little obscure & little-visited nook up in the hills back of the Rhine somewhere & you get to it by Rhine traffic-boat & country stage-coach. Come, get “sick or sorry enough” & join us.

The Clemens family shuttered the house and found new positions for all the servants. In a letter to another correspondent, Clemens indicated that he had originally “voted” to travel in Europe for only thirty days, while his wife thought six months would be ideal—but the family remained for four years, staying at the spa resorts in Aix-les-Bains and Marienbad along the way.

The European trip seemed to provide Clemens with the motivation and material he needed, and he was able to finish five books: a collection, The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories, followed by the novels Pudd’nhead Wilson, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and Tom Sawyer, Detective. He was also commissioned by the New York Sun to write a series of articles for $1,000 each. All but one of the pieces are (mostly) factual travel accounts. The exception, the short story “Playing Courier,” shows Twain at his zaniest.

Webster & Co. shut down in 1894, and Clemens was forced to declare bankruptcy. (A far more devastating event befell the family in August 1896, when the eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis at the age of twenty-four.) Even though he was not legally required to do so, by 1898 Clemens paid off all the debts incurred by his insolvency, using the proceeds from a worldwide speaking tour and from the success of his final travel book, Following the Equator.

Notes: On page 950, Mark Twain uses the expression “glass going down,” which indicates a drop in atmospheric pressure as measured by a barometer (or weather-glass) and suggests stormy weather ahead. The Compact (p. 956) refers to the formation of the Everlasting League in 1291, which became the basis of the Swiss Confederation. On page 960, Twain leaves farewell cards with the initials p.p.c. (pour prendre congé, or “for taking leave”). Twain also throws in a couple of German expressions for comic effect: dass heiss (for das heisst, or “that is”) and Du lieber Gott! (“Good heavens!” or “Oh my God!”)

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A time would come when we must go from Aix-les-Bains to Geneva, and from thence, by a series of day-long and tangled journeys, to Bayreuth in Bavaria. I should have to have a courier, of course, to take care of so considerable a party as mine. . . . 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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Mother

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941)
From Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories

Interesting Links

“All roads lead to Winesburg, Ohio: An appreciation for Sherwood Anderson and his work's lasting influence” (Porter Shreve, Chicago Tribune)

“Clyde celebrates writer who made city famous” (Toledo Blade)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Sherwood Anderson
• “Certain Things Last”
• “The Egg”
• “The Untold Lie”

Buy the book
Sherwood Anderson:
Collected Stories
Winesburg, Ohio | The Triumph of the Egg | Horses and Men | Death in the Woods | uncollected stories | 900 pages

Panoramic Landscape with a View of a Small Town, c. 1850. Artist unknown. Image courtesy of the online collection of the Brooklyn Museum.

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In 1916 the new monthly magazine Seven Arts accepted for publication a brief story, “Queer,” by advertising copywriter and household goods salesman Sherwood Anderson. It was slotted for the magazine’s second issue, but before it had even gone to press, Anderson sent in another tale and informed the editor, Waldo Frank, that both selections were part of “a series of intensive studies of people of my home town, Clyde, Ohio.” He continued:

In the book I called the town Winesburg, Ohio. Some of the studies you may think pretty raw, and there is a sad note running through them. One or two of them get pretty closely down to ugly things of life.

The second submission, “The Untold Lie” (a previous Story of the Week selection), was promptly accepted for the third issue of Seven Arts and, intrigued, Frank encouraged Anderson to send in other selections from the series. Yet another story, “Mother,” soon appeared in the magazine, with a note identifying Anderson as “one of the significant new men out of the West.”

“Mother” introduced readers to Elizabeth Willard, whose son who would appear in many of the Winesburg tales. She is disappointed with her life and her marriage and hopes that her son will be able to escape the isolation and misery she has endured in the town of Clyde. Anderson based the character on his own mother, who died in 1895 when he was eighteen, and he dedicated Winesburg, Ohio to his mother’s memory, “whose keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives.”

Today’s readers might find it hard to imagine the intensity of the reactions, both positive and negative, when the Winesburg stories first began appearing and especially after they were collected as a book in May 1919. Although the stories found favor with most critics, an early reviewer accused the author of reducing his characters “from human clay to plain dirt”; another called the book “the picture of a maggoty mind.” (The latter critic, William Allen White, would rescind his opinion when, two decades later, he recommended Anderson’s latest work to Book-of-the-Month Club members.) A somewhat ambivalent notice in the Chicago Tribune asserted, with considerable overstatement, that the tales are “practically all concerned chiefly with the sex life of the inhabitants of the Ohio village.” One of the newspaper’s readers responded with a letter:

[The book] seems to me a distillation of the sort of leering gossip one would expect to find bandied about by male scandalmongers chewing tobacco on cracker barrels in a dirty cross-roads grocery store. . . . I suppose this book will be “hailed” by a few Dreiser devotees and some impressionable reviewers will admire it as “strong.” It is so strong it ought to be buried without delay in the nearest public sanitation.*

Fortunately for the history of American literature, Anderson’s masterpiece remained well above ground. Years later William Faulkner (who dedicated Sartoris, his third novel, to Anderson) wrote, “Sherwood Anderson was the father of all my works—and those of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. We were influenced by him. He showed us the way.”

* As reprinted in Walter B. Rideout’s Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America (volume 1, 2006), p. 316.

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Free audio: This selection is accompanied by a streaming audio version, read by the award-winning memoirist Patricia Hampl.

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Elizabeth Willard, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and her face was marked with smallpox scars. Although she was but forty-five, some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure. . . . 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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