Christmas Poem

John O’Hara (1905–1970)
From John O’Hara: Stories

Interesting Links

Obituary: “John O’Hara Dead; Novelist Dissected Small‐Town Mores” (Paul L. Montgomery, The New York Times)

“John O’Hara Wrote about the Things Rich People Do. Why Isn’t He Still Famous?” (Peter Tonguette, Humanities)

Previous Story of the Week selection by John O’Hara
• “Agatha”

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John O’Hara: Stories
Sixty stories and novellas in all • 860 pages
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“Main Business Centre, Pottsville, PA,” c. 1940, vintage postcard printed on linen stock. O’Hara reimagined Pottsville as Gibbsville in his Pennsylvania fiction. Two of the mainstay stores on this block were Sears & Roebuck (on the left) and Lilienthal's Specialty Shop, a department store.

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By the 1960s John O’Hara, flush with success as a novelist and writing stories once again for The New Yorker, was happily married to his third wife, Katharine Bryan. He had given up alcohol entirely and, while memories of his infamous drunken (and often hostile) escapades lingered among associates and critics, he had become much more comfortable around his friends. As Charles McGrath writes in the recently published Library of America collection of O’Hara’s short fiction, “He was easier in his own skin, and it shows a little in the writing: there are fewer stories about loneliness, isolation or exclusion.” While some of the stories from his last decade are set in the tumultuous present of the sixties, many of his best works have a nostalgic quality and “revisit the tone and setting of the Gibbsville [Pennsylvania] stories of the thirties and forties.”

Regardless of time and place, the late stories continue to display the strongest aspect of O’Hara’s fiction: his mastery of dialogue. As former Booklist editor Brad Hooper contends in his Short Story Readers’ Advisory: A Guide to the Best, O’Hara was able to capture American speech like few writers before or since:

Dialogue is the most important aspect of an O’Hara story—he always got the vocabulary, phonetics, cadences, and syntax just right, no matter what socioeconomic group, from the money class to the upper middle class, to ordinary working people and even show-business types. This skill enabled him to conjure up a vivid character in brief space. O’Hara supplemented his ear for dialogue with a keen consciousness of social trappings, for instance, the cars, the neighborhoods, the kinds of dwelling.

In “Christmas Poem” (1964), one O’Hara’s Gibbsville stories, Billy Warden has returned home from college for the holidays. The story contains two stretches of pitch-perfect dialogue: an extended scene of family banter around the dinner table, followed by Billy’s post-adolescent preening among his old high school buddies. McGrath singled out this story among O’Hara’s late writings as “a story of late-adolescent unhappiness and frustration that ends on a note of piercing sweetness” and chose it to close the sixty stories and novellas in the Library of America collection. We present it here, in full, as the final Story of the Week selection for 2016, along with our best wishes for the holiday season.

Notes: Among the cultural, regional, and commercial references sprinkled in O’Hara’s story are the following: The Dort was a mid-level car built by the Dort Motor Company in Flint, Michigan, 1915–24; Russell Sage is a women’s college in Troy, New York; Harrigan is a kind of billiards game, also known as Kelly pool; Kappa Betes and T.N.E.’s are the secret societies Kappa Beta Phi and Tau Nu Epsilon, both with reputations for excessive drinking; Lock Haven was a Pennsylvania state teachers college, now Lock Haven University; Mercersburg is a college-preparatory boarding school; Whitehouse & Hardy’s are shoes from the clothing store of the same name. On page 804, Billy’s friend slyly slips in the line “Safe at last in your trundle bed,” from the Dartmouth College song “Where, Oh Where Are the Pea-Green Freshmen.”

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Billy Warden had dinner with his father and mother and sister. “I suppose this is the last we’ll see of you this vaca¬tion,” said his father. . . . 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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Biography of a Story

Shirley Jackson (1916–1965)
From Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

Video (in two parts): Larry Yust’s dramatic adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (20 minutes) followed by James Durbin’s discussion of the story (10 minutes)

Audio: A. M. Homes reads “The Lottery” and discusses it with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

“Haunted Womanhood”: A review of Ruth Franklin’s biography of Shirley Jackson (Heather Havrilesky, The Atlantic)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Shirley Jackson
• “Charles”
• “The Night We All Had Grippe”

Buy the book
Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories
The Lottery • The Haunting of Hill House • We Have Always Lived in the Castle • other stories and sketches • 827 pages
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Olive Dunbar as Tess Hutchinson in the 1969 dramatization of “The Lottery,” directed by Larry Yust as part of Encyclopaedia Britannica's “Short Story Showcase” series. A 10-minute discussion of the story by University of Southern California professor James Durbin was added to the performance. According to the Academic Film Archive, it became one of the best-selling films ever produced for educators.

It is probably the most famous work of fiction ever published in The New Yorker and certainly the magazine’s most controversial, generating letters of protest and bafflement and even a number of subscription cancellations. And it remains one of the most anthologized and influential stories ever written in English, required reading for several generations of high school students and the precursor to hundreds of horror stories and works of dystopian fiction. Since its publication in June 1948, readers, critics, and scholars have quarreled over the story’s “meaning.” Yet perhaps nobody was more surprised by the reaction to “The Lottery” than the author herself.

If Shirley Jackson is to be believed—and she most assuredly isn’t—“The Lottery” came to her quite easily three weeks before it was published, and the editors made only one minor change. That’s what she told audiences whenever she spoke about the story’s publication. The truth, as William Brennan points out, is a bit more complicated. Jackson sent a draft to The New Yorker several months before the story’s publication, and there were a number of changes suggested by editors over the following weeks. “Jackson, like most writers,” concludes Brennan, “achieved greatness with patient work and the help of others—her editors, her agent, and her literary-critic husband. Drafts were written and rewritten; phone calls with editors were made; galleys were drawn up and edited; and, in the end, the story appeared in print months after it had been conceived.”

The editors of The New Yorker received more mail about “The Lottery” than they had ever received in response to a short story. Alfred L. Kroeber, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, was among those who protested the story’s premise. “If Shirley Jackson’s intent was to symbolize into complete mystification, and at the same time be gratuitously disagreeable, she certainly succeeded.” His daughter, Ursula K. Le Guin, was nineteen at the time, and she recently told Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, “My memory is that my father was indignant at Shirley Jackson’s story because as a social anthropologist he felt that she didn’t, and couldn’t, tell us how the lottery could come to be an accepted social institution.”

Jackson included the comment from Kroeber, without identifying him by name, in an amusing speech recounting the days following the story’s publication and quoting many of the readers’ reactions. Jackson often gave some version of this prepared talk at colleges and writers’ conferences during the last decade of her life, and it was edited by her husband and published posthumously in 1968. In honor of the centennial of Jackson’s birth on December 14, 1916, we present that speech, “Biography of a Story,” as our Story of the Week selection.

Note: One of the readers quoted by Jackson mentions In Fact, a monthly newsletter that billed itself “An Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press” and that published media criticism and investigated stories not covered in newspapers.

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On the morning of June 26, 1948, I walked down to the post office in our little Vermont town to pick up the mail. . . . 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 Worst News That I Have Encountered in the Last 20 Years”

Robert Hagy (1914–1992)
From Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944

Interesting Links
“The First 24 Hours–Pearl Harbor” (Carl Zebrowski, America in WWII)

“Charles Lindbergh’s Des Moines Speech” (James M. Lindsay, Council on Foreign Relations)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Aufenthalt in Rosenheim,” Vincent Sheean
• “Damn the Torpedoes!” Helen Lawrenson

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Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946
Two volumes • 1,770 pages
64 pages of photos
Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, John Hersey, A. J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, many others
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The U.S. Navy battleships USS West Virginia (sunken at left) and USS Tennessee shrouded in smoke following the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor. (National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons).

By the fall of 1941 the America First Committee, founded the previous year to oppose American involvement in the war in Europe, was in disarray. At its height, the organization had more than four hundred chapters and several hundred thousand members, with its most fervent base centered in the Midwest. Yet, on September 11, the Committee’s most prominent spokesperson, Charles A. Lindbergh, delivered a speech that included the following lines:

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution the Jewish race suffered in Germany. . . . Instead of agitating for war the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few farsighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.

Beforehand, Anne Lindbergh had tried to convince her husband to remove the section singling out American Jews, but she was able only to convince him to incorporate the language sympathizing with their plight. Her frustration is apparent in her diary: “segregating them as a group, setting the ground for anti-Semitism . . . is a match lit near a pile of excelsior.”

Lindbergh’s speech was universally attacked by the media and politicians. The White House issued a statement noting the similarities between Lindbergh’s language and “the outpourings of Berlin in the last few days”; the 1940 Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, called it “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation”; the Des Moines Register thundered “that it disqualifies Lindbergh from any pretensions of leadership”; and the Texas legislature passing a resolution demanding that Lindbergh stay away from the state. Several prominent members of America First abandoned the organization, and others defected to the competing Keep America Out of the War Committee.

When they first heard of the speech, members of America First’s executive committee were initially alarmed, although they ultimately voted 10 to 1 to continue to support him and issued a statement defending their popular speaker and deploring “the injection of the race issue into the discussion of war or peace. It is the interventionists who have done this.” Various far right organizations expressed their support, and the anti-Semitic newspaper affiliated with Father Charles Coughlin’s radio program applauded the speech. Above all, Lindbergh remained immensely popular with the membership, and his rallies continued to attract huge crowds, including 20,000 in Madison Square Garden on October 30.

In November the America First Committee began a new line of attack, questioning the Roosevelt administration’s “sabre-rattling with Japan.” And then, on the morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor.

Hours after the attack, an America First rally was held in Pittsburgh, and Robert Hagy was there to cover it for the Post Gazette. Among the speakers was the famous dancer Irene Castle McLaughlin, who—with her first husband, Vernon, an Englishman killed during the First World War—had launched an American dance craze and whose life story had been the subject of a recent Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film. Other speakers included local politicians and the organization’s leaders. As word began to trickle in about the attacks, the rally took on the surreal aspect that Hagy captures in the following report.

Four days later, the national leadership of America First agreed to dissolve its operations.

Notes: When the rally’s leaders first hear of the attacks in Hawaii, they immediately recall the Greer incident. On September 4, the American destroyer Greer was carrying mail to American troops in Iceland when a British aircraft alerted it to the presence of a German U-boat. In response, the Greer used sonar to report the U-boat’s position to the British aircraft, which attacked the U-boat with depth charges. The Germans fired a torpedo at the Greer, and the destroyer then joined the battle by launching its own depth charges. When Roosevelt first reported the incident a week later in his radio address he didn’t mention the existence of the British aircraft and accused the Germans of having “fired first,” but the British involvement was revealed to the public a month later during congressional hearings.

One of the speakers mentions “50 ships” the president had “given away,” a reference to fifty destroyers Roosevelt sent to Britain in September 1940, in exchange for the right to use British bases in the Western Hemisphere.

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The strangest development here involved America Firsters assembled in Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Hall in Oakland Civic Center, three miles from downtown Pittsburgh. . . . 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 Fifth Planet

Loren Eiseley (1907–1977)
From Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos

Interesting Links
“The Man in the Moon: Remembering Loren Eiseley” (Stephen Bertman, The New Atlantis)

Dawn: Exploring the asteroid belt (NASA)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Winter Walk,” Henry David Thoreau
• “Nature Near Home,” John Burroughs
• “Natural History, the Forgotten Science,” Aldo Leopold

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Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos
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A meteor during the peak of the 2009 Leonid Meteor Shower. November 17, 2009. Image by Ed Sweeney / Navicore, via Wikipedia.

In his essay “The Mind as Nature” (1962), Loren Eiseley defended the awestruck wonder and the confessional tone that pervade his popular science writings:

It has been my own experience among students, laymen, and scholars that to express even wonder about the universe—in other words, to benefit from some humble consideration of what we do not know, as well as marching to the constant drumbeat of what we call the age of technology—is regarded askance in some quarters. I have had the vague word “mystic,” applied to me because I have not been able to shut out wonder occasionally, when I have looked at the world. I have been lectured by at least one member of my profession who advised me to “explain myself ”—words which sound for all the world like a humorless request for the self-accusations so popular in Communist lands. . . . This man was unaware, in his tough laboratory attitude, that there was another world of pure reverie that is of at least equal importance to the human soul.

An anthropologist and self-described “bone-hunter,” Eiseley published a series of books over a span of two decades, the first of which, The Immense Journey, appeared the week before he turned fifty and became an international phenomenon, selling more than a million copies in more than a dozen languages. This debut collection of essays showcased the literary qualities that led many readers to hail Eiseley as a “modern Thoreau”; Kirkus Reviews called it “an unconventional record—a model of a personal universe,” in which the author wandered among a variety of disparate topics: “fossils, prairie dogs, primates, the magic of water, the ocean depths, the progress of ‘the snout,’ flowers and plants, birds, the brain and robots.” One of the book’s more memorable essays, “Little Men and Flying Saucers,” contemplated the essential isolation of human existence in a vast universe:

Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness.

During the last years of his life, Eiseley expanded the scope of his oeuvre, publishing three books of poetry, working on an unfinished science-fiction novel titled “The Snow Wolf,” and compiling an archaeology textbook, also never finished. Less than a month before his death, he dictated from his hospital bed a letter to his publisher with the “rough outline” of a new book. To be titled “The Loren Eiseley Sampler,” it would gather both poetry and prose, some of it previously unpublished or uncollected and some of it representing the best of his earlier books. After Eiseley’s death, while arranging his papers for the archives, his assistant Caroline E. Werkley discovered two previously unpublished short stories—“The Dance of the Frogs” and “The Fifth Planet”—and it was decided to add them to the collection, which appeared as The Star Thrower in June 1978.

“The Fifth Planet,” which we present as our Story of the Week selection, was probably written in the late 1940s. Narrated by a “bone hunter” resembling Eiseley himself, the story features an amateur astronomer hoping, against the odds, to find fossils in meteorites from the asteroid belt, which was once believed to have been the remnants of a “lost” planet between Mars and Jupiter. (The universally accepted explanation among astronomers today is that Jupiter’s immense mass prevented a planet from forming at all.) In this short work of fiction, as in his essays, Eiseley shares his “mystical” wonder, in the best sense of that vague word, of humanity’s place in the universe and of the dreams that haunt our sleep while “the meteors whisper greenly overhead.”

Notes: On page 344, Eiseley mentions Bode’s law, also known as the Titius-Bode law, which predicts approximately the spacing of planets in the solar system. It was the application of this hypothesis that led nineteenth-century astronomers to posit the existence of a “lost planet” between Mars and Jupiter. On page 347 is a quote from Matthew 7:7 (“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. . . .”).

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“It isn’t there any more,” he said. He was the only man I ever knew who hunted for bones in the stars, and I remember we were standing out among his sheep in the clear starshine when he said it. . . . 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 Tyranny of Pie

George Augustus Sala (1828–1895)
From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

Interesting Links
“The Late Mr. Thackeray: A Notice by George Augustus Sala” (The New York Times, January 17, 1864)

“Dickens in America” (David Perdue’s Charles Dickens Page)

Previous Story of the Week selections for Thanksgiving
• “Eating American,” Sheila Hibben
• “Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban Seasonings,” Ana Menéndez
• “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain

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American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes
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“The Kitchen,” 1874, from Prang’s Aids for Object Teaching–Trades and Occupations, a collection of twelve chromolithographic plates issued by L. Prang & Company, Boston. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

The prolific and flamboyant journalist George Augustus Sala, one of several young British writers who found fame as acolytes of Charles Dickens, rose to become a regular contributor to Dickens’s weekly magazine, Household Words, and, eventually, one of The Daily Telegraph’s most well-known correspondents. Sala was actually a small boy when he first met the great author—his mother was an actress in Dickens’s 1836 play The Village Coquettes—but it was William Makepeace Thackeray who publicly praised one of Sala’s early articles and truly launched his career. His many books included travelogues, memoirs, five novels, and several collections of stories and journalism—but his spendthrift habits and public drunkenness often led to trouble, and he died virtually penniless only weeks after being forced to sell the immensely valuable library he had amassed from his travels.

Sala visited the United States twice, first during the Civil War in 1863 and again in 1879. His initial visit was chronicled in the two-volume work, My Diary in America in the Midst of War, and the second trip, a lecture tour, inspired the better-known America Revisited. In addition, his admiration for American humor resulted in a three-book series of anthologies, Yankee Drolleries (1866–1870), which introduced British readers to such authors as Artemus Ward, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—as well as two up-and-coming writers named Bret Harte and Mark Twain.

After his first trip to the States, Sala complained of “the melancholy and consistent monotony of American Towns.” Even the “the glittering splendour of New York” was pockmarked by the occasional neighborhood resembling “a slovenly, untidy, ill-kept Augean stable.” But he found much improvement sixteen years later. “The truth is, that in New York there is room enough for Everybody,” he wrote in America Revisited, “whereas in London, huge as it is, there is not sufficient room for Anybody.” He also noted that by the late 1870s transatlantic visitors often ran into friends from home, as Manhattan had become a popular travel destination for the European upper class.

Sala especially had a lot to say about American food. His comments range from despair and scorn to grudging, if infrequent, admiration. “It is always hard to leave New York,” he remarked, noting that the food and accommodations there were “what Europeans usually consider to be refinement and comfort.” But “once out of New York, you must expect nothing better than pork and beans and Indian pudding, or hog and hominy if you go South; the whole washed down by rough cider or molasses and water.” In a chapter describing a train trip to Baltimore, he inserted the brief digression presented below, mocking what was (according to Sala) the uniquely American passion for pie.

Notes: Bohwani is Sala’s spelling for Bhowani (Bhavani), the violent incarnation of the Hindu goddess Parvati. Dan Godfrey (1831–1903) was a famous band leader and the first of three generations of famous Dan Godfreys in England, all of them musicians and conductors.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the text of Sala’s digression, “The Tyranny of Pie,” below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

The Tyranny of Pie
Almost everything that I behold in this wonderful country bears traces of improvement and reform—everything except Pie. The national manners have become softened—the men folk chew less, expectorate less, curse less; the newspapers are not half so scurrilous as our own*; the Art idea is becoming rapidly developed; culture is made more and more manifest; even “intensity” in æsthetics is beginning to be heard of and Agnosticism and other “isms” too numerous to mention find exponents in “Society,” and the one absorbing and sickening topic of conversation is no longer the Almighty Dollar—but to the tyranny of Pie there is no surcease. It is a Fetish. It is Bohwani. It is the Mexican carnage god Huitchlipotchli, continually demanding fresh victims. It is Moloch. Men may come and men may go; the Grant “Boom” may be succeeded by the Garfield “Boom;” but Pie goes on for ever. The tramp and the scallawag, in pants of looped and windowed raggedness, hunger for Pie, and impetuously demand nickel cents wherewith to purchase it; and the President of the United States, amid the chastened splendour of the White House, can enjoy no more festive fare. The day before we left New York one of the ripest scholars, the most influential journalists (on the Democratic side) the brightest wits and most genial companions in the States lunched with us. He would drink naught but Château Yquem; but he partook twice, and in amazing profusion of Pumpkin Pie. They gave me Pie at the Brevoort, and I am now fresh from the consumption of Pie at the Mount Vernon, Baltimore. Two more aristocratic hotels are not to be found on this continent. I battled strongly against this dyspepsia-dealing pastry at first; but a mulatto waiter held me with his glittering eye, and I yielded as though I had been a two-years child. The worst of this dreadful pie—be it of apple, of pumpkin, of mulberry, or of cranberry—is that it is so very nice. It is made delusively flat and thin, so that you can cut it into conveniently-sized triangular wedges, which slip down easily. Pardon this digression; but Pie really forms as important a factor in American civilisation as the pot-au-feu does in France. There is no dish at home by which we nationally stand or fall. The “roast beef of Old England” sounds very well to the strains of Mr. Dan Godfrey’s band at a dinner at the Freemason’s Tavern; but sirloin of beef is fourteen pence a pound, and there are hundreds of thousands of labouring English people who never taste roast beef from year’s end to year’s end—save when they happen to get into gaol or into the workhouse at Christmastide.

* The modern American press seems to me to offend only against good taste in their omnivorous appetite of interviewing celebrated or notorious individuals (and the interviewing nuisance has become common enough in England), and in their fondness for filling their columns with brief personalities sometimes very quaint, but usually almost childishly frivolous and quite harmless.

Originally published in America Revisited: From the Bay of New York to the Gulf of Mexico (1882).
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Wunderkind

Carson McCullers (1917–1967)
From Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays, & Other Writings

Interesting Links

Southern Literary Trail: Columbus, Georgia, and Carson McCullers (Mississippi State University Library)

“Unhappy Endings: The Collected Carson McCullers” (Hilton Als, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Train,” Flannery O’Connor
• “A Curtain of Green,” Eudora Welty
• “The Charmed Life,” Katherine Anne Porter

Buy the book
Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays, & Other Writings
Complete stories | The Member of the Wedding: A Play | The Sojourner | The Square Root of Wonderful | Essays, poems, autobiography | 667 pages

Detail from Child at the Piano, 1928, by American artist Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874–1939). (Courtesy of The Athenaeum)

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When Carson Smith McCullers was a little girl in Columbus, Georgia, her father bought a piano. As she recalled later in her unfinished autobiography, she had already learned how to play a bit at her aunt’s house, “so when my piano arrived I sat down immediately and began to play. To my parents this seemed like a miracle.” In 1929 she began studying with her first music teacher and practiced as many as five hours a day—to the chagrin of neighbors, “who did not appreciate being awakened as early as 4:00 a.m. by the music of Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven being played by a ten-year-old,” writes biographer Virginia Spencer Car.

The next year Carson was accepted as the only student taught by Mary Tucker, a former soloist whose husband, an Army colonel, had recently moved to nearby Fort Benning. Strongly supported by her mother, Carson became convinced she was on her way to a brilliant career as a concert pianist. Yet, halfway through her four-year stint as Tucker’s student, she became severely ill with rheumatic fever, which was first misdiagnosed as pneumonia. Discouraged and fatigued, she began to doubt her abilities—both her talent and her endurance—and she told a friend her new hope was to become a writer. In 1934, when she graduated from high school, she finally confessed to her mother that she no longer felt she could become a concert pianist and, during the 1935–36 academic year, she went to New York University and enrolled in a creative writing class taught by Sylvia Chatfield Bates, a respected author of numerous now-forgotten novels and stories.

Of the pieces Carson wrote for the class, one in particular caught the eye of her teacher: “Wunderkind,” a story about a young girl who had been told at an early age that she was a prodigy. “Some will think this story is too long. I don’t,” Mrs. Bates wrote, but she suggested that her student make a few surgical cuts “to be on the safe side with regard to publication since you are unknown as yet.” She also advised Carson to prepare it for submission to Story magazine. And so, the year before the young author married and became Carson McCullers, her debut story was accepted for publication and appeared over the byline Carson Smith. “It is hard to realize the prestige and importance that Story magazine had at that time for young authors,” she later wrote. The nineteen-year-old received twenty-five dollars for her debut and celebrated by purchasing chocolate cake, a bottle of wine, and a story collection by Thomas Mann. Around this time, she also began working on a long story tentatively titled “The Mute,” which ultimately was published in 1940 as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Two decades later, in an essay written for Esquire, she reflected on how her first published story came about:

How does creation begin in any art? As Tennessee wrote The Glass Menagerie as a memory play, I wrote “Wunderkind” when I was seventeen years old, and it was a memory, although not the reality of the memory—it was a foreshortening of that memory. It was about a young music student. I didn’t write about my real music teacher—I wrote about the music we studied together because I thought it was truer. The imagination is truer than the reality.

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Notes: Mister Bilderbach addresses Frances as Bienchen, a term of endearment meaning, literally, “little bee” (as in “my busy little bee”). Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon is an 1860 comedy by French playwrights Eugène Labiche and Édouard Martin. The Russian Tea Room (page 68), near Carnegie Hall, is a New York City restaurant established in 1927 by former members of the Russian Imperial Ballet.

McCullers refers to a number of musical pieces and performers, most of which do not require further identification for an understanding of the story. The following information is provided for the curious. The Second Hungarian Rhapsody (page 63) is Franz Liszt’s 1847 Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 for Piano in C-Sharp Minor, the most popular and recognizable of Liszt’s nineteen Hungarian rhapsodies. The Bach Inventions are brief solo keyboard pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach that he wrote as exercises for his students. The Bloch (page 65) refers to a piano sonata by the Swiss-born American composer Ernest Bloch and performed for the first time the year before “Wunderkind” was published. The Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor was written for organ by Bach and later transcribed for piano by Liszt. The Harmonious Blacksmith (page 70) is the popular name for “Air and Variations,” the final movement of Handel’s Suite No. 5 in E Major. The four musicians mentioned on pages 67 and 68 were well known at the time of the story’s publication: English pianist Myra Hess, American violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, Austrian pianist and composer Artur Schnabel, and Polish-born violinist Bronisław Huberman, founder in 1936 of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, later known as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

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She came into the living room, her music satchel plopping against her winter-stockinged legs and her other arm weighted down with school books, and stood for a moment listening to the sounds from the studio. . . . 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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My First Lie and How I Got Out of It

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

Interesting Links
Mark Twain: America’s Greatest Anglophile (Dickens and Twain Crossing the Pond)

The Yellow Kid on the Paper Stage (University of Virginia)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Mark Twain
• “A Presidential Candidate”
• “Running for Governor”
• “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn”
• “Playing Courier”

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Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays 1891–1910
80 selections in all • 1,050 pages
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Editorial cartoon by American illustrator Leon Barritt (1852–1938), published in Vim Magazine, June 1898, mocking the role of the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers in drumming up public support to go to war with Spain. Newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst are each dressed as the Yellow Kid. Pulitzer’s caption mocks both his Hungarian accent and the location of his office in the dome (“tome”) at the top of the recently built New York World Building. (Wikimedia Commons)

At the end of the nineteenth century Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were engaged in a battle to attract readers to their respective newspaper empires. In 1893 Pulitzer purchased a four-color press with the idea that the Sunday New York World would include reproductions of famous paintings and architecture. But the results were unsatisfactory; the technology and expertise required for matching printed color to original art were still in the future. An editor then convinced Pulitzer to use the press for the comics supplement, including Richard Outcault’s popular “Hogan’s Alley.” One of Outcault’s minor characters was a street urchin and, when the paper began printing the comic strip in color in May 1895, an ambitious press operator who had been unhappy with the previous attempts at yellow used a solid wash of ink for the boy’s shirt. “The Yellow Kid” immediately became the strip’s most recognizable—and most popular—character.

In 1896 Hearst, who had purchased a color press for his own company, lured away Outcault, along with a good number of the World’s employees, to the New York Journal, in order to publish a competing full-color Sunday supplement, billed as “eight pages of iridescent polychromous effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a piece of lead pipe.” Although Hearst had won the cartoonist, Pulitzer still owned the copyright to “Hogan’s Alley”—and so both papers carried their own versions of the Yellow Kid. The two publications became known as the Yellow Kid papers, soon shortened to the “yellow papers.” And thus was born “yellow journalism”—the term coined by New York Press editor Erwin Wardman for the sensationalistic news and headlines featured in the World and the Journal.

The battle of the Sunday supplements continued through the remainder of the century, with the colors becoming more vibrant and the features and illustrations moving well beyond comic strips. Both papers commissioned poster-sized artwork and recruited celebrity authors—and this is where Mark Twain enters the picture. In 1899 the Sunday World began publishing “Life’s Great Problems—How to Solve Them: A Series of Special Articles by America’s Most Famous Funny Men,” and for a special Christmas supplement Pulitzer solicited a piece from the legendary author himself, then living with his family in England. The “problem” posed to Twain by the editors became the essay’s title, and “My First Lie and How I Got Out of It” was featured with a color illustration of the author on the cover (see image at right). The section also included three new Huckleberry Finn drawings by Edward W. Kemble, who had illustrated the original edition in 1884. There is a special irony here: when Huckleberry Finn initially appeared, an unsigned review in the same newspaper trashed the novel as “cheap and pernicious stuff” and “a piece of careless hackwork,” the story “of a wretchedly low, vulgar, sneaking and lying Southern country boy. . . . That such stuff should be considered humor is more than a pity.”

“My First Lie” became one of Twain’s better-known essays. When it was reprinted in the collection The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, a reviewer called it “an excellent example of the ridendo dicere verum [tell the truth while laughing] method.” The critic in the London Morning Post was even more effusive: “The whole question of the possible virtue of a lie, which has puzzled so many heads, and been so easily solved by so many to their own immediate comfort, is brightly considered in this lively little sketch, with just a glimpse of that low opinion of human nature which so often peeps out among the author’s jests.”

Notes: Twain makes passing reference to the Dreyfus case (page 440), which had dominated headlines for several years. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish staff officer assigned to the French ministry of war, was convicted in December 1894 of spying and sentenced to life in prison—a verdict widely supported by the anti-Semitic elements of society. Over the next five years, in a series of events too complicated to summarize here, evidence clearing Dreyfus came to light but was suppressed by the war ministry, a letter incriminating him was forged, and the forger later confessed—yet Dreyfus was convicted again at a second trial. He received a presidential pardon shortly before Twain wrote this essay. Twain also refers to Joseph Chamberlain, who had been accused in involvement in the unsuccessful attempt in 1895 to overthrow the Boer government in South Africa. The House of Commons cleared Chamberlain in 1897.

The quote by William Cullen Bryant on page 444 is from “The Battle-Field”; the Thomas Carlyle quote is from The French Revolution. “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (page 445) is a poem by Walter Scott (not Milton), and George Washington’s brother Edward is a figment of Twain’s imagination. The mention of Chicago is shorthand for the World's Columbian Exposition (or World’s Fair) of 1893.

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As I understand it, what you desire is information about “my first lie, and how I got out of it.” I was born in 1835; I am well along, and my memory is not as good as it was.. . . . 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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Absolute Evil

Julian Hawthorne (1846–1934)
From American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

Interesting Links

Review: Julian Hawthorne: The Life of a Prodigal Son, by Gary Scharnhorst (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post)

Text: The pamphlet Hawthorne wrote to lure investors (Alchemy of Bones)

Newspaper article: “Julian Hawthorne Indicted For Fraud” (San Francisco Call, January 6, 1912)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Eyes,” Edith Wharton
• “The Shadowy Third,” Ellen Glasgow
• “The Music of Erich Zann,” H. P. Lovecraft

Girl in Moonlight, 1910, oil on heavy board by American artist Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864–1941). Courtesy of Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

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The “Business Pointers” section of the September 1910 issue of Medical Council warned its readers about a new investment opportunity circulating widely among physicians:

Many of our subscribers have sent us the flamboyant literature of the Julian Hawthorne Company. It is a great pity that a man with the literary ability and honored name of Mr. Hawthorne should lend both to the flotation of such a scheme. The Hawthorne Company professes to own certain mines in Canada. There is a list of directors of quite respectable business men but we hardly know how Hawthorne managed to get them to lend their names to this scheme. The prime mover in the concern is Albert Freeman, a financial derelict, who started on the Consolidated Exchange, made a bad failure which resulted in the loss of some $80,000 to investors then went into bankruptcy.

The editors then detailed a number of Freeman’s other scams before revealing, “We have definite information from the land where the mines are supposed to be located.” A local official in Canada had informed them, “It is not the practice of the Department to advise for or against the purchase of shares in any particular mining company, but in this case I may say that there are grave misstatements of fact contained in the printed documents enclosed in your letter. If you or your friends have any thought of serious investment it might be well for you or them to investigate on the ground.”

Within two years, four officers of the company were indicted for mail fraud, and in October 1913 Julian Hawthorne, the only son of the famous novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, was found guilty of taking part in a conspiracy to sell millions of shares in Canadian silver mines that didn’t even exist. He spent a year in the dreaded “dungeons” of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary—although, as a celebrity prisoner, Hawthorne was treated far better than his fellow inmates. Freeman, the mastermind of the operation, had his conviction overturned on appeal.

It was an inglorious capstone to the career of the 69-year-old Hawthorne, who had reached such a level of fame that “son of the famous novelist” was no longer required to identify him. He published a total of nineteen novels and over 150 short stories—and that, points out his recent biographer Gary Scharnhorst, was “only a small fraction of his oeuvre” of over 3,000 discrete pieces. His output included book and theater reviews; interviews with such dignitaries as William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Edison, Jack London, and Louis Brandeis; biographical accounts of his father and famous family friends; travel books and nature essays; a History of the United States; and—after his release from the penitentiary—essays on prison conditions and reform that he collected as The Subterranean Brotherhood. He was a founding contributor to such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Collier’s Weekly, and Smart Set and, for a time, sports editor of the New York American. He also covered the Spanish-American War for the New York Journal. He received six hundred dollars from the Universal Film Company for a film idea that was never produced, and he wrote a screen adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, also never filmed.

His early works of fiction were Gothic melodramas, and toward the end of his career he was writing for the pulps: detective stories, fantasies, westerns, and even science fiction. Among the latter were tales about journeys to Mars and traveling between dimensions, as well as a serialized novel considered by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as one of the earliest space operas: The Cosmic Courtship, set in 2001 on the planet Saturn, where humanity has achieved sexual equality and the wealthy own personal flying apparatuses (and, naturally, ray guns). He also wrote a trio of longer stories featuring Martha Klemm, the independent, revolver-wielding “spinster” introduced in “Absolute Evil,” which appeared the year after he was released from prison.

Yet nearly all this writing is out of print and forgotten, and much of it is hack work, the daily production of a “professional writer” struggling to support his wife and seven children. “Julian Hawthorne would have been a public intellectual had he been an intellectual,” Scharnhorst admits. Still, during his life, his better works had fans among the literati: Williams James admired his “powerful yet sinister” debut Bressant; William Dean Howells praised the “constantly interesting” biography Hawthorne and His Circle, a valuable work still consulted by scholars; and Wilkie Collins (with many other reviewers) extolled the novella Archibald Malmaison, which Michael Dirda recently recommended to readers in a review.

It had long perplexed scholars why such a well-known and respected author so readily believed in and lent his name to Freeman’s transparently preposterous get-rich scheme. When Scharnhorst was researching his biography, he uncovered an unexpected explanation: Hawthorne secretly had a second family and needed the additional funds to support a mistress and two illegitimate daughters. After his release from prison, Hawthorne moved to California and lived another two decades, but he found his ability to cash in on the family name and to sell his writings vastly diminished. He spent the last eleven years of his life writing a weekly column for the Pasadena Star-News, and many of his later works of fiction were never published.

Notes: Perdita (Latin for “lost one"), the little girl in the story who mysteriously survives a shipwreck, was also the name Julian and his wife Mary gave to their last child, who died shortly after birth in 1890. The Edmund Spencer quote on page 463 is from “A Hymn in Honour of Beauty” (1596) and the George Herbert quote on the following page is from “Virtue” (1633). Alexander Selkirk (p. 465) was a Scottish sailor who spent more than four years (1704–09) marooned on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean. In Greek mythology, the hunter Actæon (p. 489) was transformed into a stag and devoured by his own hounds after spying on Diana at her bath. The French term à outrance means “to the death” or “to the very end.”

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I was half-way between twenty and thirty when I joined the Pleasances’ house-boat party on their adventure to Thirteen-Mile Beach. . . . 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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A Sketch from Maryland Life

Caroline W. Healey Dall (1822–1912)
From American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation

Interesting Links
Slaves Are Prohibited to Read and Write by Law (History Is a Weapon)

America’s First Direct Mail Campaign (Smithsonian)

Caroline Healey Dall, Daughter of Boston (Helen R. Deese, Beacon Press)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Pinda:—A True Tale,” Maria Weston Chapman
• “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes,” Lydia Maria Francis Child
• “Passages in the Life of a Slave Woman,” Annie Parker

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Left: Bible belonging to Nat Turner. The surviving artifact is missing its front and back cover. (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Maurice A. Person and Noah and Brooke Porter) Right: Page from Anti−Slavery Melodies; for The Friends of Freedom, 1843, edited by Jarius Lincoln. (Old Sturbridge Village Museum, via TeachUSHistory.org)

In the early 1830s abolitionists flooded the U.S. postal system with antislavery literature, sending pamphlets and newspapers to politicians and business leaders whose addresses had been culled from directories in slave states. By this period, it was illegal in most places to teach slaves to read. A North Carolina statue, for example, claimed “the teaching of slaves to read and write, has a tendency to excite dis-satisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion.” Still, some of the antislavery literature made its way either to slaves who had managed to become literate or to sympathetic whites and free blacks who might defy the law and read these materials aloud at secret gatherings.

The mailings peaked with a coordinated campaign by the American Anti-Slavery Society in the summer of 1835. Tipped off to the effort and invoking the Boston Tea Party, a group of Charleston residents broke into the Post Office and burned bags of mail that contained antislavery tracts from New York. President Andrew Jackson stepped into the controversy, proposing in his annual message that “severe penalties” be established for sending through the mail publications “intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.” The Senate declined to pass such a law, but Postmaster General Amos Kendall, with Jackson’s support, condemned the “revolting pictures and fervid appeals addressed to the senses and passions of the blacks” and encouraged local postmasters to circumvent the law on their own initiative. In New York City, the major conduit for the mailings, postmaster Samuel L. Gouverneur refused to accept abolitionist mail addressed to Southern states—a policy that remained in place, with varying effectiveness, until the Civil War.

In slave states, many legislatures passed laws banning the possession of such literature or, at the least, sharing it with slaves. In “A Sketch from Maryland Life,” Caroline W. Healey Dall presents the heartrending case of Sherry Williams, a free black man who traveled from Pennsylvania to the east side of Chesapeake Bay, unthinkingly taking with him a hymnal that contained abolitionist songs. Although Dall was from Boston and spent most of her life in Massachusetts, she learned of Williams's story in 1845, when she and her husband, a Baltimore native, lived with his family during the first year of their marriage. The story appeared in the 1847 edition of The Liberty Tree, an annual gift book published by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

While living in Maryland Dall also wrote article for the Christian World newspaper, describing the experiences of other free blacks in the area. Like most members of her Boston family, she did not yet support a complete and immediate end to slavery, but she conveyed in the article how revolted she was by it—which surely didn’t go over well with her in-laws, who owned slaves. Her own father scolded her in a letter from Boston. “Would to God, his eyes could be opened,” she wrote in her journal, “no one is more opposed to the stand taken by the Abolition party than I, but were I to stop—writing—would not stones cry out?”

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Ten years ago, a colored man, with an honest, straight-forward countenance and long dark hair thinly striped with grey, walked irresolutely back and forth before the window of a bookseller’s shop, in the city of Philadelphia. . . . 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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Western Union Boy

Nathanael West (1903–1940)
From Nathanael West: Novels & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“Nathanael West as online muse” (Reader’s Almanac)

“Nathanael West: Funny, but desperately sad” (Martin Chilton, The Telegraph)

Previous Story of the Week selection by Nathanael West
“Business Deal”

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Nathanael West: Novels & Other Writings
The Dream Life of Balso Snell • Miss Lonelyhearts • A Cool Million • The Day of the Locust • screenplays and correspondence • 829 pages
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A group of Western Union messenger boys in Norfolk, Virginia, June 1911. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940). Working as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine documented working and living conditions of children in the United States between 1908 and 1924. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

As a teenager, Nathan Weinstein spent school vacations at Camp Paradox, a Jewish summer camp in the Adirondacks. The camp placed a strong emphasis on sports and games and, like many bookish adolescents, Nathan was unable to measure up to the prowess of his peers—particularly that of his athletic cousins. When the boys climbed nearby Mount Marcy, Nathan spent the entire following day asleep in bed, which earned him the nickname “Pep.” He did find some pleasure working on the camp magazine, for which he eventually served as art editor and satirized camp activities in sketches and cartoons, signing them Nathan “Pep” Weinstein.

In 1926, when Weinstein began to work on his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, he legally changed his name to Nathanael West. (Years later, William Carlos Williams asked, “How did you get that name?” and West answered, “Horace Greeley said, ‘Go West, young man.’ So I did.”) One can change a name, but it’s harder to forget the past. Biographer Jay Martin notes that West’s summer camp experiences “so haunted his imagination that eventually, a decade later, he would attempt to free himself from the bitterness it left by writing a story called ‘Western Union Boy.’” The tale turns around the bumbling failure of its protagonist at a pivotal point of a baseball game—and, on several occasions, West had described to a number of friends a similarly embarrassing incident from his own past. How much of the story is autobiographical is unclear, however, since (as Martin avers), “West was the first writer to discover, or at least the first to dramatize in vivid fictions, the psychological fact that once a fantasy is perfected, it may be lived over and over in further fantasies precisely as if it had been a real experience.”

West completed “Western Union Boy” sometime in the early 1930s, while he was working on his novel Miss Lonelyhearts, but—like his other stories written at the time—he was unable to sell it. It was never published during his lifetime, and the story appears in the Library of America edition of his collected works. We are pleased to present it here exclusively—for a limited time—as our Story of the Week selection.

Note: The Traction Interests, mentioned at the end of the story, was a term often used for the trolley and bus companies and mass transit authorities, which in the early twentieth century were often assailed in the press for corruption and strong-arm tactics.

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If you're not very busy, a grown man in the uniform of a Western Union boy should make you feel a little sick. . . . This story is no longer available. Read other recent selections from Story of the Week.

Literacy Tests: Southern Style

Jack H. Pollack (1914–1984)
From Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941–1973

Interesting Links

Examples of Literacy Tests & Voter Applications (Civil Rights Movement Veterans website)

“Black Suffrage in the Twentieth Century” (Robert A. Holmes, New Georgia Encyclopedia)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Thurgood Marshall and the 14th Amendment,” James Poling
• “What It Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States,” Mary Church Terrell
• “Ordeal in Levittown,” David B. Bittan

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Reporting Civil Rights
2-volume boxed set • 200 vivid eyewitness accounts that trace the history of the civil rights movement from the 1940s to the 1970s • 1,982 pages
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Residents of Georgia wait to enter a “colored only” voter registration facility in 1946. Courtesy of Georgia State University Library Special Collections & Archives.

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Seventy years ago, in 1946, the Fifth District Court of Appeals upheld a ruling that declared the whites-only Democratic primary in Georgia unconstitutional; the previous year, the state had eliminated the poll tax for voter registration. Within the next two months the Atlanta Urban League worked to register over 14,000 black voters, and African American voters were largely responsible for electing Helen Douglas Mankin to the House of Representatives—the first woman elected to Congress from Georgia. Mocked by the governor for her courting of black voters, Mankin responded, “I’m proud of every one of those votes and I hope I’ll get them again.” Unfortunately, their victory was short-lived; the governor worked with his political machine and a white supremacist group called the Columbians to insure her defeat in the next election.

The end of the white primary in Georgia, as well as Mankin’s brief tenure in Congress, was made possible by a case argued two years earlier by up-and-coming NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall before the U.S. Supreme Court. In Smith v. Allwright the court ruled 8–1 that the exclusion of African Americans from voting in the Texas Democratic primary was a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. But, in response to these and other postwar challenges to white control of primaries and elections across the South, various state and local governments reached for an old tool of voter suppression: the literacy test.

Jack H. Pollack, a free-lance journalist from Philadelphia, investigated for The American Mercury some of the more outlandish examples of tests used to keep African Americans from voting, ranging from memorization of the Constitution (including the correct punctuation) to the translation of common—and uncommon—Latin phrases. Needless to say, the use of the exams was nothing more than a ploy, since whether a prospective voter “passed” or (nearly always) did not pass was up to the entirely subjective opinion of the test administrators, who themselves usually knew virtually nothing about the material they were allegedly testing. The Civil Rights Movement Veterans website has posted a number of typical examples of voter registration materials required of African American citizens in several states, and we present Pollack’s article “Literacy Tests: Southern Style” here as our Story of the Week selection.

Note: The second page of Pollack’s story mentions the Bilbo hearings. Following the 1946 Democratic primary in Mississippi a group of black voters petitioned the Senate, charging that Senator Theodore G. Bilbo (1877–1947) had incited racial violence during his campaign in an effort to intimidate potential African American voters. In December 1946 a Senate select committee held four days of hearings in Jackson and heard testimony from more than one hundred witnesses regarding Mississippi registration and voting procedures. The majority of the committee recommended in January 1947 that Bilbo should be allowed to take his seat, but the minority issued a report accusing him of having violated the Constitution and federal law during his campaign.

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Since the Civil War most Southern states, at one time or another, have used economic pressures, white primaries, poll taxes, “grandfather clauses,” intimidation and even outright violence to keep the ballot from Negroes. . . . 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 Village Feudists

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

Interesting Links

“Mencken and Dreiser: Friends, When Speaking” (Richard Lingeman, The New York Times)

Symposium/Video: “Sister Carrie in the 21st Century”: Joseph I. Epstein’s address begins at the nine-minute mark (CSPAN)

Previous selections from Dreiser’s Twelve Men
• “The Country Doctor”
• “A True Patriarch”
• “W. L. S.”

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Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men
1,168 pages
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Palmer's Shipyard, Connecticut, c. 1910, oil on board by American artist Reynolds Beal (1867–1951). Noank shipbuilder Robert Palmer is featured in Dreiser’s story.

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Published in 1919, Theodore Dreiser’s Twelve Men includes a dozen portraits of people the author admired. Many of the sketches were written in the first years of the century, after Dreiser had left his job as a reporter and during a period in which he was depressed by the sales of his first novel, Sister Carrie. Literary scholar Ellen Moers, in her study of Dreiser’s major works, writes:

Apparently the most effective therapy Dreiser found was searching out people about the ideals that produced their contentment. It was a strange use to which to put the interviewing technique he had once practiced as a journalist; but it was the literary as well as psychological technique that produced Twelve Men. Each portrait was a stage in his own quest for purpose, for what he once called a “stern conclusion.”

Fictionalized to various degrees, the twelve sketches depict both good Samaritans and individualists—and a few men who can be seen as both. The first six feature acquaintances who Dreiser regarded as successful; the final six are failures in spite of their virtues.

Perhaps the earliest written of the final six is “The Village Feudists.” Originally titled “Heart Bowed Down,” it was based on a 1901 interview with Elihu Potter (Elihu Burridge in the story), a curmudgeonly shopkeeper in the fishing village of Noank, Connecticut. The narrator investigates the mystery of how such an admired and upstanding man alienated so many of his neighbors, especially the town’s leading citizen, the real-life shipyard owner Robert Palmer. Upon the book’s publication, one critic wrote that “the best of the lot as psychology is probably ‘The Village Feudists,’ a study of the warping into marked eccentricity of an essentially fine and generous character.”

Almost universally praised by the critics upon publication (and still considered one of Dreiser’s greatest works), Twelve Men sold fewer than 4,000 copies. But, in an unexpected way, the book did find happiness for its author. S. E. Woodward, senior vice-president of a financial company in New York, was a fan of Dreiser’s books and for a while added a postscript to his business letters: “If you have not read Twelve Men, get it and read it.” Intrigued, Woodward’s secretary, Helen Richardson, purchased a copy, loved the book, and mentioned to her boss that Dreiser was actually her grandmother’s nephew—although she had never met him. “Well,” Woodward responded, “why don’t you go around and see him? If he were my cousin, I certainly would.” So in September 1919, with no introduction or advance notice, she rang the door of the author’s studio at 165 West 10th Street in New York. Five years later, he wrote in an unpublished sketch that, irritated by the disturbance, he nearly didn’t answer—but, after they exchanged greetings, he welcomed her “as I would a beautiful light in a dungeon.” Helen later recalled in her memoir, “I felt as if I had been looking for Dreiser all my life.”

The couple eventually traveled together to Los Angeles, where Helen managed to get roles in movies, including a supporting role in Rudolph Valentino’s first film, The Four Horsemen in the Apocalypse. Dreiser’s attempt to sell movie scenarios in Hollywood came to naught, but while they lived in California he began work on An American Tragedy. Theodore and Helen remained together for the next quarter century and finally married in 1944, the year prior to Dreiser’s death.

Notes: On the first page of the selection is a reference to Parson Thirdly, a character who appears in Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd and his poem “Channel Firing.” The parson’s name is a mocking reference to the habit of dividing sermons into enumerated paragraphs. Decoration Day (page 1043) was observed after the American Civil War as a time to decorate the graves of dead soldiers; after World War II, it became more widely known as Memorial Day. Founded in 1866, G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) was an organization of Union veterans of the Civil War; at its height, there were hundreds of posts across the country.

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In a certain Connecticut fishing-town sometime since, where, besides lobstering, a shipyard and some sail-boat-building there existed the several shops and stores which catered to the wants of those who labored in those lines, there dwelt a groceryman by the name of Elihu Burridge, whose life and methods strongly point the moral and social successes and failures of the rural man. . . . 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.