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American literature
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From the Civil War
to 1914
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Bret Harte
Harriet Beecher Stowe
William
Sydney Porter ("O.
Henry")
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)
"The Prince and the Pauper"
Chapter I-IV,
Chapter V-VII,
Chapter VIII-XI,
Chapter XII-XIV,
Chapter XV-XVII,
Chapter XVIII-XXI,
Chapter XXII-XXVI,
Chapter XXVII-XXXI,
Chapter XXXII-XXXIII
William Dean Howells
Hamlin Garland
Theodore Dreiser
Jack London
Stephen Crane
Frank Norris
Henry James
Upton Sinclair
Henry Adams
Emily Dickinson
"Poems"
Charles Sanders Peirce
William James
Bordon Parker Bowne
John Dewey
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From the Civil War
to 1914
Like the Revolution and the election of Andrew
Jackson, the Civil War was a turning point in
U.S. history and a beginning of new ways of living.
Industry became increasingly important, factories
rose and cities grew, and agrarian preeminence
declined. The frontier, which before had always been
an important factor in the economic scheme, moved
steadily westward and, toward the end of the 19th
century, vanished. The rise of modern America was
accompanied, naturally, by important mutations in
literature.
Literary
comedians
Although they continued to employ some devices of
the older American humorists, a group of comic
writers that rose to prominence was different in
important ways from the older group. Charles
Farrar Browne, David Ross Locke,
Charles Henry Smith, Henry Wheeler Shaw,
and Edgar Wilson Nye wrote, respectively, as
Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. (for Vesuvius)
Nasby, Bill Arp, Josh Billings, and
Bill Nye. Appealing to a national audience,
these authors forsook the sectional
characterizations of earlier humorists and assumed
the roles of less individualized literary comedians.
The nature of the humour thus shifted from character
portrayal to verbal devices such as poor grammar,
bad spelling, and slang, incongruously combined with
Latinate words and learned allusions. Most that they
wrote wore badly, but thousands of Americans in
their time and some in later times found these
authors vastly amusing.
Fiction and local colourists
The first group of fiction writers to become
popular—the local colourists—took over to some
extent the task of portraying sectional groups that
had been abandoned by writers of the new humour.
Bret Harte, first of these writers to achieve
wide success, admitted an indebtedness to prewar
sectional humorists, as did some others; and all
showed resemblances to the earlier group.
Within a
brief period, books by pioneers in the movement
appeared: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown
Folks (1869) and Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside
Stories (1871), delightful vignettes of New England;
Harte’s Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other
Sketches (1870), humorous and sentimental tales of
California mining camp life; and Edward Eggleston’s
Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), a novel of the early
days of the settlement of Indiana. Down into the
20th century, short stories (and a relatively small
number of novels) in patterns set by these three
continued to appear. In time, practically every
corner of the country had been portrayed in
local-colour fiction. Additional writings were the
depictions of Louisiana Creoles by George W.
Cable, of Virginia blacks by Thomas Nelson Page,
of Georgia blacks by Joel Chandler Harris, of
Tennessee mountaineers by Mary Noailles Murfree
(Charles Egbert Craddock), of tight-lipped folk of
New England by Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman, of people of New York City by Henry Cuyler
Bunner and William Sydney Porter (“O.
Henry”). The avowed aim of some of these writers
was to portray realistically the lives of various
sections and thus to promote understanding in a
united nation. The stories as a rule were only
partially realistic, however, since the authors
tended nostalgically to revisit the past instead of
portraying their own time, to winnow out less
glamorous aspects of life, or to develop their
stories with sentiment or humour. Touched by romance
though they were, these fictional works were
transitional to realism, for they did portray common
folk sympathetically; they did concern themselves
with dialect and mores; and some at least avoided
older sentimental or romantic formulas.
Bret Harte

Bret
Harte, original name Francis Brett Harte
(b. Aug. 25, 1836, Albany, N.Y., U.S.—d.
May 5, 1902, London, Eng.), American
writer who helped create the
local-colour school in American fiction.
Harte’s
family settled in New York City and
Brooklyn in 1845. His education was
spotty and irregular, but he inherited a
love of books and managed to get some
verses published at age 11. In 1854 he
left for California and went into mining
country on a brief trip that legend has
expanded into a lengthy participation
in, and intimate knowledge of, camp
life. In 1857 he was employed by the
Northern Californian, a weekly paper.
There his support of Indians and
Mexicans proved unpopular; after a
massacre of Indians in 1860, which he
editorially deplored, he found it
advisable to leave town.
Returning to San Francisco, he was
married and began to write for the
Golden Era, which published the first of
his Condensed Novels, brilliant parodies
of James Fenimore Cooper, Charles
Dickens, Victor Hugo, and others. He
then became a clerk in the U.S. branch
mint, a job that allowed freedom for
editorship of the Californian, for which
he engaged Mark Twain to write weekly
articles.
In
1868, after publishing a series of
Spanish legends akin to Washington
Irving’s Alhambra, he was named editor
of the Overland Monthly. For it he wrote
“The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The
Outcasts of Poker Flat.” Following The
Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches
(1870), he found himself world famous.
He furthered his reputation with “Plain
Language from Truthful James” (1870),
better known as “The Heathen Chinee,” a
poem that attracted national attention.
On it he based his best play, Ah Sin
(1877), a collaboration with Twain.
Flushed
with success, Harte in 1871 signed with
The Atlantic Monthly for $10,000 for 12
stories a year, the highest figure
offered an American writer up to that
time. Resigning a professorship at the
University of California, Harte left for
the East, never to return. In New
England he was greeted as an equal by
the writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, and William Dean Howells, and
was lionized and toasted to the point of
spiritual and moral breakdown. With
personal and family difficulties, his
work slumped. After several years of
indifferent success on the lecture
circuit, Harte in 1878 accepted
consulships in Crefeld, Ger., and later
in Glasgow, Scot. In 1885 he retired to
London. His wife and family joined him
at wide intervals, but he never returned
to the United States.
He
found in England a ready audience for
his tales of a past or mythical
California long after American readers
had tired of his formula. “Ingénue of
the Sierras” and “A Protégée of Jack
Hamlin’s” (both 1893) are perhaps better
than his earlier stories.
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Harriet
Beecher Stowe

Harriet
Beecher Stowe, née Harriet Elizabeth
Beecher (b. June 14, 1811, Litchfield,
Conn., U.S.—d. July 1, 1896, Hartford,
Conn.), American writer and
philanthropist, the author of the novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which contributed so
much to popular feeling against slavery
that it is cited among the causes of the
American Civil War.
Harriet
Beecher was a member of one of the 19th
century’s most remarkable families. The
daughter of the prominent
Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher
and the sister of Catharine, Henry Ward,
and Edward, she grew up in an atmosphere
of learning and moral earnestness. She
attended her sister Catharine’s school
in Hartford, Conn., in 1824–27,
thereafter teaching at the school. In
1832 she accompanied Catharine and their
father to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he
became president of Lane Theological
Seminary and she taught at another
school founded by her sister.
In
Cincinnati she took an active part in
the literary and school life,
contributing stories and sketches to
local journals and compiling a school
geography, until the school closed in
1836. That same year she married Calvin
Ellis Stowe, a clergyman and seminary
professor, who encouraged her literary
activity and was himself an eminent
biblical scholar. She wrote continually
and in 1843 published The Mayflower; or,
Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among
the Descendants of the Pilgrims.
Stowe
lived for 18 years in Cincinnati,
separated only by the Ohio River from a
slave-holding community; she came in
contact with fugitive slaves and learned
about life in the South from friends and
from her own visits there. In 1850 her
husband became professor at Bowdoin
College and the family moved to
Brunswick, Maine.
There
Harriet Stowe began to write a long tale
of slavery, based on her reading of
abolitionist literature and on her
personal observations in Ohio and
Kentucky. Her tale was published
serially (1851–52) in the National Era,
an antislavery paper of Washington,
D.C.; in 1852 it appeared in book form
as Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the
Lowly. The book was an immediate
sensation and was taken up eagerly by
abolitionists while, along with its
author, it was vehemently denounced in
the South, where reading or possessing
the book became an extremely dangerous
enterprise. With sales of 300,000 in the
first year, the book exerted an
influence equaled by few other novels in
history, helping to solidify both pro-
and antislavery sentiment. The book was
translated widely and several times
dramatized (the first time, in 1852,
without Stowe’s permission), where it
played to capacity audiences. Stowe was
enthusiastically received on a visit to
England in 1853, and there she formed
friendships with many leading literary
figures. In that same year she published
A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a
compilation of documents and testimonies
in support of disputed details of her
indictment of slavery.
In 1856
she published Dred: A Tale of the Great
Dismal Swamp, in which she depicted the
deterioration of a society resting on a
slave basis. When The Atlantic Monthly
was established the following year, she
found a ready vehicle for her writings;
she also found outlets in the
Independent of New York City and later
the Christian Union, of which papers her
brother Henry Ward Beecher was editor.
She
thereafter led the life of a woman of
letters, writing novels, of which The
Minister’s Wooing (1859) is best known,
many studies of social life in both
fiction and essay, and a small volume of
religious poems. An article she
published in The Atlantic in 1869, in
which she alleged that Lord Byron had
had an incestuous affair with his
half-sister, created an uproar in
England and cost her much of her
popularity there, but she remained a
leading author and lyceum lecturer in
the United States. Late in her life she
assisted her son Charles E. Stowe on a
biography of her, which appeared in
1889. Stowe had moved to Hartford in
1864, and she largely remained there
until her death.
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William Sydney Porter (“O.
Henry”)

O.
Henry, pseudonym of William Sydney
Porter (b. Sept. 11, 1862, Greensboro,
N.C., U.S.—d. June 5, 1910, New York,
N.Y.), American short-story writer whose
tales romanticized the commonplace—in
particular the life of ordinary people
in New York City. His stories expressed
the effect of coincidence on character
through humour, grim or ironic, and
often had surprise endings, a device
that became identified with his name and
cost him critical favour when its vogue
had passed.
Porter
attended a school taught by his aunt,
then clerked in his uncle’s drugstore.
In 1882 he went to Texas, where he
worked on a ranch, in a general land
office, and later as teller in the First
National Bank in Austin. He began
writing sketches at about the time of
his marriage to Athol Estes in 1887, and
in 1894 he started a humorous weekly,
The Rolling Stone. When that venture
failed, Porter joined the Houston Post
as reporter, columnist, and occasional
cartoonist.
In
February 1896 he was indicted for
embezzlement of bank funds. Friends
aided his flight to Honduras. News of
his wife’s fatal illness, however, took
him back to Austin, and lenient
authorities did not press his case until
after her death. When convicted, Porter
received the lightest sentence possible,
and in 1898 he entered the penitentiary
at Columbus, Ohio; his sentence was
shortened to three years and three
months for good behaviour. As night
druggist in the prison hospital, he
could write to earn money for support of
his daughter Margaret. His stories of
adventure in the southwest U.S. and
Central America were immediately popular
with magazine readers, and when he
emerged from prison W.S. Porter had
become O. Henry.
In 1902
O. Henry arrived in New York—his “Bagdad
on the Subway.” From December 1903 to
January 1906 he produced a story a week
for the New York World, writing also for
magazines. His first book, Cabbages and
Kings (1904), depicted fantastic
characters against exotic Honduran
backgrounds. Both The Four Million
(1906) and The Trimmed Lamp (1907)
explored the lives of the multitude of
New York in their daily routines and
searchings for romance and adventure.
Heart of the West (1907) presented
accurate and fascinating tales of the
Texas range.
Then in
rapid succession came The Voice of the
City (1908), The Gentle Grafter (1908),
Roads of Destiny (1909), Options (1909),
Strictly Business (1910), and Whirligigs
(1910). Whirligigs contains perhaps
Porter’s funniest story, “The Ransom of
Red Chief.”
Despite
his popularity, O. Henry’s final years
were marred by ill health, a desperate
financial struggle, and alcoholism. A
second marriage in 1907 was unhappy.
After his death three more collected
volumes appeared: Sixes and Sevens
(1911), Rolling Stones (1912), and Waifs
and Strays (1917). Later seven fugitive
stories and poems, O. Henryana (1920),
Letters to Lithopolis (1922), and two
collections of his early work on the
Houston Post, Postscripts (1923) and O.
Henry Encore (1939), were published.
Foreign translations and adaptations for
other art forms, including films and
television, attest his universal
application and appeal.
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) was allied
with literary comedians and local colourists. As a
printer’s apprentice, he knew and emulated the
prewar sectional humorists. He rose to prominence in
days when Artemus Ward, Bret Harte,
and their followers were idols of the public. His
first books, The Innocents Abroad (1869) and
Roughing It (1872), like several of later periods,
were travel books in which affiliations with postwar
professional humorists were clearest. The Adventures
of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi
(1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884), his best works, which re-created the life of
the Mississippi valley in the past, were closest to
the work of older humorists and local colourists.
Even in his best work, however, he succumbed now and
then to the temptation to play the buffoon or sink
into burlesque. Despite his flaws, he was one of
America’s greatest writers. He was a very funny man.
He had more skill than his teachers in selecting
evocative details, and he had a genius for
characterization.
Born and raised in
Ohio,
William Dean Howells was an effective
advocate of a new realistic mode of fiction writing.
At the start, Howells conceived of realism as
a truthful portrayal of ordinary facets of life—with
some limitations; he preferred comedy to tragedy,
and he tended to be reticent to the point of
prudishness. The formula was displayed at its best
in Their Wedding Journey (1872), A Modern Instance
(1882), and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).
Howells preferred novels he wrote after he
encountered
Tolstoy’s
writings and was persuaded by them, as he said, to
“set art forever below humanity.” In such later
novels as Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New
Fortunes (1890), he chose characters not only
because they were commonplace but also because the
stories he told about them were commentaries upon
society, government, and economics.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)
"The Prince and
the Pauper"
Chapter I-IV,
Chapter V-VII,
Chapter VIII-XI,
Chapter XII-XIV,
Chapter XV-XVII,
Chapter XVIII-XXI,
Chapter XXII-XXVI,
Chapter XXVII-XXXI,
Chapter
XXXII-XXXIII

American writer
pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
born Nov. 30, 1835, Florida, Mo., U.S.
died April 21, 1910, Redding, Conn.
Main
American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired
international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents
Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883),
and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). A gifted
raconteur, distinctive humorist, and irascible moralist, he transcended
the apparent limitations of his origins to become a popular public
figure and one of America’s best and most beloved writers.
Youth
Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Moffit
Clemens, was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor
health for the first 10 years of his life. His mother tried various
allopathic and hydropathic remedies on him during those early years, and
his recollections of those instances (along with other memories of his
growing up) would eventually find their way into Tom Sawyer and other
writings. Because he was sickly, Clemens was often coddled, particularly
by his mother, and he developed early the tendency to test her
indulgence through mischief, offering only his good nature as bond for
the domestic crimes he was apt to commit. When Jane Clemens was in her
80s, Clemens asked her about his poor health in those early years: “I
suppose that during that whole time you were uneasy about me?” “Yes, the
whole time,” she answered. “Afraid I wouldn’t live?” “No,” she said,
“afraid you would.”
Insofar as Clemens could be said to have inherited his sense of
humour, it would have come from his mother, not his father. John
Clemens, by all reports, was a serious man who seldom demonstrated
affection. No doubt his temperament was affected by his worries over his
financial situation, made all the more distressing by a series of
business failures. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family
that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles (50 km) east from Florida, Mo.,
to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal, where there were greater
opportunities. John Clemens opened a store and eventually became a
justice of the peace, which entitled him to be called “Judge” but not to
a great deal more. In the meantime, the debts accumulated. Still, John
Clemens believed the Tennessee land he had purchased in the late 1820s
(some 70,000 acres [28,000 hectares]) might one day make them wealthy,
and this prospect cultivated in the children a dreamy hope. Late in his
life, Twain reflected on this promise that became a curse:
It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us—dreamers and
indolent.…It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life
rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man
who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.
Judging from his own speculative ventures in silver mining, business,
and publishing, it was a curse that Sam Clemens never quite outgrew.
Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to
recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness. As he remembered it in
Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), the village was a “white town
drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning,” until the arrival of a
riverboat suddenly made it a hive of activity. The gamblers, stevedores,
and pilots, the boisterous raftsmen and elegant travelers, all bound for
somewhere surely glamorous and exciting, would have impressed a young
boy and stimulated his already active imagination. And the lives he
might imagine for these living people could easily be embroidered by the
romantic exploits he read in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Sir
Walter Scott, and others. Those same adventures could be reenacted with
his companions as well, and Clemens and his friends did play at being
pirates, Robin Hood, and other fabled adventurers. Among those
companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom
Twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn.
There were local diversions as well—fishing, picnicking, and swimming. A
boy might swim or canoe to and explore Glasscock’s Island, in the middle
of the Mississippi River, or he might visit the labyrinthine McDowell’s
Cave, about 2 miles (3 km) south of town. The first site evidently
became Jackson’s Island in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the second
became McDougal’s Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the summers,
Clemens visited his uncle John Quarles’s farm, near Florida, Mo., where
he played with his cousins and listened to stories told by the slave
Uncle Daniel, who served, in part, as a model for Jim in Huckleberry
Finn.
It is not surprising that the pleasant events of youth, filtered
through the softening lens of memory, might outweigh disturbing
realities. However, in many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a
rough one. Death from disease during this time was common. His sister
Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was not yet four years old; three
years later his brother Benjamin died. When he was eight, a measles
epidemic (potentially lethal in those days) was so frightening to him
that he deliberately exposed himself to infection by climbing into bed
with his friend Will Bowen in order to relieve the anxiety. A cholera
epidemic a few years later killed at least 24 people, a substantial
number for a small town. In 1847 Clemens’s father died of pneumonia.
John Clemens’s death contributed further to the family’s financial
instability. Even before that year, however, continuing debts had forced
them to auction off property, to sell their only slave, Jennie, to take
in boarders, even to sell their furniture.
Apart from family worries, the social environment was hardly idyllic.
Missouri was a slave state, and, though the young Clemens had been
reassured that chattel slavery was an institution approved by God, he
nevertheless carried with him memories of cruelty and sadness that he
would reflect upon in his maturity. Then there was the violence of
Hannibal itself. One evening in 1844 Clemens discovered a corpse in his
father’s office; it was the body of a California emigrant who had been
stabbed in a quarrel and was placed there for the inquest. In January
1845 Clemens watched a man die in the street after he had been shot by a
local merchant; this incident provided the basis for the Boggs shooting
in Huckleberry Finn. Two years later he witnessed the drowning of one of
his friends, and only a few days later, when he and some friends were
fishing on Sny Island, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, they
discovered the drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave. As it
turned out, Tom Blankenship’s older brother Bence had been secretly
taking food to the runaway slave for some weeks before the slave was
apparently discovered and killed. Bence’s act of courage and kindness
served in some measure as a model for Huck’s decision to help the
fugitive Jim in Huckleberry Finn.
After the death of his father, Sam Clemens worked at several odd jobs
in town, and in 1848 he became a printer’s apprentice for Joseph P.
Ament’s Missouri Courier. He lived sparingly in the Ament household but
was allowed to continue his schooling and, from time to time, indulge in
boyish amusements. Nevertheless, by the time Clemens was 13, his boyhood
had effectively come to an end.
Apprenticeships
In 1850 the oldest Clemens boy, Orion, returned from St. Louis, Mo., and
began to publish a weekly newspaper. A year later he bought the Hannibal
Journal, and Sam and his younger brother Henry worked for him. Sam
became more than competent as a typesetter, but he also occasionally
contributed sketches and articles to his brother’s paper. Some of those
early sketches, such as The Dandy Frightening the Squatter (1852),
appeared in Eastern newspapers and periodicals. In 1852, acting as the
substitute editor while Orion was out of town, Clemens signed a sketch
“W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins.” This was his first known use of a
pseudonym, and there would be several more (Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass,
Quintius Curtius Snodgrass, Josh, and others) before he adopted,
permanently, the pen name Mark Twain.
Having acquired a trade by age 17, Clemens left Hannibal in 1853 with
some degree of self-sufficiency. For almost two decades he would be an
itinerant labourer, trying many occupations. It was not until he was 37,
he once remarked, that he woke up to discover he had become a “literary
person.” In the meantime, he was intent on seeing the world and
exploring his own possibilities. He worked briefly as a typesetter in
St. Louis in 1853 before traveling to New York City to work at a large
printing shop. From there he went to Philadelphia and on to Washington,
D.C.; then he returned to New York, only to find work hard to come by
because of fires that destroyed two publishing houses. During his time
in the East, which lasted until early 1854, he read widely and took in
the sights of these cities. He was acquiring, if not a worldly air, at
least a broader perspective than that offered by his rural background.
And Clemens continued to write, though without firm literary ambitions,
occasionally publishing letters in his brother’s new newspaper. Orion
had moved briefly to Muscatine, Iowa, with their mother, where he had
established the Muscatine Journal before relocating to Keokuk, Iowa, and
opening a printing shop there. Sam Clemens joined his brother in Keokuk
in 1855 and was a partner in the business for a little over a year, but
he then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to work as a typesetter. Still
restless and ambitious, he booked passage in 1857 on a steamboat bound
for New Orleans, La., planning to find his fortune in South America.
Instead, he saw a more immediate opportunity and persuaded the
accomplished riverboat captain Horace Bixby to take him on as an
apprentice.
Having agreed to pay a $500 apprentice fee, Clemens studied the
Mississippi River and the operation of a riverboat under the masterful
instruction of Bixby, with an eye toward obtaining a pilot’s license.
(Clemens paid Bixby $100 down and promised to pay the remainder of the
substantial fee in installments, something he evidently never managed to
do.) Bixby did indeed “learn”—a word Twain insisted on—him the river,
but the young man was an apt pupil as well. Because Bixby was an
exceptional pilot and had a license to navigate the Missouri River and
the upper as well as the lower Mississippi, lucrative opportunities
several times took him upstream. On those occasions, Clemens was
transferred to other veteran pilots and thereby learned the profession
more quickly and thoroughly than he might have otherwise. The profession
of riverboat pilot was, as he confessed many years later in Old Times on
the Mississippi, the most congenial one he had ever followed. Not only
did a pilot receive good wages and enjoy universal respect, but he was
absolutely free and self-sufficient: “a pilot, in those days, was the
only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the
earth,” he wrote. Clemens enjoyed the rank and dignity that came with
the position; he belonged, both informally and officially, to a group of
men whose acceptance he cherished; and—by virtue of his membership in
the Western Boatman’s Benevolent Association, obtained soon after he
earned his pilot’s license in 1859—he participated in a true
“meritocracy” of the sort he admired and would dramatize many years
later in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
Clemens’s years on the river were eventful in other ways. He met and
fell in love with Laura Wright, eight years his junior. The courtship
dissolved in a misunderstanding, but she remained the remembered
sweetheart of his youth. He also arranged a job for his younger brother
Henry on the riverboat Pennsylvania. The boilers exploded, however, and
Henry was fatally injured. Clemens was not on board when the accident
occurred, but he blamed himself for the tragedy. His experience as a cub
and then as a full-fledged pilot gave him a sense of discipline and
direction he might never have acquired elsewhere. Before this period his
had been a directionless knockabout life; afterward he had a sense of
determined possibility. He continued to write occasional pieces
throughout these years and, in one satirical sketch, River Intelligence
(1859), lampooned the self-important senior pilot Isaiah Sellers, whose
observations of the Mississippi were published in a New Orleans
newspaper. Clemens and the other “starchy boys,” as he once described
his fellow riverboat pilots in a letter to his wife, had no particular
use for this nonunion man, but Clemens did envy what he later recalled
to be Sellers’s delicious pen name, Mark Twain.
The Civil War severely curtailed river traffic, and, fearing that he
might be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, Clemens brought his years
on the river to a halt a mere two years after he had acquired his
license. He returned to Hannibal, where he joined the prosecessionist
Marion Rangers, a ragtag lot of about a dozen men. After only two
uneventful weeks, during which the soldiers mostly retreated from Union
troops rumoured to be in the vicinity, the group disbanded. A few of the
men joined other Confederate units, and the rest, along with Clemens,
scattered. Twain would recall this experience, a bit fuzzily and with
some fictional embellishments, in The Private History of the Campaign
That Failed (1885). In that memoir he extenuated his history as a
deserter on the grounds that he was not made for soldiering. Like the
fictional Huckleberry Finn, whose narrative he was to publish in 1885,
Clemens then lit out for the territory. Huck Finn intends to escape to
the Indian country, probably Oklahoma; Clemens accompanied his brother
Orion to the Nevada Territory.
Clemens’s own political sympathies during the war are obscure. It is
known at any rate that Orion Clemens was deeply involved in Republican
Party politics and in Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for the U.S.
presidency, and it was as a reward for those efforts that he was
appointed territorial secretary of Nevada. Upon their arrival in Carson
City, the territorial capital, Sam Clemens’s association with Orion did
not provide him the sort of livelihood he might have supposed, and, once
again, he had to shift for himself—mining and investing in timber and
silver and gold stocks, oftentimes “prospectively rich,” but that was
all. Clemens submitted several letters to the Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise, and these attracted the attention of the editor, Joseph
Goodman, who offered him a salaried job as a reporter. He was again
embarked on an apprenticeship, in the hearty company of a group of
writers sometimes called the Sagebrush Bohemians, and again he
succeeded.
The Nevada Territory was a rambunctious and violent place during the
boom years of the Comstock Lode, from its discovery in 1859 to its peak
production in the late 1870s. Nearby Virginia City was known for its
gambling and dance halls, its breweries and whiskey mills, its murders,
riots, and political corruption. Years later Twain recalled the town in
a public lecture: “It was no place for a Presbyterian,” he said. Then,
after a thoughtful pause, he added, “And I did not remain one very
long.” Nevertheless, he seems to have retained something of his moral
integrity. He was often indignant and prone to expose fraud and
corruption when he found them. This was a dangerous indulgence, for
violent retribution was not uncommon.
In February 1863 Clemens covered the legislative session in Carson
City and wrote three letters for the Enterprise. He signed them “Mark
Twain.” Apparently the mistranscription of a telegram misled Clemens to
believe that the pilot Isaiah Sellers had died and that his cognomen was
up for grabs. Clemens seized it. (See Researcher’s Note: Origins of the
name Mark Twain.) It would be several years before this pen name would
acquire the firmness of a full-fledged literary persona, however. In the
meantime, he was discovering by degrees what it meant to be a “literary
person.”
Already he was acquiring a reputation outside the territory. Some of
his articles and sketches had appeared in New York papers, and he became
the Nevada correspondent for the San Francisco Morning Call. In 1864,
after challenging the editor of a rival newspaper to a duel and then
fearing the legal consequences for this indiscretion, he left Virginia
City for San Francisco and became a full-time reporter for the Call.
Finding that work tiresome, he began contributing to the Golden Era and
the new literary magazine the Californian, edited by Bret Harte. After
he published an article expressing his fiery indignation at police
corruption in San Francisco, and after a man with whom he associated was
arrested in a brawl, Clemens decided it prudent to leave the city for a
time. He went to the Tuolumne foothills to do some mining. It was there
that he heard the story of a jumping frog. The story was widely known,
but it was new to Clemens, and he took notes for a literary
representation of the tale. When the humorist Artemus Ward invited him
to contribute something for a book of humorous sketches, Clemens decided
to write up the story. Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog arrived too late
to be included in the volume, but it was published in the New York
Saturday Press in November 1865 and was subsequently reprinted
throughout the country. “Mark Twain” had acquired sudden celebrity, and
Sam Clemens was following in his wake.
Literary maturity
The next few years were important for Clemens. After he had finished
writing the jumping-frog story but before it was published, he declared
in a letter to Orion that he had a “ ‘call’ to literature of a low
order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of,” he continued, “but
it is my strongest suit.” However much he might deprecate his calling,
it appears that he was committed to making a professional career for
himself. He continued to write for newspapers, traveling to Hawaii for
the Sacramento Union and also writing for New York newspapers, but he
apparently wanted to become something more than a journalist. He went on
his first lecture tour, speaking mostly on the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii)
in 1866. It was a success, and for the rest of his life, though he found
touring grueling, he knew he could take to the lecture platform when he
needed money. Meanwhile, he tried, unsuccessfully, to publish a book
made up of his letters from Hawaii. His first book was in fact The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867),
but it did not sell well. That same year, he moved to New York City,
serving as the traveling correspondent for the San Francisco Alta
California and for New York newspapers. He had ambitions to enlarge his
reputation and his audience, and the announcement of a transatlantic
excursion to Europe and the Holy Land provided him with just such an
opportunity. The Alta paid the substantial fare in exchange for some 50
letters he would write concerning the trip. Eventually his account of
the voyage was published as The Innocents Abroad (1869). It was a great
success.
The trip abroad was fortuitous in another way. He met on the boat a
young man named Charlie Langdon, who invited Clemens to dine with his
family in New York and introduced him to his sister Olivia; the writer
fell in love with her. Clemens’s courtship of Olivia Langdon, the
daughter of a prosperous businessman from Elmira, N.Y., was an ardent
one, conducted mostly through correspondence. They were married in
February 1870. With financial assistance from Olivia’s father, Clemens
bought a one-third interest in the Express of Buffalo, N.Y., and began
writing a column for a New York City magazine, the Galaxy. A son,
Langdon, was born in November 1870, but the boy was frail and would die
of diphtheria less than two years later. Clemens came to dislike Buffalo
and hoped that he and his family might move to the Nook Farm area of
Hartford, Conn. In the meantime, he worked hard on a book about his
experiences in the West. Roughing It was published in February 1872 and
sold well. The next month, Olivia Susan (Susy) Clemens was born in
Elmira. Later that year, Clemens traveled to England. Upon his return,
he began work with his friend Charles Dudley Warner on a satirical novel
about political and financial corruption in the United States. The
Gilded Age (1873) was remarkably well received, and a play based on the
most amusing character from the novel, Colonel Sellers, also became
quite popular.
The Gilded Age was Twain’s first attempt at a novel, and the
experience was apparently congenial enough for him to begin writing Tom
Sawyer, along with his reminiscences about his days as a riverboat
pilot. He also published A True Story, a moving dialect sketch told by a
former slave, in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly in 1874. A second
daughter, Clara, was born in June, and the Clemenses moved into their
still-unfinished house in Nook Farm later the same year, counting among
their neighbours Warner and the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. Old Times
on the Mississippi appeared in the Atlantic in installments in 1875. The
obscure journalist from the wilds of California and Nevada had arrived:
he had settled down in a comfortable house with his family; he was known
worldwide; his books sold well, and he was a popular favourite on the
lecture tour; and his fortunes had steadily improved over the years. In
the process, the journalistic and satirical temperament of the writer
had, at times, become retrospective. Old Times, which would later become
a portion of Life on the Mississippi, described comically, but a bit
ruefully too, a way of life that would never return. The highly episodic
narrative of Tom Sawyer, which recounts the mischievous adventures of a
boy growing up along the Mississippi River, was coloured by a nostalgia
for childhood and simplicity that would permit Twain to characterize the
novel as a “hymn” to childhood. The continuing popularity of Tom Sawyer
(it sold well from its first publication, in 1876, and has never gone
out of print) indicates that Twain could write a novel that appealed to
young and old readers alike. The antics and high adventure of Tom Sawyer
and his comrades—including pranks in church and at school, the comic
courtship of Becky Thatcher, a murder mystery, and a thrilling escape
from a cave—continue to delight children, while the book’s comedy,
narrated by someone who vividly recalls what it was to be a child,
amuses adults with similar memories.
In the summer of 1876, while staying with his in-laws Susan and
Theodore Crane on Quarry Farm overlooking Elmira, Clemens began writing
what he called in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells “Huck
Finn’s Autobiography.” Huck had appeared as a character in Tom Sawyer,
and Clemens decided that the untutored boy had his own story to tell. He
soon discovered that it had to be told in Huck’s own vernacular voice.
Huckleberry Finn was written in fits and starts over an extended period
and would not be published until 1885. During that interval, Twain often
turned his attention to other projects, only to return again and again
to the novel’s manuscript.
Twain believed he had humiliated himself before Boston’s literary
worthies when he delivered one of many speeches at a dinner
commemorating the 70th birthday of poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf
Whittier. Twain’s contribution to the occasion fell flat (perhaps
because of a failure of delivery or the contents of the speech itself),
and some believed he had insulted three literary icons in particular:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell
Holmes. The embarrassing experience may have in part prompted his
removal to Europe for nearly two years. He published A Tramp Abroad
(1880), about his travels with his friend Joseph Twichell in the Black
Forest and the Swiss Alps, and The Prince and the Pauper (1881), a
fanciful tale set in 16th-century England and written for “young people
of all ages.” In 1882 he traveled up the Mississippi with Horace Bixby,
taking notes for the book that became Life on the Mississippi (1883).
All the while, he continued to make often ill-advised investments, the
most disastrous of which was the continued financial support of an
inventor, James W. Paige, who was perfecting an automatic typesetting
machine. In 1884 Clemens founded his own publishing company, bearing the
name of his nephew and business agent, Charles L. Webster, and embarked
on a four-month lecture tour with fellow author George W. Cable, both to
raise money for the company and to promote the sales of Huckleberry
Finn. Not long after that, Clemens began the first of several
Tom-and-Huck sequels. None of them would rival Huckleberry Finn. All the
Tom-and-Huck narratives engage in broad comedy and pointed satire, and
they show that Twain had not lost his ability to speak in Huck’s voice.
What distinguishes Huckleberry Finn from the others is the moral dilemma
Huck faces in aiding the runaway slave Jim while at the same time
escaping from the unwanted influences of so-called civilization. Through
Huck, the novel’s narrator, Twain was able to address the shameful
legacy of chattel slavery prior to the Civil War and the persistent
racial discrimination and violence after. That he did so in the voice
and consciousness of a 14-year-old boy, a character who shows the signs
of having been trained to accept the cruel and indifferent attitudes of
a slaveholding culture, gives the novel its affecting power, which can
elicit genuine sympathies in readers but can also generate controversy
and debate and can affront those who find the book patronizing toward
African Americans, if not perhaps much worse. If Huckleberry Finn is a
great book of American literature, its greatness may lie in its
continuing ability to touch a nerve in the American national
consciousness that is still raw and troubling.
For a time, Clemens’s prospects seemed rosy. After working closely
with Ulysses S. Grant, he watched as his company’s publication of the
former U.S. president’s memoirs in 1885–86 became an overwhelming
success. (For an explanation of why Grant’s memoirs were so successful,
see Sidebar: Translating Thought into Action: Grant’s Personal Memoirs.)
Clemens believed a forthcoming biography of Pope Leo XIII would do even
better. The prototype for the Paige typesetter also seemed to be working
splendidly. It was in a generally sanguine mood that he began to write A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, about the exploits of a
practical and democratic factory superintendent who is magically
transported to Camelot and attempts to transform the kingdom according
to 19th-century republican values and modern technology. So confident
was he about prospects for the typesetter that Clemens predicted this
novel would be his “swan-song” to literature and that he would live
comfortably off the profits of his investment.
Things did not go according to plan, however. His publishing company
was floundering, and cash flow problems meant he was drawing on his
royalties to provide capital for the business. Clemens was suffering
from rheumatism in his right arm, but he continued to write for
magazines out of necessity. Still, he was getting deeper and deeper in
debt, and by 1891 he had ceased his monthly payments to support work on
the Paige typesetter, effectively giving up on an investment that over
the years had cost him some $200,000 or more. He closed his beloved
house in Hartford, and the family moved to Europe, where they might live
more cheaply and, perhaps, where his wife, who had always been frail,
might improve her health. Debts continued to mount, and the financial
panic of 1893 made it difficult to borrow money. Luckily, he was
befriended by a Standard Oil executive, Henry Huttleston Rogers, who
undertook to put Clemens’s financial house in order. Clemens assigned
his property, including his copyrights, to Olivia, announced the failure
of his publishing house, and declared personal bankruptcy. In 1894,
approaching his 60th year, Samuel Clemens was forced to repair his
fortunes and to remake his career.
Old age
Late in 1894 The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those
Extraordinary Twins was published. Set in the antebellum South,
Pudd’nhead Wilson concerns the fates of transposed babies, one white and
the other black, and is a fascinating, if ambiguous, exploration of the
social and legal construction of race. It also reflects Twain’s thoughts
on determinism, a subject that would increasingly occupy his thoughts
for the remainder of his life. One of the maxims from that novel
jocularly expresses his point of view: “Training is everything. The
peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with
a college education.” Clearly, despite his reversal of fortunes, Twain
had not lost his sense of humour. But he was frustrated too—frustrated
by financial difficulties but also by the public’s perception of him as
a funnyman and nothing more. The persona of Mark Twain had become
something of a curse for Samuel Clemens.
Clemens published his next novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of
Arc (serialized 1895–96), anonymously in hopes that the public might
take it more seriously than a book bearing the Mark Twain name. The
strategy did not work, for it soon became generally known that he was
the author; when the novel was first published in book form, in 1896,
his name appeared on the volume’s spine but not on its title page.
However, in later years he would publish some works anonymously, and
still others he declared could not be published until long after his
death, on the largely erroneous assumption that his true views would
scandalize the public. Clemens’s sense of wounded pride was necessarily
compromised by his indebtedness, and he embarked on a lecture tour in
July 1895 that would take him across North America to Vancouver, B.C.,
Can., and from there around the world. He gave lectures in Australia,
New Zealand, India, South Africa, and points in-between, arriving in
England a little more than a year afterward. Clemens was in London when
he was notified of the death of his daughter Susy, of spinal meningitis.
A pall settled over the Clemens household; they would not celebrate
birthdays or holidays for the next several years. As an antidote to his
grief as much as anything else, Clemens threw himself into work. He
wrote a great deal he did not intend to publish during those years, but
he did publish Following the Equator (1897), a relatively serious
account of his world lecture tour. By 1898 the revenue generated from
the tour and the subsequent book, along with Henry Huttleston Rogers’s
shrewd investments of his money, had allowed Clemens to pay his
creditors in full. Rogers was shrewd as well in the way he publicized
and redeemed the reputation of “Mark Twain” as a man of impeccable moral
character. Palpable tokens of public approbation are the three honorary
degrees conferred on Clemens in his last years—from Yale University in
1901, from the University of Missouri in 1902, and, the one he most
coveted, from Oxford University in 1907. When he traveled to Missouri to
receive his honorary Doctor of Laws, he visited old friends in Hannibal
along the way. He knew that it would be his last visit to his hometown.
Clemens had acquired the esteem and moral authority he had yearned
for only a few years before, and the writer made good use of his
reinvigorated position. He began writing The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg (1899), a devastating satire of venality in small-town
America, and the first of three manuscript versions of The Mysterious
Stranger. (None of the manuscripts was ever completed, and they were
posthumously combined and published in 1916.) He also started What Is
Man? (published anonymously in 1906), a dialogue in which a wise “Old
Man” converts a resistant “Young Man” to a brand of philosophical
determinism. He began to dictate his autobiography, which he would
continue to do until a few months before he died. Some of Twain’s best
work during his late years was not fiction but polemical essays in which
his earnestness was not in doubt: an essay against anti-Semitism,
Concerning the Jews (1899); a denunciation of imperialism, To the Man
Sitting in Darkness (1901); an essay on lynching, The United States of
Lyncherdom (posthumously published in 1923); and a pamphlet on the
brutal and exploitative Belgian rule in the Congo, King Leopold’s
Soliloquy (1905).
Clemens’s last years have been described as his “bad mood” period.
The description may or may not be apt. It is true that in his polemical
essays and in much of his fiction during this time he was venting
powerful moral feelings and commenting freely on the “damn’d human
race.” But he had always been against sham and corruption, greed,
cruelty, and violence. Even in his California days, he was principally
known as the “Moralist of the Main” and only incidentally as the “Wild
Humorist of the Pacific Slope.” It was not the indignation he was
expressing during these last years that was new; what seemed to be new
was the frequent absence of the palliative humour that had seasoned the
earlier outbursts. At any rate, even though the worst of his financial
worries were behind him, there was no particular reason for Clemens to
be in a good mood.
The family, including Clemens himself, had suffered from one sort of
ailment or another for a very long time. In 1896 his daughter Jean was
diagnosed with epilepsy, and the search for a cure, or at least relief,
had taken the family to different doctors throughout Europe. By 1901 his
wife’s health was seriously deteriorating. She was violently ill in
1902, and for a time Clemens was allowed to see her for only five
minutes a day. Removing to Italy seemed to improve her condition, but
that was only temporary. She died on June 5, 1904. Something of his
affection for her and his sense of personal loss after her death is
conveyed in the moving piece Eve’s Diary (1906). The story chronicles in
tenderly comic ways the loving relationship between Adam and Eve. After
Eve dies, Adam comments at her grave site, “Wheresoever she was, there
was Eden.” Clemens had written a commemorative poem on the anniversary
of Susy’s death, and Eve’s Diary serves the equivalent function for the
death of his wife. He would have yet another occasion to publish his
grief. His daughter Jean died on Dec. 24, 1909. The Death of Jean (1911)
was written beside her deathbed. He was writing, he said, “to keep my
heart from breaking.”
It is true that Clemens was bitter and lonely during his last years.
He took some solace in the grandfatherly friendships he established with
young schoolgirls he called his “angelfish.” His “Angelfish Club”
consisted of 10 to 12 girls who were admitted to membership on the basis
of their intelligence, sincerity, and good will, and he corresponded
with them frequently. In 1906–07 he published selected chapters from his
ongoing autobiography in the North American Review. Judging from the
tone of the work, writing his autobiography often supplied Clemens with
at least a wistful pleasure. These writings and others reveal an
imaginative energy and humorous exuberance that do not fit the picture
of a wholly bitter and cynical man. He moved into his new house in
Redding, Conn., in June 1908, and that too was a comfort. He had wanted
to call it “Innocents at Home,” but his daughter Clara convinced him to
name it “Stormfield,” after a story he had written about a sea captain
who sailed for heaven but arrived at the wrong port. Extracts from
Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven was published in installments in
Harper’s Magazine in 1907–08. It is an uneven but delightfully humorous
story, one that critic and journalist H.L. Mencken ranked on a level
with Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Little Bessie and
Letters from the Earth (both published posthumously) were also written
during this period, and, while they are sardonic, they are antically
comic as well. Clemens thought Letters from the Earth was so heretical
that it could never be published. However, it was published in a book by
that name, along with other previously unpublished writings, in 1962,
and it reinvigorated public interest in Twain’s serious writings. The
letters did present unorthodox views—that God was something of a
bungling scientist and human beings his failed experiment, that Christ,
not Satan, devised hell, and that God was ultimately to blame for human
suffering, injustice, and hypocrisy. Twain was speaking candidly in his
last years but still with a vitality and ironic detachment that kept his
work from being merely the fulminations of an old and angry man.
Clara Clemens married in October 1909 and left for Europe by early
December. Jean died later that month. Clemens was too grief-stricken to
attend the burial services, and he stopped working on his autobiography.
Perhaps as an escape from painful memories, he traveled to Bermuda in
January 1910. By early April he was having severe chest pains. His
biographer Albert Bigelow Paine joined him, and together they returned
to Stormfield. Clemens died on April 21. The last piece of writing he
did, evidently, was the short humorous sketch Etiquette for the
Afterlife: Advice to Paine (first published in full in 1995). Clearly,
Clemens’s mind was on final things; just as clearly, he had not
altogether lost his sense of humour. Among the pieces of advice he
offered Paine, for when his turn to enter heaven arrived, was this:
“Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you
would stay out and the dog would go in.” Clemens was buried in the
family plot in Elmira, N.Y., alongside his wife, his son, and two of his
daughters. Only Clara survived him.
Reputation and assessment
Shortly after Clemens’s death, Howells published My Mark Twain (1910),
in which he pronounced Samuel Clemens “sole, incomparable, the Lincoln
of our literature.” Twenty-five years later Ernest Hemingway wrote in
The Green Hills of Africa (1935), “All modern American literature comes
from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Both compliments
are grandiose and a bit obscure. For Howells, Twain’s significance was
apparently social—the humorist, Howells wrote, spoke to and for the
common American man and woman; he emancipated and dignified the speech
and manners of a class of people largely neglected by writers (except as
objects of fun or disapproval) and largely ignored by genteel America.
For Hemingway, Twain’s achievement was evidently an aesthetic one
principally located in one novel. For later generations, however, the
reputation of and controversy surrounding Huckleberry Finn largely
eclipsed the vast body of Clemens’s substantial literary corpus: the
novel has been dropped from some American schools’ curricula on the
basis of its characterization of the slave Jim, which some regard as
demeaning, and its repeated use of an offensive racial epithet.
As a humorist and as a moralist, Twain worked best in short pieces.
Roughing It is a rollicking account of his adventures in the American
West, but it is also seasoned with such exquisite yarns as Buck
Fanshaw’s Funeral and The Story of the Old Ram; A Tramp Abroad is for
many readers a disappointment, but it does contain the nearly perfect
Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn. In A True Story, told in an African American
dialect, Twain transformed the resources of the typically American
humorous story into something serious and profoundly moving. The Man
That Corrupted Hadleyburg is relentless social satire; it is also the
most formally controlled piece Twain ever wrote. The originality of the
longer works is often to be found more in their conception than in their
sustained execution. The Innocents Abroad is perhaps the funniest of all
of Twain’s books, but it also redefined the genre of the travel
narrative by attempting to suggest to the reader, as Twain wrote, “how
he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with
his own eyes.” Similarly, in Tom Sawyer, he treated childhood not as the
achievement of obedience to adult authority but as a period of
mischief-making fun and good-natured affection. Like Miguel de
Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which he much admired, Huckleberry Finn rang
changes on the picaresque novel that are of permanent interest.
Twain was not the first Anglo-American to treat the problems of race
and racism in all their complexity, but, along with that of Herman
Melville, his treatment remains of vital interest more than a hundred
years later. His ability to swiftly and convincingly create a variety of
fictional characters rivals that of Charles Dickens. Twain’s scalawags,
dreamers, stalwarts, and toughs, his solicitous aunts, ambitious
politicians, carping widows, false aristocrats, canny but generous
slaves, sententious moralists, brave but misguided children, and decent
but complicitous bystanders, his loyal lovers and friends, and his
fractious rivals—these and many more constitute a virtual census of
American types. And his mastery of spoken language, of slang and argot
and dialect, gave these figures a voice. Twain’s democratic sympathies
and his steadfast refusal to condescend to the lowliest of his creations
give the whole of his literary production a point of view that is far
more expansive, interesting, and challenging than his somewhat crusty
philosophical speculations. Howells, who had known most of the important
American literary figures of the 19th century and thought them to be
more or less like one another, believed that Twain was unique. Twain
will always be remembered first and foremost as a humorist, but he was a
great deal more—a public moralist, popular entertainer, political
philosopher, travel writer, and novelist. Perhaps it is too much to
claim, as some have, that Twain invented the American point of view in
fiction, but that such a notion might be entertained indicates that his
place in American literary culture is secure.
Thomas V. Quirk
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William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells, (b. March 1,
1837, Martins Ferry, Ohio, U.S.—d. May
11, 1920, New York City), U.S. novelist
and critic, the dean of late
19th-century American letters, the
champion of literary realism, and the
close friend and adviser of Mark Twain
and Henry James.
The son of an itinerant printer and
newspaper editor, Howells grew up in
various Ohio towns and began work early
as a typesetter and later as a reporter.
Meanwhile, he taught himself languages,
becoming well read in German, Spanish,
and English classics, and began
contributing poems to The Atlantic
Monthly. His campaign biography of
Abraham Lincoln (1860) financed a trip
to New England, where he met the great
men of the literary establishment, James
Russell Lowell, editor of The Atlantic
Monthly, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Hawthorne, and Emerson. On Lincoln’s
victory he was rewarded with a
consulship at Venice (1861–65), which
enabled him to marry. On his return to
the U.S. he became assistant editor
(1866–71), then editor (1871–81), of The
Atlantic Monthly, in which he began
publishing reviews and articles that
interpreted American writers. He was a
shrewd judge of his contemporaries. He
immediately recognized the worth of
Henry James, and he was the first to
take Mark Twain seriously as an artist.
Their Wedding Journey (1872) and A
Chance Acquaintance (1873) were his
first realistic novels of uneventful
middle-class life. There followed some
international novels, contrasting
American and European manners. Howells’
best work depicts the American scene as
it changed from a simple, egalitarian
society where luck and pluck were
rewarded to one in which social and
economic gulfs were becoming
unbridgeable, and the individual’s fate
was ruled by chance. He wrote A Modern
Instance (1882), the story of the
disintegration of a marriage, which is
considered his strongest novel. His best
known work, The Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885), deals with a self-made
businessman’s efforts to fit into Boston
society. In 1887 he risked both
livelihood and reputation with his plea
for clemency for the condemned Haymarket
anarchists on the grounds that they had
been convicted for their political
beliefs. In 1888 he left Boston for New
York.
His deeply shaken social faith is
reflected in the novels of his New York
period, such as the strongly pro-labour
Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New
Fortunes (1890), generally considered
his finest work, which dramatizes the
teeming, competitive life of New York,
where a representative group of
characters try to establish a magazine.
Howells’ critical writings of this
period welcomed the young Naturalistic
novelists Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane,
and Frank Norris and promoted the
European authors Turgenev, Ibsen, Zola,
Pérez Galdós, Verga, and above all
Tolstoy.
Long before his death Howells was out
of fashion. Later critics have more
fairly evaluated his enormous influence,
and readers have rediscovered the style,
humour, and honesty of his best works.
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The naturalists
Other American writers toward the close of the 19th
century moved toward naturalism, a more advanced
stage of realism. Hamlin Garland’s writings
exemplified some aspects of this development when he
made short stories and novels vehicles for
philosophical and social preachments and was franker
than Howells in stressing the harsher details of the
farmer’s struggles and in treating the subject of
sex. Main-Travelled Roads (1891) and Rose of
Dutcher’s Coolly (1895) displayed Garland’s
particular talents. These and a critical manifesto
for the new fiction, Crumbling Idols (1894), were
influential contributions to a developing movement.
Other American
authors of the same period or slightly later were
avowed followers of French naturalists led by
Émile Zola.
Theodore Dreiser,
for instance, treated subjects that had seemed too
daring to earlier realists and, like other
Naturalists, illustrated his own beliefs by his
depictions of characters and unfolding of plots.
Holding that men’s deeds were “chemical
compulsions,” he showed characters unable to direct
their actions. Holding also that “the race was to
the swift and the battle to the strong,” he showed
characters defeated by stronger and more ruthless
opponents. His major books included Sister Carrie
(1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), The Financier
(1912), The Titan (1914), and—much later—An American
Tragedy (1925).
Jack London was was a pioneer in the
then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction
and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain
worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his
fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author
of Call of the Wild, set in the Yukon Gold Rush, as
well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An
Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also
wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The
Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and The Sea
Wolf, of the San Francisco Bay area.
Dreiser did
not bother with—or did not care for—niceties of
style or elaborate symbolism such as were found in
French naturalistic works; but Stephen Crane and
Frank Norris were attentive to such matters. In
short novels, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)
and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and in some of
his short stories, Crane was an impressionist
who made his details and his setting forth of them
embody a conception of man overwhelmed by
circumstance and environment. Frank Norris,
who admired Crane’s “aptitude for making
phrases—sparks that cast a momentary gleam upon
whole phases of life,” himself tried to make
phrases, scenes, and whole narratives cast such
gleams in McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and
The Pit (1903). Both Crane and Norris
died young, their full abilities undeveloped but
their experiments foreshadowing later achievements
in the 20th-century novel.
Hamlin Garland

Hamlin Garland, (b. Sept. 14, 1860,
West Salem, Wis., U.S.—d. March 4, 1940,
Hollywood, Calif.), American author
perhaps best remembered for his short
stories and his autobiographical “Middle
Border” series of narratives.
As his farming family moved
progressively westward from Wisconsin to
Iowa and then to the Dakotas, Garland
rebelled against the vicissitudes of
pioneering and went to Boston for a
career in 1884. Self-educated there, he
gradually won a place for himself in the
literary set of Boston and Cambridge and
was influenced by the novelist William
Dean Howells. Garland recorded the
physical oppression and economic
frustrations of pioneer life on the
Great Plains in the short stories that
were collected in Main-Travelled Roads
(1891), one of his best works. The short
stories he published in Prairie Folk
(1892) and Wayside Courtships (1897)
were later combined in Other
Main-Travelled Roads (1910). In 1892
Garland published three lacklustre
novels. His next novel, Rose of
Dutcher’s Coolly (1895), tells the story
of a sensitive young woman who rebels
against the drudgery of farm life and
goes to Chicago to pursue her talent for
literature. Garland’s critical theory of
“veritism,” set forth in the essay
collection Crumbling Idols (1894),
called for the use of socially conscious
realism combined with more
individualistic and subjective elements.
Garland next turned to the “high
country” of the American West and to
romantic melodrama for materials,
producing a series of mediocre novels
that were serialized in the popular
“slick magazines.” He grew increasingly
critical of the “excesses” of the
naturalists, and in 1917 in a mellow
autobiographical mood wrote A Son of the
Middle Border, in which he described his
family background and childhood as the
son of pioneer farmers. This book won
immediate and deserved acclaim. Its
sequel, A Daughter of the Middle Border
(1921), was less successful, as were
Trail-Makers of the Middle Border (1926)
and his last historical and
autobiographical novels.
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Theodore
Dreiser

American author
born Aug. 27, 1871, Terre Haute, Ind., U.S.
died Dec. 28, 1945, Hollywood, Calif.
Main
novelist who was the outstanding American practitioner of naturalism. He
was the leading figure in a national literary movement that replaced the
observance of Victorian notions of propriety with the unflinching
presentation of real-life subject matter. Among other themes, his novels
explore the new social problems that had arisen in a rapidly
industrializing America.
Life.
Dreiser was the ninth of 10 surviving children in a family whose
perennial poverty forced frequent moves between small Indiana towns and
Chicago in search of a lower cost of living. His father, a German
immigrant, was a mostly unemployed millworker who subscribed to a stern
and narrow Roman Catholicism. His mother’s gentle and compassionate
outlook sprang from her Czech Mennonite background. In later life
Dreiser would bitterly associate religion with his father’s
ineffectuality and the family’s resulting material deprivation, but he
always spoke and wrote of his mother with unswerving affection.
Dreiser’s own harsh experience of poverty as a youth and his early
yearnings for wealth and success would become dominant themes in his
novels, and the misadventures of his brothers and sisters in early adult
life gave him additional material on which to base his characters.
Dreiser’s spotty education in parochial and public schools was capped
by a year (1889–90) at Indiana University. He began a career as a
newspaper reporter in Chicago in 1892 and worked his way to the East
Coast. While writing for a Pittsburgh newspaper in 1894, he read works
by the scientists T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall and adopted the
speculations of the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Through these readings
and his own experience, Dreiser came to believe that human beings are
helpless in the grip of instincts and social forces beyond their
control, and he judged human society as an unequal contest between the
strong and the weak. In 1894 Dreiser arrived in New York City, where he
worked for several newspapers and contributed to magazines. He married
Sara White in 1898, but his roving affections (and resulting
infidelities) doomed their relationship. The couple separated
permanently in 1912.
Dreiser began writing his first novel, Sister Carrie, in 1899 at the
suggestion of a newspaper colleague. Doubleday, Page and Company
published it the following year, thanks in large measure to the
enthusiasm of that firm’s reader, the novelist Frank Norris. But
Doubleday’s qualms about the book, the story line of which involves a
young kept woman whose “immorality” goes unpunished, led the publisher
to limit the book’s advertising, and consequently it sold fewer than 500
copies. This disappointment and an accumulation of family and marital
troubles sent Dreiser into a suicidal depression from which he was
rescued in 1901 by his brother, Paul Dresser, a well-known songwriter,
who arranged for Theodore’s treatment in a sanitarium. Dreiser recovered
his spirits, and in the next nine years he achieved notable financial
success as an editor in chief of several women’s magazines. He was
forced to resign in 1910, however, because of an office imbroglio
involving his romantic fascination with an assistant’s daughter.
Somewhat encouraged by the earlier response to Sister Carrie in
England and the novel’s republication in America, Dreiser returned to
writing fiction. The reception accorded his second novel, Jennie
Gerhardt (1911), the story of a woman who submits sexually to rich and
powerful men to help her poverty-stricken family, lent him further
encouragement. The first two volumes of a projected trilogy of novels
based on the life of the American transportation magnate Charles T.
Yerkes, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), followed. Dreiser
recorded his experiences on a trip to Europe in A Traveler at Forty
(1913). In his next major novel, The ‘Genius’ (1915), he transformed his
own life and numerous love affairs into a sprawling semiautobiographical
chronicle that was censured by the New York Society for the Suppression
of Vice. There ensued 10 years of sustained literary activity during
which Dreiser produced a short-story collection, Free and Other Stories
(1918); a book of sketches, Twelve Men (1919); philosophical essays,
Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920); a rhapsodic description of New York, The Color
of A Great City (1923); works of drama, including Plays of the Natural
and Supernatural (1916) and The Hand of the Potter (1918); and the
autobiographical works A Hoosier Holiday (1916) and A Book About Myself
(1922).
In 1925 Dreiser’s first novel in a decade, An American Tragedy, based
on a celebrated murder case, was published. This book brought Dreiser a
degree of critical and commercial success he had never before attained
and would not thereafter equal. The book’s highly critical view of the
American legal system also made him the adopted champion of social
reformers. He became involved in a variety of causes and slackened his
literary production. A visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 produced a
skeptical critique of that communist society entitled Dreiser Looks at
Russia (1928). His only other significant publications in the late 1920s
were collections of stories and sketches written earlier, Chains (1927)
and A Gallery of Women (1929), and an unsuccessful collection of poetry,
Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed (1926).
The Great Depression of the 1930s ended Dreiser’s prosperity and
intensified his commitment to social causes. He came to reconsider his
opposition to communism and wrote the anticapitalist Tragic America
(1931). His only important literary achievement in this decade was the
autobiography of his childhood and teens, Dawn (1931), one of the most
candid self-revelations by any major writer. In the middle and late ’30s
his growing social consciousness and his interest in science converged
to produce a vaguely mystical philosophy.
In 1938 Dreiser moved from New York to Los Angeles with Helen
Richardson, who had been his mistress since 1920. There he set about
marketing the film rights to his earlier works. In 1942 he began
belatedly to rewrite The Bulwark, a novel begun in 1912. The task was
completed in 1944, the same year he married Helen. (Sara White Dreiser
had died in 1942.) One of his last acts was to join the American
Communist Party. Helen helped him complete most of The Stoic, the
long-postponed third volume of his Yerkes trilogy, in the weeks before
his death. Both The Bulwark and The Stoic were published posthumously
(1946 and 1947, respectively). A collection of Dreiser’s philosophical
speculations, Notes on Life, appeared in 1974.
Works
Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), is a work of pivotal
importance in American literature despite its inauspicious launching. It
became a beacon to subsequent American writers whose allegiance was to
the realistic treatment of any and all subject matter. Sister Carrie
tells the story of a rudderless but pretty small-town girl who comes to
the big city filled with vague ambitions. She is used by men and uses
them in turn to become a successful Broadway actress while George
Hurstwood, the married man who has run away with her, loses his grip on
life and descends into beggary and suicide. Sister Carrie was the first
masterpiece of the American naturalistic movement in its grittily
factual presentation of the vagaries of urban life and in its ingenuous
heroine, who goes unpunished for her transgressions against conventional
sexual morality. The book’s strengths include a brooding but
compassionate view of humanity, a memorable cast of characters, and a
compelling narrative line. The emotional disintegration of Hurstwood is
a much-praised triumph of psychological analysis.
Dreiser’s second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), is a lesser
achievement than Sister Carrie owing to its heroine’s comparative lack
of credibility. Based on Dreiser’s remembrance of his beloved mother,
Jennie emerges as a plaster saint with whom most modern readers find it
difficult to empathize. The novel’s strengths include stinging
characterizations of social snobs and narrow “religionists,” as well as
a deep sympathy for the poor.
The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) are the first two novels of
a trilogy dealing with the career of the late-19th century American
financier and traction tycoon Charles T. Yerkes, who is cast in
fictionalized form as Frank Cowperwood. As Cowperwood successfully plots
monopolistic business coups first in Philadelphia and then in Chicago,
the focus of the novels alternates between his amoral business dealings
and his marital and other erotic relations. The Financier and The Titan
are important examples of the business novel and represent probably the
most meticulously researched and documented studies of high finance in
first-rate fiction. Cowperwood, like all of Dreiser’s major characters,
remains unfulfilled despite achieving most of his apparent wishes. The
third novel in the trilogy, The Stoic (1947), is fatally weakened by
Dreiser’s diminished interest in his protagonist.
The ‘Genius’ (1915) is artistically one of Dreiser’s least successful
novels but is nonetheless indispensable to an understanding of his
psychology. This book chronicles its autobiographical hero’s career as
an artist and his unpredictable pursuit of the perfect woman as a source
of ultimate fulfillment.
Dreiser’s longest novel, An American Tragedy (1925), is a complex and
compassionate account of the life and death of a young antihero named
Clyde Griffiths. The novel begins with Clyde’s blighted background,
recounts his path to success, and culminates in his apprehension, trial,
and execution for murder. The book was called by one influential critic
“the worst-written great novel in the world,” but its questionable
grammar and style are transcended by its narrative power. Dreiser’s
labyrinthine speculations on the extent of Clyde’s guilt do not blunt
his searing indictment of materialism and the American dream of success.
Dreiser’s next-to-last novel, The Bulwark (1946), is the story of a
Quaker father’s unavailing struggle to shield his children from the
materialism of modern American life. More intellectually consistent than
Dreiser’s earlier novels, this book also boasts some of his most
polished prose.
Assessment.
Dreiser’s considerable stature, beyond his historic importance as a
pioneer of unvarnished truth-telling in modern literature, is due almost
entirely to his achievements as a novelist. His sprawling imagination
and cumbersome style kept him from performing well in the smaller
literary forms, and his nonfiction writing, especially his essays, are
marred by intellectual inconsistency, a lack of objectivity, and even
bitterness. But these latter traits are much less obtrusive in his
novels, where his compassion and empathy for human striving make his
best work moving and memorable. The long novel gave Dreiser the prime
form through which to explore in depth the possibilities of 20th-century
American life, with its material profusion and spiritual doubt.
Dreiser’s characters struggle for self-realization in the face of
society’s narrow and repressive moral conventions, and they often obtain
material success and erotic gratification while a more enduring
spiritual satisfaction eludes them. Despite Dreiser’s alleged
deficiencies as a stylist, his novels succeed in their accumulation of
realistic detail and in the power and integrity with which they
delineate the tragic aspects of the American pursuit of worldly success.
Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy are certainly enduring works of
literature that display a deep understanding of the American experience
around the turn of the century, with its expansive desires and pervasive
disillusionments.
Lawrence E. Hussman
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Jack London

Jack London, pseudonym of John Griffith
Chaney (b. Jan. 12, 1876, San Francisco,
Calif., U.S.—d. Nov. 22, 1916, Glen
Ellen, Calif.), American novelist and
short-story writer whose works deal
romantically with elemental struggles
for survival. He is one of the most
extensively translated of American
authors.
Deserted by his father, a roving
astrologer, London was raised in
Oakland, Calif., by his spiritualist
mother and his stepfather, whose
surname, London, he took. At 14 he quit
school to escape poverty and gain
adventure. He explored San Francisco Bay
in his sloop, alternately stealing
oysters or working for the government
fish patrol. He went to Japan as a
sailor and saw much of the United States
as a hobo riding freight trains and as a
member of Kelly’s industrial army (one
of the many protest armies of unemployed
born of the panic of 1893). He saw
depression conditions, was jailed for
vagrancy, and in 1894 became a militant
socialist. London educated himself at
public libraries with the writings of
Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Friedrich
Nietzsche, usually in popularized forms,
and created his own amalgam of socialism
and white superiority. At 19 he crammed
a four-year high school course into one
year and entered the University of
California at Berkeley, but after a year
he quit school to seek a fortune in the
Klondike gold rush of 1897. Returning
the next year, still poor and unable to
find work, he decided to earn a living
as a writer.
London
studied magazines and then set himself a
daily schedule of producing sonnets,
ballads, jokes, anecdotes, adventure
stories, or horror stories, steadily
increasing his output. The optimism and
energy with which he attacked his task
are best conveyed in his
autobiographical novel Martin Eden
(1909), perhaps his most enduring work.
Within two years stories of his Alaskan
adventures, though often crude, began to
win acceptance for their fresh subject
matter and virile force. His first book,
The Son of the Wolf (1900), gained a
wide audience. During the remainder of
his life he produced steadily,
completing 50 books of fiction and
nonfiction in 17 years. Although he
became the highest-paid writer in the
United States, his earnings never
matched his expenditures, and he was
never freed of the urgency of writing
for money. He sailed a ketch to the
South Pacific, telling of his adventures
in The Cruise of the Snark (1911). In
1910 he settled on a ranch near Glen
Ellen, Calif., where he built his
grandiose Wolf House. He maintained his
socialist beliefs almost to the end of
his life.
Jack
London’s hastily written output is of
uneven quality. His Alaskan stories Call
of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906),
and Burning Daylight (1910), in which he
dramatized in turn atavism,
adaptability, and the appeal of the
wilderness, are outstanding. In addition
to Martin Eden, he wrote two other
autobiographical novels of considerable
interest: The Road (1907) and John
Barleycorn (1913). Other important works
are The Sea Wolf (1904), which features
a Nietzschean superman hero, and The
Iron Heel (1907), a fantasy of the
future that is a terrifying anticipation
of fascism. London’s reputation declined
in the United States in the 1920s when a
brilliant new generation of postwar
writers made the prewar writers seem
lacking in sophistication, but his
popularity has remained high throughout
the world, especially in Russia, where a
commemorative edition of his works
published in 1956 was reported to have
been sold out in five hours. A
three-volume set of his letters, edited
by Earle Labor et al., was published in
1988.
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Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane, (b. Nov. 1, 1871,
Newark, N.J., U.S.—d. June 5, 1900,
Badenweiler, Baden, Ger.), American
novelist, poet, and short-story writer,
best known for his novels Maggie: A Girl
of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge
of Courage (1895) and the short stories
“The Open Boat,” “The Bride Comes to
Yellow Sky,” and “The Blue Hotel.”
Stephen’s father, Jonathan Crane, was
a Methodist minister who died in 1880,
leaving Stephen, the youngest of 14
children, to be reared by his devout,
strong-minded mother. After attending
preparatory school at the Claverack
College (1888–90), Crane spent less than
two years at college and then went to
New York City to live in a medical
students’ boardinghouse while
freelancing his way to a literary
career. While alternating bohemian
student life and explorations of the
Bowery slums with visits to genteel
relatives in the country near Port
Jervis, N.Y., Crane wrote his first
book, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893), a sympathetic study of an
innocent and abused slum girl’s descent
into prostitution and her eventual
suicide.
At that time so shocking that Crane
published it under a pseudonym and at
his own expense, Maggie left him to
struggle as a poor and unknown freelance
journalist, until he was befriended by
Hamlin Garland and the influential
critic William Dean Howells. Suddenly in
1895 the publication of The Red Badge of
Courage and of his first book of poems,
The Black Riders, brought him
international fame. Strikingly different
in tone and technique from Maggie, The
Red Badge of Courage is a subtle
impressionistic study of a young soldier
trying to find reality amid the conflict
of fierce warfare. The book’s hero,
Henry Fleming, survives his own fear,
cowardice, and vainglory and goes on to
discover courage, humility, and perhaps
wisdom in the confused combat of an
unnamed Civil War battle. Crane, who had
as yet seen no war, was widely praised
by veterans for his uncanny power to
imagine and reproduce the sense of
actual combat.
Crane’s few remaining years were
chaotic and personally disastrous. His
unconventionality and his sympathy for
the downtrodden aroused malicious gossip
and false charges of drug addiction and
Satanism that disgusted the fastidious
author. His reputation as a war writer,
his desire to see if he had guessed
right about the psychology of combat,
and his fascination with death and
danger sent him to Greece and then to
Cuba as a war correspondent.
His first attempt in 1897 to report
on the insurrection in Cuba ended in
near disaster; the ship Commodore on
which he was traveling sank with $5,000
worth of ammunition, and Crane—reported
drowned—finally rowed into shore in a
dinghy with the captain, cook, and
oiler, Crane scuttling his money belt of
gold before swimming through dangerous
surf. The result was one of the world’s
great short stories, “The Open Boat.”
Unable to get to Cuba, Crane went to
Greece to report the Greco-Turkish War
for the New York Journal. He was
accompanied by Cora Taylor, a former
brothel-house proprietor. At the end of
the war they settled in England in a
villa at Oxted, Surrey, and in April
1898 Crane departed to report the
Spanish-American War in Cuba, first for
the New York World and then for the New
York Journal. When the war ended, Crane
wrote the first draft of Active Service,
a novel of the Greek war. He finally
returned to Cora in England nine months
after his departure and settled in a
costly 14th-century manor house at Brede
Place, Sussex. Here Cora, a silly woman
with social and literary pretensions,
contributed to Crane’s ruin by
encouraging his own social ambitions.
They ruined themselves financially by
entertaining hordes of spongers, as well
as close literary friends—including
Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, H.G.
Wells, Henry James, and Robert Barr, who
completed Crane’s Irish romance The
O’Ruddy.
Crane now fought a desperate battle
against time, illness, and debts.
Privation and exposure in his Bowery
years and as a correspondent, together
with an almost deliberate disregard for
his health, probably hastened the
disease that killed him at an early age.
He died of tuberculosis that was
compounded by the recurrent malarial
fever he had caught in Cuba.
After The Red Badge of Courage,
Crane’s few attempts at the novel were
of small importance, but he achieved an
extraordinary mastery of the short
story. He exploited youthful small-town
experiences in The Monster and Other
Stories (1899) and Whilomville Stories
(1900); the Bowery again in George’s
Mother (1896); an early trip to the
southwest and Mexico in “The Blue Hotel”
and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”; the
Civil War again in The Little Regiment
(1896); and war correspondent
experiences in The Open Boat and Other
Tales of Adventure (1898) and Wounds in
the Rain (1900). In the best of these
tales Crane showed a rare ability to
shape colourful settings, dramatic
action, and perceptive characterization
into ironic explorations of human nature
and destiny. In even briefer scope,
rhymeless, cadenced and “free” in form,
his unique, flashing poetry was extended
into War Is Kind (1899).
Stephen Crane first broke new ground
in Maggie, which evinced an
uncompromising (then considered sordid)
realism that initiated the literary
trend of the succeeding
generations—i.e., the sociological
novels of Frank Norris, Theodore
Dreiser, and James T. Farrell. Crane
intended The Red Badge of Courage to be
“a psychological portrayal of fear,” and
reviewers rightly praised its
psychological realism. The first
nonromantic novel of the Civil War to
attain widespread popularity, The Red
Badge of Courage turned the tide of the
prevailing convention about war fiction
and established a new, if not
unprecedented, one. The secret of
Crane’s success as war correspondent,
journalist, novelist, short-story
writer, and poet lay in his achieving
tensions between irony and pity,
illusion and reality, or the double mood
of hope contradicted by despair. Crane
was a great stylist and a master of the
contradictory effect.
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Frank Norris

Frank Norris, byname of Benjamin
Franklin Norris (b. March 5, 1870,
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—d. October 25,
1902, San Francisco, California),
American novelist who was the first
important naturalist writer in the
United States.
Norris studied painting in Paris for
two years but then decided that
literature was his vocation. He attended
the University of California in 1890–94
and then spent another year at Harvard
University. He was a news correspondent
in South Africa in 1895, an editorial
assistant on the San Francisco Wave
(1896–97), and a war correspondent in
Cuba for McClure’s Magazine in 1898. He
joined the New York City publishing firm
of Doubleday, Page, and Company in 1899.
He died three years later after an
operation for appendicitis.
Norris’s first important novel,
McTeague (1899), is a naturalist work
set in San Francisco. It tells the story
of a stupid and brutal dentist who
murders his miserly wife and then meets
his own end while fleeing through Death
Valley. With this book and those that
followed, Norris joined Theodore Dreiser
in the front rank of American novelists.
Norris’s masterpiece, The Octopus
(1901), was the first novel of a
projected trilogy, The Epic of the
Wheat, dealing with the economic and
social forces involved in the
production, distribution, and
consumption of wheat. The Octopus
pictures with bold symbolism the raising
of wheat in California and the struggle
of the wheat growers there against a
monopolistic railway corporation. The
second novel in the trilogy, The Pit
(1903), deals with wheat speculation on
the Chicago Board of Trade. The third
novel, Wolf, unwritten at Norris’s
death, was to have shown the
American-grown wheat relieving a
famine-stricken village in Europe.
Vandover and the Brute, posthumously
published in 1914, is a study of
degeneration. McTeague was filmed by
Erich von Stroheim in 1924 under the
title Greed and staged as an opera by
composer William Bolcom and director
Robert Altman in 1992.
After the example of Émile Zola and
the European naturalists, Norris in
McTeague sought to describe with
realistic detail the influence of
heredity and environment on human life.
From The Octopus on he adopted a more
humanitarian ideal and began to view the
novel as a proper agent for social
betterment. In The Octopus and other
novels he strove to return American
fiction, which was then dominated by
historical romance, to more serious
themes. Despite their romanticizing
tendencies, his novels present a vividly
authentic and highly readable picture of
life in California at the turn of the
20th century.
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Henry James
In the books of
Henry James, born in New York
but later an expatriate in England, fiction took a
different pathway. Like realists and naturalists of
his time, he thought that fiction should reproduce
reality. He conceived of reality, however, as twice
translated—first, through the author’s peculiar
experiencing of it and, second, through his unique
depicting of it. Deep insight and thorough
experience were no more important, therefore, than
the complicated and delicate task of the artist. The
Art of Fiction (1884), essays on novelists, and
brilliant prefaces to his collected works showed him
struggling thoroughly and consciously with the
problems of his craft. Together, they formed an
important body of discussion of fictional artistry.
An excellent
short-story writer,
James nevertheless was chiefly
important for novels in which his doctrines found
concrete embodiment. Outstanding were The American
(1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Spoils of
Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Wings
of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The
Golden Bowl (1904). The earliest of these were
international novels wherein conflicts arose from
relationships between Americans and Europeans—each
group with its own characteristics and morals. As
time passed, he became increasingly interested in
the psychological processes of his characters and in
a subtle rendering of their limited insights, their
perceptions, and their emotions.
Henry James

American writer
born April 15, 1843, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died Feb. 28, 1916, London, Eng.
Main
American novelist and, as a naturalized English citizen from 1915, a
great figure in the transatlantic culture. His fundamental theme was the
innocence and exuberance of the New World in clash with the corruption
and wisdom of the Old, as illustrated in such works as Daisy Miller
(1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), and The
Ambassadors (1903).
Early life and works.
Henry James was named for his father, a prominent social theorist and
lecturer, and was the younger brother of the pragmatist philosopher
William James. The young Henry was a shy, book-addicted boy who assumed
the role of quiet observer beside his active elder brother. They were
taken abroad as infants, were schooled by tutors and governesses, and
spent their preadolescent years in Manhattan. Returned to Geneva, Paris,
and London during their teens, the James children acquired languages and
an awareness of Europe vouchsafed to few Americans in their times. On
the eve of the American Civil War, the James family settled at Newport,
R.I., and there, and later in Boston, Henry came to know New England
intimately. When he was 19 years of age he enrolled at the Harvard Law
School, but he devoted his study time to reading Charles-Augustin
Sainte-Beuve, Honoré de Balzac, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. His first story
appeared anonymously two years later in the New York Continental Monthly
and his first book reviews in the North American Review. When William
Dean Howells became editor of The Atlantic Monthly, James found in him a
friend and mentor who published him regularly. Between them, James and
Howells inaugurated the era of American “realism.”
By his mid-20s James was regarded as one of the most skillful writers
of short stories in America. Critics, however, deplored his tendency to
write of the life of the mind, rather than of action. The stories of
these early years show the leisurely existence of the well-to-do at
Newport and Saratoga. James’s apprenticeship was thorough. He wrote
stories, reviews, and articles for almost a decade before he attempted a
full-length novel. There had to be also the traditional “grand tour,”
and James went abroad for his first adult encounter with Europe in 1869.
His year’s wandering in England, France, and Italy set the stage for a
lifetime of travel in those countries. James never married. By nature he
was friendly and even gregarious, but while he was an active observer
and participant in society, he tended, until late middle age, to be
“distant” in his relations with people and was careful to avoid
“involvement.”
Career—first phase.
Recognizing the appeal of Europe, given his cosmopolitan upbringing,
James made a deliberate effort to discover whether he could live and
work in the United States. Two years in Boston, two years in Europe,
mainly in Rome, and a winter of unremitting hackwork in New York City
convinced him that he could write better and live more cheaply abroad.
Thus began his long expatriation—heralded by publication in 1875 of the
novel Roderick Hudson, the story of an American sculptor’s struggle by
the banks of the Tiber between his art and his passions; Transatlantic
Sketches, his first collection of travel writings; and a collection of
tales. With these three substantial books, he inaugurated a career that
saw about 100 volumes through the press during the next 40 years.
During 1875–76 James lived in Paris, writing literary and topical
letters for the New York Tribune and working on his novel The American
(1877), the story of a self-made American millionaire whose guileless
and forthright character contrasts with that of the arrogant and cunning
family of French aristocrats whose daughter he unsuccessfully attempts
to marry. In Paris James sought out the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev,
whose work appealed to him, and through Turgenev was brought into
Gustave Flaubert’s coterie, where he got to know Edmond de Goncourt,
Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Guy de Maupassant. From Turgenev he
received confirmation of his own view that a novelist need not worry
about “story” and that, in focusing on character, he would arrive at the
life experience of his protagonist.
Much as he liked France, James felt that he would be an eternal
outsider there, and late in 1876 he crossed to London. There, in small
rooms in Bolton Street off Piccadilly, he wrote the major fiction of his
middle years. In 1878 he achieved international renown with his story of
an American flirt in Rome, Daisy Miller, and further advanced his
reputation with The Europeans that same year. In England he was promptly
taken up by the leading Victorians and became a regular at Lord
Houghton’s breakfasts, where he consorted with Alfred Tennyson, William
Gladstone, Robert Browning, and others. A great social lion, James dined
out 140 times during 1878 and 1879 and visited in many of the great
Victorian houses and country seats. He was elected to London clubs,
published his stories simultaneously in English and American
periodicals, and mingled with George Meredith, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Edmund Gosse, and other writers, thus establishing himself as a
significant figure in Anglo-American literary and artistic relations.
James’s reputation was founded on his versatile studies of “the
American girl.” In a series of witty tales, he pictured the “self-made”
young woman, the bold and brash American innocent who insists upon
American standards in European society. James ended this first phase of
his career by producing his masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881),
a study of a young woman from Albany who brings to Europe her narrow
provincialism and pretensions but also her sense of her own sovereignty,
her “free spirit,” her refusal to be treated, in the Victorian world,
merely as a marriageable object. As a picture of Americans moving in the
expatriate society of England and of Italy, this novel has no equal in
the history of modern fiction. It is a remarkable study of a band of
egotists while at the same time offering a shrewd appraisal of the
American character. James’s understanding of power in personal relations
was profound, as evinced in Washington Square (1881), the story of a
young American heroine whose hopes for love and marriage are thwarted by
her father’s callous rejection of a somewhat opportunistic suitor.
Career—middle phase.
In the 1880s James wrote two novels dealing with social reformers and
revolutionaries, The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima
(1886). In the novel of Boston life, James analyzed the struggle between
conservative masculinity embodied in a Southerner living in the North
and an embittered man-hating suffragist. The Bostonians remains the
fullest and most rounded American social novel of its time in its study
of cranks, faddists, and “do-gooders.” In The Princess Casamassima James
exploited the anarchist violence of the decade and depicted the struggle
of a man who toys with revolution and is destroyed by it. These novels
were followed by The Tragic Muse (1890), in which James projected a
study of the London and Paris art studios and the stage, the conflict
between art and “the world.”
The latter novel raised the curtain on his own “dramatic years,”
1890–95, during which he tried to win success writing for the stage. His
dramatization of The American in 1891 was a modest success, but an
original play, Guy Domville, produced in 1895, was a failure, and James
was booed at the end of the first performance. Crushed and feeling that
he had lost his public, he spent several years seeking to adapt his
dramatic experience to his fiction. The result was a complete change in
his storytelling methods. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie
Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw and In the Cage (1898), and The
Awkward Age (1899), James began to use the methods of alternating
“picture” and dramatic scene, close adherence to a given angle of
vision, a withholding of information from the reader, making available
to him only that which the characters see. The subjects of this period
are the developing consciousness and moral education of children—in
reality James’s old international theme of innocence in a corrupting
world, transferred to the English setting.
Career—final phase.
The experiments of this “transition” phase led James to the writing of
three grandiose novels at the beginning of the new century, which
represent his final—his “major”—phase, as it has been called. In these
novels James pointed the way for the 20th-century novel. He had begun as
a realist who describes minutely his crowded stage. He ended by leaving
his stage comparatively bare, and showing a small group of characters in
a tense situation, with a retrospective working out, through multiple
angles of vision, of their drama. In addition to these technical devices
he resorted to an increasingly allusive prose style, which became dense
and charged with symbolic imagery. His late “manner” derived in part
from his dictating directly to a typist and in part from his unremitting
search for ways of projecting subjective experience in a flexible prose.
The first of the three novels was The Ambassadors (1903). This is a
high comedy of manners, of a middle-aged American who goes to Paris to
bring back to a Massachusetts industrial town a wealthy young man who,
in the view of his affluent family, has lingered too long abroad. The
“ambassador” in the end is captivated by civilized Parisian life. The
novel is a study in the growth of perception and awareness in the
elderly hero, and it balances the relaxed moral standards of the
European continent against the parochial rigidities of New England. The
second of this series of novels was The Wings of the Dove, published in
1902, before The Ambassadors, although written after it. This novel,
dealing with a melodramatic subject of great pathos, that of an heiress
doomed by illness to die, avoids its cliche subject by focusing upon the
characters surrounding the unfortunate young woman. They intrigue to
inherit her millions. Told in this way, and set in London and Venice, it
becomes a powerful study of well-intentioned humans who, with dignity
and reason, are at the same time also birds of prey. In its shifting
points of view and avoidance of scenes that would end in melodrama, The
Wings of the Dove demonstrated the mastery with which James could take a
tawdry subject and invest it with grandeur. His final novel was The
Golden Bowl (1904), a study of adultery, with four principal characters.
The first part of the story is seen through the eyes of the aristocratic
husband and the second through the developing awareness of the wife.
While many of James’s short stories were potboilers written for the
current magazines, he achieved high mastery in the ghostly form, notably
in The Turn of the Screw (1898), and in such remarkable narratives as
“The Aspern Papers” (1888) and “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)—his
prophetic picture of dissociated 20th-century man lost in an urban
agglomeration. As a critic James tended to explore the character and
personality of writers as revealed in their creations; his essays are a
brilliant series of studies, moral portraits, of the most famous
novelists of his century, from Balzac to the Edwardian realists. His
travel writings, English Hours (1905), Italian Hours (1909), and A
Little Tour in France (1884), portray the backgrounds James used for his
fictions.
In his later years, James lived in retirement in an 18th-century
house at Rye in Sussex, though on completion of The Golden Bowl he
revisited the United States in 1904–05. James had lived abroad for 20
years, and in the interval America had become a great industrial and
political power. His observation of the land and its people led him to
write, on his return to England, a poetic volume of rediscovery and
discovery, The American Scene (1907), prophetic in its vision of urban
doom, spoliation, and pollution of resources and filled with misgivings
over the anomalies of a “melting pot” civilization. The materialism of
American life deeply troubled James, and on his return to England he set
to work to shore up his own writings, and his own career, against this
ephemeral world. He devoted three years to rewriting and revising his
principal novels and tales for the highly selective “New York Edition,”
published in 24 volumes. For this edition James wrote 18 significant
prefaces, which contain both reminiscence and exposition of his theories
of fiction.
Throwing his moral weight into Britain’s struggle in World War I,
James became a British subject in 1915 and received the Order of Merit
from King George V.
Assessment.
Henry James’s career was one of the longest and most productive—and most
influential—in American letters. A master of prose fiction from the
first, he practiced it as a fertile innovator, enlarged the form, and
placed upon it the stamp of a highly individual method and style. He
wrote for 51 years—20 novels, 112 tales, 12 plays, several volumes of
travel and criticism, and a great deal of literary journalism. He
recognized and helped to fashion the myth of the American abroad and
incorporated this myth in the “international novel,” of which he was the
acknowledged master. His fundamental theme was that of an innocent,
exuberant, and democratic America confronting the worldly wisdom and
corruption of Europe’s older, aristocratic culture. In both his light
comedies and his tragedies, James’s sense of the human scene was sure
and vivid; and, in spite of the mannerisms of his later style, he was
one of the great prose writers and stylists of his century.
James’s public remained limited during his lifetime, but, after a
revival of interest in his work during the 1940s and ’50s, he reached an
ever-widening audience; his works were translated in many countries, and
he was recognized in the late 20th century as one of the subtlest
craftsmen who ever practiced the art of the novel. His rendering of the
inner life of his characters made him a forerunner of the
“stream-of-consciousness” movement in the 20th century.
Leon Edel
|
Critics of the gilded
age
Writers of many types of works contributed to a
great body of literature that flourished between the
Civil War and 1914—literature of social revolt.
Novels attacked the growing power of business and
the growing corruption of government, and some
novelists outlined utopias. Political corruption and
inefficiency figured in
Henry Adams’s novel
Democracy (1880). Edward Bellamy’s Looking
Backward (1888) was both an indictment of the
capitalistic system and an imaginative picturing of
a utopia achieved by a collectivist society in the
year 2000. Howells’s Traveler from Altruria
(1894) pleaded for an equalitarian state in which
the government regimented men’s lives. The year 1906
saw the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle,
first of many works by him that criticized U.S.
economic and political life and urged socialism as
the remedy.
Two poets embodied
criticisms in songs. Edwin Markham’s Man with
the Hoe (1899) was a protest against the
exploitation of labour and vaguely threatened
revolution; it immediately stimulated nationwide
interest. A year later William Vaughn Moody’s
Ode in Time of Hesitation denounced growing U.S.
imperialism as a desertion of earlier principles;
his On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines (1901)
developed the same theme even more effectively.
With the rise of
journalistic magazines, a group of journalists
became notable as critics of America—the group
dubbed “the muckrakers” by Theodore Roosevelt.
Ida M. Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil
Company (1904) and Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of
the Cities (1904) were typical contributions by two
members of a large group of journalistic crusaders.
Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair, in full Upton Beall
Sinclair (b. Sept. 20, 1878, Baltimore,
Md., U.S.—d. Nov. 25, 1968, Bound Brook,
N.J.), American novelist and polemicist
for socialism and other causes; his The
Jungle is a landmark among naturalistic,
proletarian novels.
Sinclair graduated from the College
of the City of New York in 1897 and did
graduate work at Columbia University,
supporting himself by journalistic
writing. The Jungle (1906), his sixth
novel and first popular success, was
written when he was sent by the
socialist weekly newspaper Appeal to
Reason to Chicago to investigate
conditions in the stockyards. Though
intended to create sympathy for the
exploited and poorly treated immigrant
workers in the meat-packing industry,
The Jungle instead aroused widespread
public indignation at the quality of and
impurities in processed meats and thus
helped bring about the passage of
federal food-inspection laws. Sinclair
ironically commented at the time, “I
aimed at the public’s heart and by
accident I hit it in the stomach.” The
Jungle is the most enduring of the works
of the “muckrakers” (see muckraker).
Published at Sinclair’s own expense
after several publishers rejected it, it
became a best-seller, and Sinclair used
the proceeds to open Helicon Hall, a
cooperative-living venture in Englewood,
N.J. The building was destroyed by fire
in 1907 and the project abandoned.
A long series of other topical novels
followed, none as popular as The Jungle;
among them were Oil! (1927), based on
the Teapot Dome Scandal, and Boston
(1928), based on the Sacco-Vanzetti
case. Sinclair’s works were highly
popular in Russia both before and
immediately after the Revolution of
1917. Later his active opposition to the
communist regime caused a decline in his
reputation there, but it was revived
temporarily in the late 1930s and ’40s
by his antifascist writings. Sinclair
again reached a wide audience with the
Lanny Budd series, 11 contemporary
historical novels beginning with World’s
End (1940) that were constructed around
an implausible antifascist hero who
happens to be on hand for all the
momentous events of the day.
During the economic crisis of the
1930s, Sinclair organized the EPIC (End
Poverty in California) socialist reform
movement; in 1934 he was defeated as
Democratic candidate for governor. Of
his autobiographical writings, American
Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences (1932;
also published as Candid Reminiscences:
My First Thirty Years) was reworked and
extended in The Autobiography of Upton
Sinclair (1962); My Lifetime in Letters
(1960) is a collection of letters
written to Sinclair.
|
Henry Adams
One of the most devastating and most literate
attacks on modern life was an autobiography of a
scion of an ancient New England family, the Adamses.
Educated at Harvard and abroad,
Henry Adams
was a great teacher and historian (History of the
United States [1889–91] and Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres [1904]). The Education of Henry Adams
(printed privately 1906; published 1918), however,
complained that a lifelong hunt for some sort of
order in the world, some sort of faith for man, left
him completely baffled. The quiet, urbane style
served well to underline, in an ironic way, the
message of this pessimistic book.
Henry Adams

American historian
in full Henry Brooks Adams
born Feb. 16, 1838, Boston
died March 27, 1918, Washington, D.C.
Main
historian, man of letters, and author of one of the outstanding
autobiographies of Western literature, The Education of Henry Adams.
Adams was the product of Boston’s Brahmin class, a cultured elite
that traced its lineage to Puritan New England. He was the
great-grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, both
presidents of the United States. The Adams family tradition of
leadership was carried on by his father, Charles Francis Adams
(1807–86), a diplomat, historian, and congressman. His younger brother,
Brooks (1848–1927), was also a historian; his older brother, Charles
Francis, Jr. (1835–1915), was an author and railroad executive. Through
his mother, Abigail Brown Brooks, Adams was related to one of the most
distinguished and wealthiest families in Boston. Tradition ingrained a
deep sense of morality in Adams. He never escaped his heritage and often
spoke of himself as a child of the 17th and 18th centuries who was
forced to come to terms with the new world of the 20th century.
Adams was graduated from Harvard in 1858 and, in typical patrician
fashion, embarked upon a grand tour of Europe in search of amusement and
a vocation. Anticipating a career as an attorney, he spent the winter of
1859 attending lectures in civil law at the University of Berlin. With
the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, Pres. Abraham Lincoln
appointed Adams’ father minister to England. Henry, age 23, accompanied
him to London, acting as his private secretary until 1868.
Returning to the United States, Adams travelled to Washington, D.C.,
as a newspaper correspondent for The Nation and other leading journals.
He plunged into the capital’s social and political life, anxious to
begin the reconstruction of a nation shattered by war. He called for
civil service reform and retention of the silver standard. Adams wrote
numerous essays exposing political corruption and warning against the
growing power of economic monopolies, particularly railroads. These
articles were published in Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (1871). The
mediocrity of the nation’s “statesmen” constantly irritated him. Adams
liked to repeat Pres. Ulysses S. Grant’s remark that Venice would be a
fine city if it were drained.
Adams continued his reformist activities as editor of the North
American Review (1870–76). Moreover, he participated in the Liberal
Republican movement. This group of insurgents, repelled by partisanship
and the scandals of the Grant administration, bolted the Republican
Party in 1872 and nominated the Democrat Horace Greeley for president.
Their crusade soon foundered. Adams grew disillusioned with a world he
characterized as devoid of principle. He was disgusted with demagogic
politicians and a society in which all became “servant[s] of the
powerhouse.” Americans, he wrote, “had no time for thought; they saw,
and could see, nothing beyond their day’s work; their attitude to the
universe outside them was that of the deep-sea fish.” His anonymously
published novel Democracy, an American Novel (1880) reflected his loss
of faith. The heroine, Madeleine Lee, like Adams himself, becomes an
intimate of Washington’s political circles. As confidante of a
Midwestern senator, Madeleine is introduced to the democratic process.
She meets the President and other figures who are equally vacuous. After
her contact with the power brokers, Madeleine concluded: “Democracy has
shaken my nerves to pieces.”
In 1870 Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard College, appointed
Adams professor of medieval history. He was the first American to employ
the seminar method in teaching history. In 1877 he resigned to edit the
papers of Thomas Jefferson’s treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin.
Pursuing his interest in U.S. history, Adams completed two biographies,
The Life of Albert Gallatin (1879) and John Randolph (1882). He
continued to delve into the nation’s early national period, hoping to
understand the nature of an evolving American democracy. This study
culminated in his nine-volume History of the United States of America
during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, a scholarly work
that received immediate acclaim after its publication (1889–91). In this
work he explored the dilemma of governing an egalitarian society in a
political world in which the predominant tendency was to aggrandize
power. In 1884 Adams wrote another novel, Esther. Published under a
pseudonym, Esther dealt with the relationship between religion and
modern science, a theme that engaged Adams throughout his life.
Adams was stunned when, in 1885, his wife of 13 years, Marian Hooper,
committed suicide. Distraught, he arranged for the sculpture of a
mysterious, cloaked woman to be placed upon her grave. The union had
produced no children, and Adams never remarried. After his wife’s death,
Adams began a period of restless wandering. He travelled the globe from
the South Sea islands to the Middle East. Gradually the circuit narrowed
to winters in Washington and summers in Paris.
Though Adams referred to his existence during this period as that of
a “cave-dweller,” his life was quite the opposite. From the 1870s until
his last years, intellectuals gravitated to his home to discuss art,
science, politics, and literature. Among them were the British diplomat
Sir Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice, the architect Henry Hobson Richardson, and
Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge. His closest friends were the geologist Clarence
King and the diplomat John Hay. Adams and King were inseparable. Their
letters remain a rich source of information on everything from gossip to
the most current trends of thought.
While in France, Adams pushed further into the recesses of history in
search of “a fixed point . . . from which he might measure motion down
to his own time.” That point became medieval Christendom in the 13th
century. In Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (printed privately, 1904;
published, 1913) he described the medieval world view as reflected in
its cathedrals. These buildings, he believed, expressed “an emotion, the
deepest man ever felt—the struggle of his own littleness to grasp the
infinite.” Adams’ attraction to the Middle Ages lay in the era’s
ideological unity; a coherence expressed in Catholicism and symbolized
by the Virgin Mary.
The Education of Henry Adams (printed privately, 1906; published
1918) was a companion volume to Chartres. The Education remains Adams’
best known work and one of the most distinguished of all
autobiographies. In contrast to Chartres, the Education centred upon the
20th-century universe of multiplicity, particularly the exploding world
of science and technology. In opposition to the medieval Virgin, Adams
saw a new godhead—the dynamo—symbol of modern history’s anarchic
energies. The Education recorded his failure to understand the
centrifugal forces of contemporary life. The book traced Adams’
confrontations with reality as he moved from the custom-bound world of
his birth into the modern, existential universe in which certainties had
vanished.
Neither history nor education provided an answer for Henry Adams.
Individuals, he believed, could not face reality; to endure, one adopts
illusions. His attempt to draw lines of continuity from the 13th to the
20th century ended in futility. Adams concluded that all he could prove
was change.
In 1908 Adams edited the letters and diary of his friend John Hay,
secretary of state from 1898 to 1905. His last book, The Life of George
Cabot Lodge, was published in 1911. In two speculative essays, “Rule of
Phase Applied to History” (1909) and Letter to American Teachers of
History (1910), Adams calculated the demise of the world. Basing his
theory on a scientific law, the dissipation of energy, he described
civilization as having retrogressed through four stages: the religious,
mechanical, electrical, and ethereal. The cataclysm, he prophesied,
would occur in 1921. How literally Adams intended his prediction remains
a point of dispute.
In 1912, at the age of 74, Adams suffered a stroke. His haunting fear
of senility became real for a short time. For three months he lay
partially paralyzed, his mind hovering between reason and delirium. He
recovered sufficiently, however, to travel to Europe once again. When he
died, in his sleep in his Washington home, he was, according to his
wish, buried next to his wife in an unmarked grave. In 1919 he was
posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the Education.
Adams is noted for an ironic literary style coupled with a detached,
often bitter, tone. These characteristics have led some critics to view
him as an irascible misfit. They contend that his fascination with the
Middle Ages and his continuous emphasis upon failure were masks behind
which he hid a misanthropic alienation from the world. More sympathetic
commentators see Adams as a romantic figure who sought meaning in the
chaos and violence of the 20th century. As Adams described it, he was in
pursuit of “. . . a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard
without a shudder.”
Christine McHugh
|
Poets of the
era
The later 19th century and early years of the 20th
century were a poor period for American poetry; yet
(in addition to William Vaughn Moody) two poets of
distinction wrote songs that survived long after
scores of minor poets had been forgotten. One was
Southern-born Sidney Lanier, a talented
musician who utilized the rhythms of music and the
thematic developments of symphonies in such fine
songs as Corn (1875), The Symphony (1875), and The
Marshes of Glynn (1878). Distressed, like many of
his contemporaries, by changes in American life, he
wove his doubts, fears, and suggestions into his
richest poems.
The other poet was
a New Englander,
Emily Dickinson. A shy,
playful, odd personality, she allowed practically
none of her writings to be published during her
lifetime. Not until 1890, four years after her
death, was the first book of her poems published, to
be followed at intervals by other collections. Later
poets were to be influenced by her individual
techniques—use of imperfect, or eye, rhymes,
avoidance of regular rhythms, and a tendency to pack
brief stanzas with cryptic meanings. Like Lanier,
she rediscovered the value of conceits for setting
forth her thoughts and feelings. Such poems as The
Snake, I Like to See It Lap the Miles, The Chariot,
Farther in Summer than the Birds, and There’s a
Certain Slant of Light represented her unusual
talent at its best.
Emily Dickinson
"Poems"

American poet
in full Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
born Dec. 10, 1830, Amherst, Mass., U.S.
died May 15, 1886, Amherst
Main
American lyric poet who lived in
seclusion and commanded a singular
brilliance of style and integrity of
vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is
widely considered to be one of the two
leading 19th-century American poets.
Only 10 of Emily Dickinson’s nearly
1,800 poems are known to have been
published in her lifetime. Devoted to
private pursuits, she sent hundreds of
poems to friends and correspondents
while apparently keeping the greater
number to herself. She habitually worked
in verse forms suggestive of hymns and
ballads, with lines of three or four
stresses. Her unusual off-rhymes have
been seen as both experimental and
influenced by the 18th-century hymnist
Isaac Watts. She freely ignored the
usual rules of versification and even of
grammar, and in the intellectual content
of her work she likewise proved
exceptionally bold and original. Her
verse is distinguished by its
epigrammatic compression, haunting
personal voice, enigmatic brilliance,
and lack of high polish.
Early years
The second of three children, Dickinson
grew up in moderate privilege and with
strong local and religious attachments.
For her first nine years she resided in
a mansion built by her paternal
grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson,
who had helped found Amherst College but
then went bankrupt shortly before her
birth. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was
a forceful and prosperous Whig lawyer
who served as treasurer of the college
and was elected to one term in Congress.
Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson,
from the leading family in nearby
Monson, was an introverted wife and
hardworking housekeeper; her letters
seem equally inexpressive and quirky.
Both parents were loving but austere,
and Emily became closely attached to her
brother, Austin, and sister, Lavinia.
Never marrying, the two sisters remained
at home, and when their brother married,
he and his wife established their own
household next door. The highly distinct
and even eccentric personalities
developed by the three siblings seem to
have mandated strict limits to their
intimacy. “If we had come up for the
first time from two wells,” Emily once
said of Lavinia, “her astonishment would
not be greater at some things I say.”
Only after the poet’s death did Lavinia
and Austin realize how dedicated she was
to her art.
As a girl, Emily was seen as frail by
her parents and others and was often
kept home from school. She attended the
coeducational Amherst Academy, where she
was recognized by teachers and students
alike for her prodigious abilities in
composition. She also excelled in other
subjects emphasized by the school, most
notably Latin and the sciences. A class
in botany inspired her to assemble an
herbarium containing a large number of
pressed plants identified by their Latin
names. She was fond of her teachers, but
when she left home to attend Mount
Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount
Holyoke College) in nearby South Hadley,
she found the school’s institutional
tone uncongenial. Mount Holyoke’s strict
rules and invasive religious practices,
along with her own homesickness and
growing rebelliousness, help explain why
she did not return for a second year.
At home as well as at school and church,
the religious faith that ruled the
poet’s early years was evangelical
Calvinism, a faith centred on the belief
that humans are born totally depraved
and can be saved only if they undergo a
life-altering conversion in which they
accept the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus
Christ. Questioning this tradition soon
after leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson
was to be the only member of her family
who did not experience conversion or
join Amherst’s First Congregational
Church. Yet she seems to have retained a
belief in the soul’s immortality or at
least to have transmuted it into a
Romantic quest for the transcendent and
absolute. One reason her mature
religious views elude specification is
that she took no interest in creedal or
doctrinal definition. In this she was
influenced by both the Transcendentalism
of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the
mid-century tendencies of liberal
Protestant orthodoxy. These influences
pushed her toward a more symbolic
understanding of religious truth and
helped shape her vocation as poet.
Development as a poet
Although Dickinson had begun
composing verse by her late teens, few
of her early poems are extant. Among
them are two of the burlesque
“Valentines”—the exuberantly inventive
expressions of affection and esteem she
sent to friends of her youth. Two other
poems dating from the first half of the
1850s draw a contrast between the world
as it is and a more peaceful
alternative, variously eternity or a
serene imaginative order. All her known
juvenilia were sent to friends and
engage in a striking play of visionary
fancies, a direction in which she was
encouraged by the popular, sentimental
book of essays Reveries of a Bachelor:
Or a Book of the Heart by Ik. Marvel
(the pseudonym of Donald Grant
Mitchell). Dickinson’s acts of fancy and
reverie, however, were more intricately
social than those of Marvel’s bachelor,
uniting the pleasures of solitary mental
play, performance for an audience, and
intimate communion with another. It may
be because her writing began with a
strong social impetus that her later
solitude did not lead to a meaningless
hermeticism.
Until Dickinson was in her mid-20s, her
writing mostly took the form of letters,
and a surprising number of those that
she wrote from age 11 onward have been
preserved. Sent to her brother, Austin,
or to friends of her own sex, especially
Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, and Susan
Gilbert (who would marry Austin), these
generous communications overflow with
humour, anecdote, invention, and sombre
reflection. In general, Dickinson seems
to have given and demanded more from her
correspondents than she received. On
occasion she interpreted her
correspondents’ laxity in replying as
evidence of neglect or even betrayal.
Indeed, the loss of friends, whether
through death or cooling interest,
became a basic pattern for Dickinson.
Much of her writing, both poetic and
epistolary, seems premised on a feeling
of abandonment and a matching effort to
deny, overcome, or reflect on a sense of
solitude.
Dickinson’s closest friendships usually
had a literary flavour. She was
introduced to the poetry of Ralph Waldo
Emerson by one of her father’s law
students, Benjamin F. Newton, and to
that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by
Susan Gilbert and Henry Vaughan Emmons,
a gifted college student. Two of Barrett
Browning’s works, A Vision of Poets,
describing the pantheon of poets, and
Aurora Leigh, on the development of a
female poet, seem to have played a
formative role for Dickinson, validating
the idea of female greatness and
stimulating her ambition. Though she
also corresponded with Josiah G.
Holland, a popular writer of the time,
he counted for less with her than his
appealing wife, Elizabeth, a lifelong
friend and the recipient of many
affectionate letters.
In 1855 Dickinson traveled to
Washington, D.C., with her sister and
father, who was then ending his term as
U.S. representative. On the return trip
the sisters made an extended stay in
Philadelphia, where it is thought the
poet heard the preaching of Charles
Wadsworth, a fascinating Presbyterian
minister whose pulpit oratory suggested
(as a colleague put it) “years of
conflict and agony.” Seventy years
later, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the
poet’s niece, claimed that Emily had
fallen in love with Wadsworth, who was
married, and then grandly renounced him.
The story is too highly coloured for its
details to be credited; certainly, there
is no evidence the minister returned the
poet’s love. Yet it is true that a
correspondence arose between the two and
that Wadsworth visited her in Amherst
about 1860 and again in 1880. After his
death in 1882, Dickinson remembered him
as “my Philadelphia,” “my dearest
earthly friend,” and “my Shepherd from
‘Little Girl’hood.”
Always fastidious, Dickinson began to
restrict her social activity in her
early 20s, staying home from communal
functions and cultivating intense
epistolary relationships with a reduced
number of correspondents. In 1855,
leaving the large and much-loved house
(since razed) in which she had lived for
15 years, the 25-year-old woman and her
family moved back to the dwelling
associated with her first decade: the
Dickinson mansion on Main Street in
Amherst. Her home for the rest of her
life, this large brick house, still
standing, has become a favourite
destination for her admirers. She found
the return profoundly disturbing, and
when her mother became incapacitated by
a mysterious illness that lasted from
1855 to 1859, both daughters were
compelled to give more of themselves to
domestic pursuits. Various events
outside the home—a bitter Norcross
family lawsuit, the financial collapse
of the local railroad that had been
promoted by the poet’s father, and a
powerful religious revival that renewed
the pressure to “convert”—made the years
1857 and 1858 deeply troubling for
Dickinson and promoted her further
withdrawal.
Mature career
In summer 1858, at the height of
this period of obscure tension,
Dickinson began assembling her
manuscript-books. She made clean copies
of her poems on fine quality stationery
and then sewed small bundles of these
sheets together at the fold. Over the
next seven years she created 40 such
booklets and several unsewn sheaves, and
altogether they contained about 800
poems. No doubt she intended to arrange
her work in a convenient form, perhaps
for her own use in sending poems to
friends. Perhaps the assemblage was
meant to remain private, like her
earlier herbarium. Or perhaps, as
implied in a poem of 1863, This is my
letter to the world, she anticipated
posthumous publication. Because she left
no instructions regarding the
disposition of her manuscript-books, her
ultimate purpose in assembling them can
only be conjectured.
Dickinson sent more poems to her
sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson,
a cultivated reader, than to any other
known correspondent. Repeatedly
professing eternal allegiance, these
poems often imply that there was a
certain distance between the two—that
the sister-in-law was felt to be
haughty, remote, or even
incomprehensible. Yet Susan admired the
poetry’s wit and verve and offered the
kind of personally attentive audience
Dickinson craved. On one occasion,
Susan’s dissatisfaction with a poem,
Safe in their alabaster chambers,
resulted in the drafting of alternative
stanzas. Susan was an active hostess,
and her home was the venue at which
Dickinson met a few friends, most
importantly Samuel Bowles, publisher and
editor of the influential Springfield
Republican. Gregarious, captivating, and
unusually liberal on the question of
women’s careers, Bowles had a high
regard for Dickinson’s poems, publishing
(without her consent) seven of them
during her lifetime—more than appeared
in any other outlet. From 1859 to 1862
she sent him some of her most intense
and confidential communications,
including the daring poem Title divine
is mine, whose speaker proclaims that
she is now a “Wife,” but of a highly
unconventional type.
In those years Dickinson experienced a
painful and obscure personal crisis,
partly of a romantic nature. The abject
and pleading drafts of her second and
third letters to the unidentified person
she called “Master” are probably related
to her many poems about a loved but
distant person, usually male. There has
been much speculation about the identity
of this individual. One of the first
candidates was George Henry Gould, the
recipient in 1850 of a prose Valentine
from Dickinson. Some have contended that
Master was a woman, possibly Kate Scott
Anthon or Susan Dickinson. Richard
Sewall’s 1974 biography makes the case
for Samuel Bowles. All such claims have
rested on a partial examination of
surviving documents and collateral
evidence. Since it is now believed that
the earliest draft to Master predates
her friendship with Bowles, he cannot
have been the person. On balance,
Charles Wadsworth and possibly Gould
remain the most likely candidates.
Whoever the person was, Master’s failure
to return Dickinson’s affection—together
with Susan’s absorption in her first
childbirth and Bowles’s growing
invalidism—contributed to a piercing and
ultimate sense of distress. In a letter,
Dickinson described her lonely suffering
as a “terror—since September—[that] I
could tell to none.” Instead of
succumbing to anguish, however, she came
to view it as the sign of a special
vocation, and it became the basis of an
unprecedented creativity. A poem that
seems to register this life-restoring
act of resistance begins “The zeroes
taught us phosphorus,” meaning that it
is in absolute cold and nothingness that
true brilliance originates.
Though Dickinson wrote little about the
American Civil War, which was then
raging, her awareness of its multiplied
tragedies seems to have empowered her
poetic drive. As she confided to her
cousins in Boston, apropos of wartime
bereavements, “Every day life feels
mightier, and what we have the power to
be, more stupendous.” In the hundreds of
poems Dickinson composed during the war,
a movement can be discerned from the
expression of immediate pain or
exultation to the celebration of
achievement and self-command. Building
on her earlier quest for human intimacy
and obsession with heaven, she explored
the tragic ironies of human desire, such
as fulfillment denied, the frustrated
search for the absolute within the
mundane, and the terrors of internal
dissolution. She also articulated a
profound sense of female subjectivity,
expressing what it means to be
subordinate, secondary, or not in
control. Yet as the war proceeded, she
also wrote with growing frequency about
self-reliance, imperviousness, personal
triumph, and hard-won liberty. The
perfect transcendence she had formerly
associated with heaven was now attached
to a vision of supreme artistry.
In April 1862, about the time Wadsworth
left the East Coast for a pastorate in
San Francisco, Dickinson sought the
critical advice of Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, whose witty article of advice
to writers, A Letter to a Young
Contributor, had just appeared in The
Atlantic Monthly. Higginson was known as
a writer of delicate nature essays and a
crusader for women’s rights. Enclosing
four poems, Dickinson asked for his
opinion of her verse—whether or not it
was “alive.” The ensuing correspondence
lasted for years, with the poet sending
her “preceptor,” as she called him, many
more samples of her work. In addition to
seeking an informed critique from a
professional but not unsympathetic man
of letters, she was reaching out at a
time of accentuated loneliness. “You
were not aware that you saved my Life,”
she confided years later.
Dickinson’s last trips from Amherst were
in 1864 and 1865, when she shared her
cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross’s
boardinghouse in Cambridge and underwent
a course of treatment with the leading
Boston ophthalmologist. She described
her symptoms as an aching in her eyes
and a painful sensitivity to light. Of
the two posthumous diagnoses, exotropia
(a kind of strabismus, the inability of
one eye to align with the other) and
anterior uveitis (inflammation of the
uvea, a part of the iris), the latter
seems more likely. In 1869 Higginson
invited the poet to Boston to attend a
literary salon. The terms she used in
declining his invitation—“I do not cross
my Father’s ground to any House or
town”—make clear her refusal by that
time to leave home and also reveal her
sense of paternal order. When Higginson
visited her the next year, he recorded
his vivid first impression of her
“plain” features, “exquisitely” neat
attire, “childlike” manner, and
loquacious and exhausting brilliance. He
was “glad not to live near her.”
In her last 15 years Dickinson averaged
35 poems a year and conducted her social
life mainly through her chiselled and
often sibylline written messages. Her
father’s sudden death in 1874 caused a
profound and persisting emotional
upheaval yet eventually led to a greater
openness, self-possession, and serenity.
She repaired an 11-year breach with
Samuel Bowles and made friends with
Maria Whitney, a teacher of modern
languages at Smith College, and Helen
Hunt Jackson, poet and author of the
novel Ramona (1884). Dickinson resumed
contact with Wadsworth, and from about
age 50 she conducted a passionate
romance with Otis Phillips Lord, an
elderly judge on the supreme court of
Massachusetts. The letters she
apparently sent Lord reveal her at her
most playful, alternately teasing and
confiding. In declining an erotic
advance or his proposal of marriage, she
asked, “Dont you know you are happiest
while I withhold and not confer—dont you
know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we
consign to Language?”
After Dickinson’s aging mother was
incapacitated by a stroke and a broken
hip, caring for her at home made large
demands on the poet’s time and patience.
After her mother died in 1882, Dickinson
summed up the relationship in a
confidential letter to her Norcross
cousins: “We were never intimate Mother
and Children while she was our
Mother—but…when she became our Child,
the Affection came.” The deaths of
Dickinson’s friends in her last
years—Bowles in 1878, Wadsworth in 1882,
Lord in 1884, and Jackson in 1885—left
her feeling terminally alone. But the
single most shattering death, occurring
in 1883, was that of her eight-year-old
nephew next door, the gifted and
charming Gilbert Dickinson. Her health
broken by this culminating tragedy, she
ceased seeing almost everyone,
apparently including her sister-in-law.
The poet died in 1886, when she was 55
years old. The immediate cause of death
was a stroke. The attending physician
attributed this to Bright’s disease, but
a modern posthumous diagnosis points to
severe primary hypertension as the
underlying condition.
Assessment
Dickinson’s exact wishes regarding
the publication of her poetry are in
dispute. When Lavinia found the
manuscript-books, she decided the poems
should be made public and asked Susan to
prepare an edition. Susan failed to move
the project forward, however, and after
two years Lavinia turned the
manuscript-books over to Mabel Loomis
Todd, a local family friend, who
energetically transcribed and selected
the poems and also enlisted the aid of
Thomas Wentworth Higginson in editing. A
complicating circumstance was that Todd
was conducting an affair with Susan’s
husband, Austin. When Poems by Emily
Dickinson appeared in 1890, it drew
widespread interest and a warm welcome
from the eminent American novelist and
critic William Dean Howells, who saw the
verse as a signal expression of a
distinctively American sensibility. But
Susan, who was well aware of her
husband’s ongoing affair with Todd, was
outraged at what she perceived as
Lavinia’s betrayal and Todd’s
effrontery. The enmity between Susan and
Todd, and later between their daughters,
Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Millicent
Todd Bingham (each of whom edited
selections of Dickinson’s work), had a
pernicious effect on the presentation of
Emily Dickinson’s work. Her poetic
manuscripts are divided between two
primary collections: the poems in
Bingham’s possession went to Amherst
College Library, and those in Bianchi’s
hands to Harvard University’s Houghton
Library. The acrimonious relationship
between the two families has affected
scholarly interpretation of Dickinson’s
work into the 21st century.
In editing Dickinson’s poems in the
1890s, Todd and Higginson invented
titles and regularized diction, grammar,
metre, and rhyme. The first scholarly
editions of Dickinson’s poems and
letters, by Thomas H. Johnson, did not
appear until the 1950s. A much improved
edition of the complete poems was
brought out in 1998 by R.W. Franklin. A
reliable edition of the letters is not
yet available.
In spite of her "modernism," Dickinson’s
verse drew little interest from the
first generation of “High Modernists.”
Hart Crane and Allen Tate were among the
first leading writers to register her
greatness, followed in the 1950s by
Elizabeth Bishop and others. The New
Critics also played an important role in
establishing her place in the modern
canon. From the beginning, however,
Dickinson has strongly appealed to many
ordinary or unschooled readers. Her
unmistakable voice, private yet
forthright—"I’m Nobody! Who are you? /
Are you—Nobody—too?"—establishes an
immediate connection. Readers respond,
too, to the impression her poems convey
of a haunting private life, one marked
by extremes of deprivation and refined
ecstasies. At the same time, her rich
abundance—her great range of feeling,
her supple expressiveness—testifies to
an intrinsic poetic genius. Widely
translated into Japanese, Italian,
French, German, and many other
languages, Dickinson has begun to strike
readers as the one American lyric poet
who belongs in the pantheon with Sappho,
Catullus, Saʿdī, the Shakespeare of the
sonnets, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arthur
Rimbaud.
Editions
The standard edition of the poems is
the three-volume variorum edition, The
Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum
Edition (1998), edited by R.W. Franklin.
He also edited a two-volume work, The
Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson
(1981), which provides facsimiles of the
poems in their original groupings. The
Letters of Emily Dickinson, in three
volumes edited by Thomas H. Johnson and
Theodora Ward (1958), was reissued in
one volume in 1986, and it is still the
standard source for the poet’s letters.
Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s
Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington
Dickinson (1998), edited by Ellen Louise
Hart and Martha Nell Smith, is a
selection of the poet’s correspondence
with her sister-in-law. Facsimiles of
the letters to “Master” and Otis
Phillips Lord are presented in The
Master Letters of Emily Dickinson
(1986), edited by R.W. Franklin, and
Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of
Reading, Surfaces of Writing (1995),
edited by Marta L. Werner. Emily
Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s: A
Documentary History (1989), edited by
Willis J. Buckingham, reprints all known
reviews from the first decade of
publication.
Alfred Habegger
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APPENDIX
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Charles Sanders Peirce

American philosopher and scientist
born Sept. 10, 1839, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.
died April 19, 1914, near Milford, Pa.
Main
American scientist, logician, and philosopher who is noted
for his work on the logic of relations and on pragmatism as
a method of research.
Life.
Peirce was one of four sons of Sarah Mills and Benjamin
Peirce, who was Perkins professor of astronomy and
mathematics at Harvard University. After graduating from
Harvard College in 1859 and spending one year with field
parties of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Peirce
entered the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard
University, from which, in 1863, he graduated summa cum
laude in chemistry. Meanwhile, he had reentered the Survey
in 1861 as a computing aide to his father, who had
undertaken the task of determining, from observations of
lunar occultations of the Pleiades, the longitudes of
American survey points with respect to European ones. Much
of his early astronomical work for the Survey was done in
the Harvard Observatory, in whose Annals (1878) there
appeared his Photometric Researches (concerning a more
precise determination of the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy).
In 1871 his father obtained an appropriation to initiate
a geodetic connection between the surveys of the Atlantic
and Pacific coasts. This cross-continental triangulation
lent urgency to the need for a gravimetric survey of North
America directed toward a more precise determination of the
Earth’s ellipticity, a project that Charles was to
supervise. In pursuit of this project, Peirce contributed to
the theory and practice of pendulum swinging as a means of
measuring the force of gravity. The need to make accurate
measurements of lengths in his pendulum researches, in turn,
led him to make a pioneer determination of the length of the
metre in terms of a wavelength of light (1877–79). Between
1873 and 1886 Peirce conducted pendulum experiments at about
20 stations in Europe and the United States and (through
deputies) at several other places, including Grinnell Land
in the Canadian Arctic.
Though his experimental and theoretical work on gravity
determinations had won international recognition for both
him and the Survey, he was in frequent disagreement with its
administrators from 1885 onward. The amount of time he took
for the careful preparation of reports was ascribed to
procrastination. His “Report on Gravity at the Smithsonian,
Ann Arbor, Madison, and Cornell” (written 1889) was never
published, because of differences concerning its form and
content. He finally resigned as of the end of 1891, and,
from then until his death in 1914, he had no regular
employment or income. For some years he was a consulting
chemical engineer, mathematician, and inventor.
Peirce was elected a fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 1867 and a member of the National
Academy of Sciences in 1877. He presented 34 papers before
the latter from 1878 to 1911, nearly a third of them in
logic (others were in mathematics, physics, geodesy,
spectroscopy, and experimental psychology). He was elected a
member of the London Mathematical Society in 1880.
Work in logic.
Though Peirce’s career was in physical science, his
ambitions were in logic. By the age of 31, he had published
a number of technical papers in that field, besides papers
and reviews in chemistry, philology, the philosophy of
history and of religion, and the history of philosophy. He
had also given two series of Harvard University lectures and
one of Lowell Institute lectures, all in logic. Though
Peirce aspired to a university chair of logical research, no
such chair existed, and none was created for him: the day of
logic had not yet come. His nearest approach to this
ambition occurred at Johns Hopkins University, where he held
a lectureship in logic from 1879 to 1884 while retaining his
position in the Survey.
Logic in its widest sense he identified with semiotics,
the general theory of signs. He laboured over the
distinction between two kinds of action: sign action, or
semiosis, and dynamic, or mechanical, action. His major
work, unfinished, was to have been entitled A System of
Logic, Considered as Semiotic.
Although he made eminent contributions to deductive, or
mathematical, logic, Peirce was a student primarily of “the
logic of science”—i.e., of induction and of what he referred
to as “retroduction,” or “abduction,” the forming and
accepting on probation of a hypothesis to explain surprising
facts. His lifelong ambition was to establish abduction and
induction firmly and permanently along with deduction in the
very conception of logic—each of them clearly distinguished
from the other two, yet positively related to them. It was
for the sake of logic that Peirce so diversified his
scientific researches, for he considered that the logician
should ideally possess an insider’s acquaintance with the
methods and reasonings of all the sciences.
Work in philosophy
Peirce’s Pragmatism was first elaborated in a series of
“Illustrations of the Logic of Science” in the Popular
Science Monthly in 1877–78. The scientific method, he
argued, is one of several ways of fixing beliefs. Beliefs
are essentially habits of action. It is characteristic of
the method of science that it makes its ideas clear in terms
first of the sensible effects of their objects, and second
of habits of action adjusted to those effects. Here, for
example, is how the mineralogist makes the idea of hardness
clear: the sensible effect of x being harder than y is that
x will scratch y and not be scratched by it; and believing
that x is harder than y means habitually using x to scratch
y (as in dividing a sheet of glass) and keeping x away from
y when y is to remain unscratched. By the same method Peirce
tried to give equal clarity to the much more complex,
difficult, and important idea of probability. In his Harvard
lectures of 1903, he identified Pragmatism more narrowly
with the logic of abduction. Even his evolutionary
metaphysics of 1891–93 was a higher order working hypothesis
by which the special sciences might be guided in forming
their lower order hypotheses; thus, his more metaphysical
writings, with their emphases on chance and continuity, were
but further illustrations of the logic of science.
When Pragmatism became a popular movement in the early
1900s, Peirce was dissatisfied both with all of the forms of
Pragmatism then current and with his own original exposition
of it, and his last productive years were devoted in large
part to its radical revision and systematic completion and
to the proof of the principle of what he by then had come to
call “pragmaticism.”
His “one contribution to philosophy,” he thought, was his
“new list of categories” analogous to Kant’s a priori forms
of the understanding, which he reduced from 12 to 3:
Quality, Relation, and Representation. In later writings he
sometimes called them Quality, Reaction, and Mediation; and
finally, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. At first he
called them concepts; later, irreducible elements of
concepts—the univalent, bivalent, and trivalent elements.
They appear in that order, for example, in his division of
the modalities into possibility, actuality, and necessity;
in his division of signs into icons, indexes, and symbols;
in the division of symbols into terms, propositions, and
arguments; and in his division of arguments into abductions,
inductions, and deductions. The primary function of the new
list was to give systematic support to this last division.
Peirce was twice married: first in 1862 to Harriet
Melusina Fay, who left him in 1876, and second in 1883 to
Juliette Pourtalai (née Froissy). There were no children of
either marriage. For the last 26 years of his life, he and
Juliette lived on a farm on the Delaware River near Milford,
Pa. He called himself a bucolic logician, a recluse for
logic’s sake. He lived his last years in serious illness and
in abject poverty relieved only by aid from such friends as
William James.
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William James

American psychologist and philosopher
born Jan. 11, 1842, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died Aug. 26, 1910, Chocorua, N.H.
Main
American philosopher and psychologist, a leader of the
philosophical movement of Pragmatism and of the
psychological movement of functionalism.
Early life and education
James was the eldest son of Henry James, an idiosyncratic
and voluble man whose philosophical interests attracted him
to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg. One of William’s
brothers was the novelist Henry James. The elder Henry James
held an “antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he
expressed with abounding scorn and irony throughout all his
later years.” Both his physical and his spiritual life were
marked by restlessness and wanderings, largely in Europe,
that affected the training of his children at school and
their education at home. Building upon the works of
Swedenborg, which had been proffered as a revelation from
God for a new age of truth and reason in religion, the elder
James had constructed a system of his own that seems to have
served him as a vision of spiritual life. This philosophy
provided the permanent intellectual atmosphere of William’s
home life, to some degree compensating for the undisciplined
irregularity of his schooling, which ranged from New York to
Boulogne, Fr., and to Geneva and back. The habits acquired
in dealing with his father’s views at dinner and at tea
carried over into the extraordinarily sympathetic yet
critical manner that William displayed in dealing with
anybody’s views on any occasion.
When James was 18 years of age he tried his hand at
studying art, under the tutelage of William M. Hunt, an
American painter of religious subjects. But he soon tired of
it and the following year entered the Lawrence Scientific
School of Harvard University. From courses in chemistry,
anatomy, and similar subjects there, he went to the study of
medicine in the Harvard Medical School; but he interrupted
this study in order to accompany the eminent naturalist
Louis Agassiz, in the capacity of assistant, on an
expedition to the Amazon. There James’s health failed, and
his duties irked him. He returned to the medical school for
a term and then during 1867–68 went to Germany for courses
with the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz,
who formulated the law of the conservation of energy; with
Rudolf Virchow, a pathologist; with Claude Bernard, the
foremost experimentalist of 19th-century medicine; and with
others. At the same time he read widely in the psychology
and philosophy then current, especially the writings of
Charles Renouvier, a Kantian Idealist and relativist.
The acquaintance with Renouvier was a focal point in
James’s personal and intellectual history. He seems from
adolescence to have been a delicate boy, always ailing, and
at this period of his stay in Germany he suffered a
breakdown, with thoughts of suicide. When he returned home
in November 1868, after 18 months in Germany, he was still
ill. Though he took the degree of M.D. at the Harvard
Medical School in June 1869, he was unable to begin
practice. Between that date and 1872 he lived in a state of
semi-invalidism in his father’s house, doing nothing but
reading and writing an occasional review. Early in this
period he experienced a sort of phobic panic, which
persisted until the end of April 1870. It was relieved,
according to his own statement, by the reading of Renouvier
on free will and the decision that “my first act of free
will shall be to believe in free will.” The decision carried
with it the abandonment of all determinisms—both the
scientific kind that his training had established for him
and that seems to have had some relation to his neurosis and
the theological, metaphysical kind that he later opposed in
the notion of “the block universe.” His revolutionary
discoveries in psychology and philosophy, his views
concerning the methods of science, the qualities of men, and
the nature of reality all seem to have received a definite
propulsion from this resolution of his poignant personal
problem.
Interest in psychology
In 1872 James was appointed instructor in physiology at
Harvard College, in which capacity he served until 1876. But
he could not be diverted from his ruling passion, and the
step from teaching physiology to teaching psychology—not the
traditional “mental science” but physiological
psychology—was as inevitable as it was revolutionary. It
meant a challenge to the vested interests of the mind,
mainly theological, that were entrenched in the colleges and
universities of the United States; and it meant a definite
break with what Santayana called “the genteel tradition.”
Psychology ceased to be mental philosophy and became a
laboratory science. Philosophy ceased to be an exercise in
the grammar of assent and became an adventure in
methodological invention and metaphysical discovery.
With his marriage in 1878, to Alice H. Gibbens of
Cambridge, Mass., a new life began for James. The old
neurasthenia practically disappeared. He went at his tasks
with a zest and an energy of which his earlier record had
given no hint. It was as if some deeper level of his being
had been tapped: his life as an originative thinker began in
earnest. He contracted to produce a textbook of psychology
by 1880. But the work grew under his hand, and when it
finally appeared in 1890, as The Principles of Psychology,
it was not a textbook but a monumental work in two great
volumes, from which the textbook was condensed two years
later.
The Principles, which was recognized at once as both
definitive and innovating in its field, established the
functional point of view in psychology. It assimilated
mental science to the biological disciplines and treated
thinking and knowledge as instruments in the struggle to
live. At one and the same time it made the fullest use of
principles of psychophysics (the study of the effect of
physical processes upon the mental processes of an organism)
and defended, without embracing, free will.
Interest in religion
The Principles completed, James seems to have lost interest
in the subject. Creator of the first U.S. demonstrational
psychological laboratory, he disliked laboratory work and
did not feel himself fitted for it. He liked best the
adventure of free observation and reflection. Compared with
the problems of philosophy and religion, psychology seemed
to him “a nasty little subject” that he was glad to have
done with. His studies, which were now of the nature and
existence of God, the immortality of the soul, free will and
determinism, the values of life, were empirical, not
dialectical; James went directly to religious experience for
the nature of God, to psychical research for survival after
death, to fields of belief and action for free will and
determinism. He was searching out these things, not arguing
foregone conclusions. Having begun to teach ethics and
religion in the late 1880s, his collaboration with the
psychical researchers dated even earlier. Survival after
death he ultimately concluded to be unproved; but the
existence of divinity he held to be established by the
record of the religious experience, viewing it as a
plurality of saving powers, “a more of the same quality” as
oneself, with which, in a crisis, one’s personality can make
saving contact. Freedom he found to be a certain looseness
in the conjunction of things, so that what the future will
be is not made inevitable by past history and present form;
freedom, or chance, corresponds to Darwin’s “spontaneous
variations.” These views were set forth in the period
between 1893 and 1903 in various essays and lectures,
afterward collected into works, of which the most notable is
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
(1897). During this decade, which may be correctly described
as James’s religious period, all of his studies were
concerned with one aspect or another of the religious
question.
His natural interest in religion was reinforced by the
practical stimulus of an invitation to give the Gifford
Lectures on natural religion at the University of Edinburgh.
He was not able to deliver them until 1901–02, and their
preparation focussed his labours for a number of years. His
disability, involving his heart, was caused by prolonged
effort and exposure during a vacation in the Adirondacks in
1898. A trip to Europe, which was to have taken up a
sabbatical year away from university duties, turned into two
years of invalidism. The Gifford Lectures were prepared
during this distressful period. Published as The Varieties
of Religious Experience (1902), they had an even greater
acclaim as a book than as articles. Cautious and tentative
though it was, the rich concreteness of the material and the
final summary of the evidence—that the varieties of
religious experience point to the existence of specific and
various reservoirs of consciousness-like energies with which
we can make specific contact in times of trouble—touched
something fundamental in the minds of religionists and at
least provided them with apologetic material not in conflict
with science and scientific method. The book was the
culmination of James’s interest in the psychology of
religion.
Career in philosophy
James now explicitly turned his attention to the ultimate
philosophic problems that had been at least marginally
present along with his other interests. Already in 1898, in
a lecture at the University of California on philosophical
conceptions and practical results, he had formulated the
theory of method known as Pragmatism. Originating in the
strict analysis of the logic of the sciences that had been
made in the middle 1870s by Charles Sanders Peirce, the
theory underwent in James’s hands a transforming
generalization. He showed how the meaning of any idea
whatsoever—scientific, religious, philosophical, political,
social, personal—can be found ultimately in nothing save in
the succession of experiential consequences that it leads
through and to; that truth and error, if they are within the
reach of the mind at all, are identical with these
consequences. Having made use of the pragmatic rule in his
study of religious experience, he now turned it upon the
ideas of change and chance, of freedom, variety, pluralism,
and novelty, which, from the time he had read Renouvier, it
had been his preoccupation to establish. He used the
pragmatic rule in his polemic against monism and the “block
universe,” which held that all of reality is of one piece
(cemented, as it were, together); and he used this rule
against internal relations (i.e., the notion that you cannot
have one thing without having everything), against all
finalities, staticisms, and completenesses. His classes rang
with the polemic against absolutes, and a new vitality
flowed into the veins of American philosophers. Indeed, the
historic controversy over Pragmatism saved the profession
from iteration and dullness.
Meanwhile (1906), James had been asked to lecture at
Stanford University, in California, and he experienced there
the earthquake that nearly destroyed San Francisco. The same
year he delivered the Lowell Lectures in Boston, afterward
published as Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking
(1907). Various studies appeared—“Does Consciousness Exist?”
“The Thing and Its Relations,” “The Experience of
Activity”—chiefly in The Journal of Philosophy; these were
essays in the extension of the empirical and pragmatic
method, which were collected after James’s death and
published as Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912). The
fundamental point of these writings is that the relations
between things, holding them together or separating them,
are at least as real as the things themselves; that their
function is real; and that no hidden substrata are necessary
to account for the clashes and coherences of the world. The
Empiricism was radical because until this time even
Empiricists believed in a metaphysical ground like the
hidden turtle of Hindu mythology on whose back the cosmic
elephant rode.
James was now the centre of a new life for philosophy in
the English-speaking world. The continentals did not “get”
Pragmatism; if its German opponents altogether misunderstood
it, its Italian adherents—among them, of all people, the
critic and devastating iconoclast Giovanni Papini—travestied
it. In England it was championed by F.C.S. Schiller, in the
United States by John Dewey and his school, in China by Hu
Shih. In 1907 James gave his last course at Harvard. In the
spring he repeated the lectures on Pragmatism at Columbia
University. It was as if a new prophet had come; the lecture
halls were as crowded on the last day as on the first, with
people standing outside the door. Shortly afterward came an
invitation to give the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester
College, Oxford. These lectures, published in 1909 as A
Pluralistic Universe, state, in a more systematic and less
technical way than the Essays, the same essential positions.
They present, in addition, certain religious overbeliefs of
James’s, which further thinking—if the implications of the
posthumous Some Problems of Philosophy may be trusted—was to
mitigate. These overbeliefs involve a panpsychistic
interpretation of experience (one that ascribes a psychic
aspect to all of nature) that goes beyond radical Empiricism
and the pragmatic rule into conventional metaphysics.
Home again, James found himself working, against growing
physical trouble, upon the material that was partially
published after his death as Some Problems of Philosophy
(1911). He also collected his occasional pieces in the
controversy over Pragmatism and published them as The
Meaning of Truth (1909). Finally, his physical discomfort
exceeded even his remarkable voluntary endurance. After a
fruitless trip to Europe in search of a cure, he returned,
going straight to the country home in New Hampshire, where
he died in 1910.
Significance and influence
In psychology, James’s work is of course dated, but it is
dated as is Galileo’s in physics or Charles Darwin’s in
biology because it is the originative matrix of the great
variety of new developments that are the current vogue. In
philosophy, his positive work is still prophetic. The world
he argued for was soon reflected in the new physics, as
diversely interpreted, with its resonances from Charles
Peirce, particularly by Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell,
and the Danish quantum physicist Niels Bohr—a world of
events connected with one another by kinds of next-to-next
relations, a world various, manifold, changeful, originating
in chance, perpetuated by habits (that the scientist calls
laws), and transformed by breaks, spontaneities, and
freedoms. In human nature, James believed, these visible
traits of the world are equally manifest. The real specific
event is the individual, whose intervention in history gives
it in each case a new and unexpected turn. But in history,
as in nature, the continuous flux of change and chance
transforms every being, invalidates every law, and alters
every ideal.
James lived his philosophy. It entered into the texture
and rhythms of his rich and vivid literary style. It
determined his attitude toward scientifically unaccepted
therapies, such as Christian Science or mind cure, and
repugnant ideals, such as militarism. It made him an
anti-imperialist, a defender of the small, the variant, the
unprecedented, the weak, wherever and whenever they
appeared. His philosophy is too viable and subtle, too
hedged, experiential, and tentative to have become the dogma
of a school. It has functioned rather to implant the germs
of new thought in others than to serve as a standard old
system for others to repeat.
Horace M. Kallen
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Bordon Parker Bowne

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910) was an American Christian
philosopher and theologian in the Methodist tradition. In
1876 he became a professor of philosophy at Boston
University for more than thirty years. He later served as
dean of the graduate school. Bowne was an acute critic of
positivism & naturalism. He categorized his views as
Kantianized Berkeleyanism, transcendental empiricism and,
finally, Personalism, a philosophical branch of liberal
theology, of which Bowne is the dominant figure. His
masterpiece, Metaphysics, appeared in 1882. Bowne was
chiefly influenced by Lotze.
Early life
Borden Parker Bowne was born on 14 January, 1847, near
Leonardville, NJ, and died in Boston on 1 April, 1910. He
was one of six children of upright parents raised in rural
New Jersey, near what is today called Atlantic Highlands.
Notably, the father, Joseph Bowne was a Justice of the
Peace, a farmer, a Methodist preacher and a vocal
abolitionist at a time when such a stand was controversial.
The mother was of a Quaker family and also an abolitionist.
As a youth Bowne was able to observe the example of parents
who were unbending on points of moral significance, and
particularly regarding the dignity of all persons. Later
Bowne was instrumental in supporting integration in higher
education, and he presided over the dissertation of the
first African American to earn a Ph.D. from a U.S.
University, John Wesley Edward Bowen (1855-1933), in 1891.
In demeanor and bearing Bowne was very formal, even with his
own family members, business-like and orderly. He followed
the manner of personal discipline from which the Methodists
originally took their name.
Education
Bowne entered New York University in 1867 amidst the
swirling new controversy of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
Simultaneously in 1867 he was examined and licensed to
preach in the Methodist Church. He worked his way through
college employed at his uncle’s grocery in Brooklyn while
preaching and pastoring part-time. He studied the standard
curriculum and was graduated with the Bachelor of Arts in
1871. Bowne’s formal ordination as a Methodist deacon
followed in 1872 and he was assigned a congregation of rural
Long Island at Whitestone. In 1873 the opportunity came to
continue his studies in Europe. He studied mainly at Paris,
Halle, and Göttingen, being most deeply influenced at the
last of these by the empirical strain of Kantian philosophy
prevailing in that age under Rudolf Hermann Lotze
(1817-1881). Bowne worked as a journalist in New York City
from 1874 until 1876 when he completed the Master of Arts at
New York University. He accepted a call to the philosophy
department at Boston University in 1877, refusing in turn
attractive offers from Yale and the new University of
Chicago as his reputation grew. In 1888 Bowne became the
first Dean of the Graduate School at Boston University and
held that position until his death.
Career
Bowne’s most lasting contributions came in the philosophy of
religion. His religious background is important in this
regard. Bowne was a popular guest preacher throughout his
career and a volume of his sermons was published
posthumously under the title The Essence of Religion (1910).
His constant stream of contributions to popular religious
magazines and newspapers made him one of the foremost
theological opinion leaders of his time. These voluminous
popular writings were applications of his technical
philosophical positions to the social and religious issues
of the day. These writings bespeak an unusual mixture of
progressive ideas, the guiding spirit of which is a devotion
to clarity of thought and practicality of viewpoint. It will
be worthwhile to make note of two theological and
biographical points before moving to a summary of Bowne’s
formal philosophy.
Bowne was able to negotiate a kind of theistic naturalism
that enabled him to avoid much of the controversy over
evolutionary theory during his career. His basic position
was that there was no naturalistic or theological basis for
treating nature, its changes, developments, and laws, as
something over against God. The idea that a scientific
description of nature could contradict the basic principles
of theism betrayed a misunderstanding of both nature and
theism. Thus, the reductive evolutionist misunderstands
nature by assuming that the result of a process ought to be
understood through its beginnings or origins, when in fact
it is only from the practical survey of the results that the
origins can be empirically approached or deduced. This same
limiting principle applies to all human understanding and
knowledge regardless of whether the question before us is
natural, cultural or historical. In addition, whatever
principles and trends may have prevailed regarding an
origin, they are undeveloped in their original state and
therefore not to be valued except as seen through a later
accomplishment, i.e., their having produced a valuable
result. There might be any number of trends and happenings
in natural or human history which were dead-ends and no one
is scandalized by their lack of issue, so why should any
theist be scandalized where the issue of natural or
historical processes is so immensely and obviously valuable
as in the case of evolution? On the other side, the
defenders of “special creation” err in assuming that God is
something supernatural, something wholly apart from nature.
Bowne points out that unless God is conceived as working
immanently within each moment of experience, be it natural
or human, the sustaining continuity of natural or human
experience is wholly without an explanation. Thus, every
event is a special creation in the sense that the complete
explanation for its existence cannot be given by science,
history, theology, or any other device of human
understanding. Scientific explanations are incomplete, just
as theological explanations are incomplete. One result of
this view is that there is no reason to defend the idea of
miracles in the traditional sense of the word, since a
serviceable conception of the immanent activity of God in
nature renders such traditional tales more suitable for
children than persons of mature faith, according to Bowne.
This latter view, in which Bowne denies the traditional view
of miracles and argues against the blood atonement, and by
implication the resurrection, led him into troubles with the
conservative constituency of his church, and also led
William James to remark to Bowne in a letter that he (James)
was “a better Methodist than you, in spite of your efforts
to persuade me to the contrary. If the ass and the
blatherskite succeed in their efforts to weed you out of the
body [of the church], I hope they will have the wisdom to
get me voted in to fill the vacuum.” (December 29, 1903).
Bowne’s standard answer to such charges was to remind his
accusers that there was a difference between matters of
knowledge in which human methods could expect some success,
however limited, and in matters of faith which take up where
investigation will avail nothing.
James’ remark about “weeding out” Bowne was a reference
to the controversy brewing in 1903 which resulted in Bowne’s
heresy trial in the spring of 1904. In addition to the
issues described above, Bowne had defended the teaching of
the controversial higher criticism of the Bible at Boston
University, where a religion professor had been dismissed
for teaching this approach. Having had the example of his
own parents, Bowne was unintimidated by those who pointed
fingers and threw epithets his way. He calmly defended
himself and was acquitted of all charges, unanimously, by a
council of Methodist bishops (some of whom were his former
students). In many ways this episode served to bring
Methodist theology into an influential role in the forging
of what has since been called the “liberal Protestant
consensus,” with other mainline denominations, which was so
influential in 20th century philosophical theology and
social ethics. The Bowne heresy trial was one of many
turning points in the creation of that important
perspective.
Among important philosophical associations in Bowne’s
environment, William James was perhaps the most notable.
Bowne was part of a group that met every two weeks for some
years in the rooms of Thomas Davidson in Boston. The group
included not only Davidson and James, but George Holmes
Howison (until his permanent departure from Boston in 1882),
J.E. Cabot, W.T. Harris, and C.C. Everett. A close
examination of the philosophies of those who were part of
this group suggests that this pleasant fortnightly meeting
might have been the birthplace of pluralistic philosophy in
America, in the rich exchanges particularly among Howison,
James and Bowne.
Philosophy
Bowne’s method was a descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive
or formalist or logical) version of Kantian philosophy,
similar to Lotze’s, but with a greater emphasis upon the
empirical roots of our descriptions. In describing
experience we are enjoined to remember always the difference
between our conceptual suppositions and our genuine
evidence. Conceptual clarity is to be sought and
self-contradiction to be avoided not because a clear
description is certain to provide access to the structures
of the real (be they mental or material), but because
conceptual confusion is likely to cloud our judgments about
what exists and what we know. Therefore, the primary
function of logic is the normative clarification of thought,
and the function of clear thinking is to bring to the fore
knowledge, understanding or appreciation of what we value.
Abstractions are tools, not principles of the real. The
following passage from Bowne’s 1899 treatise on method,
Theory of Thought and Knowledge, exemplifies his outlook:
“The root thought of this work is that thought is an organic
activity which unfolds from within, and can never be put
together mechanically from without . . . . Knowledge is no
longer something originating outside the mind, possibly in
the nerves, and passed along ready-made into the mind; it is
rather something built up by the mind within itself in
accordance with principles immanent in the mental nature.
Nothing is nearer to us than thought, and yet nothing is
harder to grasp. The reason is that spontaneous thought
deals with its objects rather than with itself, and the work
of reflection is difficult.” (pp. iii-iv) Thus Bowne’s
approach is a kind of phenomenology that is governed not by
an ontologically grounded pure logic, but by a supposition
that careful reflection can reveal some portion of its own
origins and structures, and can be more clearly described as
greater care is given to the refinement of our descriptions.
However, ontological knowledge is not the result of this
process any more than it is the ground; more or less useful
guides for action are the most we can expect in our
endeavors, and epistemology is the critical treatment of the
processes by which valuable knowledge is acquired.
Regarding the limits of description and philosophical
knowledge, Bowne warns against the twin pitfalls of
epistemology –warnings that characterize much of American
philosophy in Bowne’s time: “I have emphasized two points
the knowledge of which is of great importance, if not
absolutely necessary, for our intellectual salvation. The
first point is the volitional and practical nature of
belief. Persons living on the plane of instinct and hearsay
have no intellectual difficulty here, or anywhere else; but
persons entering upon the life of reflection without insight
into this fact are sure to lose themselves in theoretical
impotence and practical impudence. The impotence manifests
itself in a paralyzing inability to believe, owing to the
fancy that theoretical demonstration must precede belief.
The impudence shows itself in ruling out with an airy levity
the practical principles by which men and nations live,
because they admit of no formal proof. These extremes of
unwisdom can be escaped only by an insight into the
volitional and practical nature of belief.” Hence Bowne
embraces what is better known under the aegis of pragmatism
as “the will to believe,” in James’ terminology, or
alternately as “the scientific method of fixing belief” in
C.S. Peirce’s vocabulary. Whether Bowne ought to be called a
pragmatist is a matter of some debate, but that his method
can be characterized as pragmatic seems very clear. James
did not regard Bowne as a radical empiricist, but a case
might be made that Bowne was such.
Bowne continues: “The second point . . . is the almost
universal illusion arising from what I have called the
structural fallacies of uncritical thought. Spontaneous
thought is pretty sure to take itself as the double of
reality. Thus arises the fallacy of the universal, the
parent of a very large part of popular speculation. And when
to this are added the omnipresent imposture and deceit of
language, there results a great world of abstract and verbal
illusion against which we cannot be too much on our guard,
seeing that it is the source both of so much theoretical
error and of so much practical menace and aberration.” (p.
v) Here is a statement of method that is hard to distinguish
from pragmatism or from process philosophy. Bowne’s
consistency in adhering to these methodological principles
is exemplary, and his writing itself is clever, pithy,
economical and insightful. His prose bears up well to the
contemporary eye.
In metaphysics Bowne was an early proponent of process
philosophy. In the first edition of his Metaphysics (1882),
Bowne attacked the traditional notion of “substance” and
“being” and suggested that it be replaced with a notion of
process. His idea of God as the “world ground” is similar to
A. N. Whitehead’s idea of God in the succeeding century.
This move rendered “time” and “space” as they had appeared
in Kantian and Aristotleian philosophies phenomenal as
opposed to either noumenal or ontological. This and other
such positions of Bowne in metaphysics labeled him as an
idealist, but Bowne insisted that his brand of pluralistic
objective idealism was entirely consistent with the
conviction of the reality of an order quite beyond our
mental processes, although such a reality cannot be
conceived as wholly independent, since nothing is wholly
independent of anything else at the level of existence. What
was required in order to provide consistent and usable
descriptions in metaphysics was a central principle which
provided a reliable and fruitful clue to the place we hold
in the broader reality. Bowne found this “clue” in the idea
of the person. Whatever else we might suppose about the
nature of reality, we can be assured that it is compatible
with or not entirely hostile to the personal mode of
existence. In addition, it seems that a pervasive and indeed
inevitable feature of all our philosophical descriptions is
that they express the perspective and values of personal
beings. Thus, person is a mode of relation that we may
safely take as clue to the structure of objective reality
and a feature of all philosophical description. Accordingly,
Bowne brings his critical acumen to bear against the various
“impersonalist” philosophies of his time. Absolute idealism
errs by sacrificing the clear empirical plurality of persons
in our experience to an impersonal Absolute. Materialism
errs in reducing a personal reality to an impersonal
principle which can only be abstract. Impersonalist versions
of naturalism and psychologism suffer from similar errors,
according to Bowne. Ultimately his claim is that
philosophies that eliminate the personal principle fall into
the “structural fallacies of uncritical thought” or the
fallacy of the universal, what James called “the
philosopher’s fallacy” and Whitehead called “the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness.”
This trajectory in metaphysics culminated in the
expression of Bowne’s mature philosophy in his book
Personalism (1908). Although Bowne’s philosophical system
bore several names along the way, including “objective
idealism” and “transcendental empiricism,” its final moniker
was “personalism.” Whether this is a very good label can be
questioned, but it has stayed with philosophy in the
tradition of Bowne in subsequent generations. Personalism
was an important force in mainstream philosophy until the
decline of idealistic philosophies in America became a
marked phenomenon in the 1930s. In theology and social
ethics personalism exerted greater influence through Bowne’s
student Edgar Sheffield Brightman, and Brightman’s student
Martin Luther King, Jr., who was perhaps the most important
social, political and ethical thinker in the personalist
tradition. In the philosophy of religion personalism
continues to exercise some influence in the circles that
take philosophical theology seriously. The term
“personalism” has gained greater currency in these circles
in recent years due to the espousal of this view by Pope
John Paul II. Due to the importance of this philosopher Pope
it is likely that the term “personalism” will be in use for
the foreseeable future, and with the same basic meaning that
Bowne gave it.
Regarding the mature expression of Bowne’s philosophy in
Personalism, James, upon reading it, remarked in a letter to
Bowne: “It seems to me that you and I are now aiming at
exactly the same end . . . . The common foe of us both is
the dogmatist-rationalist-abstractionist. Our common desire
is to redeem the concrete personal life which wells up in us
from moment to moment, from fastidious (and really
preposterous) dialectic contradictions, impossibilities and
vetoes.” (August 17, 1908) Arguably, then, Bowne’s
personalism is a kind of pragmatism that insists upon
“person” in a way analogous to the way that John Dewey, for
example, insists upon “organism.”
The idea that “person” is both a fundamental modality of
existence and a reliable descriptive principle in philosophy
supplies a needed bridge between metaphysics, method, and
ethics. Accordingly, Bowne wrote extensively in moral
philosophy, arguably his most important writings, in terms
of subsequent impact on the world. Bowne’s ethical
philosophy is characterized by its guarded meliorism; an
emphasis on practicality and on learning to be circumspect
about human nature and possibilities. Bowne tends to take a
fairly dim view of the prospects for improving human
behavior, but he is convinced that we may find exemplars of
freedom well employed in our midst. He is a progressive,
arguing that ethical philosophy ought to learn from its
past, but exists for the sake of the present and future and
must not be tied down to tradition. Freedom is a given in
moral philosophy in the sense that it is implied by the very
notion of personal existence. An unfree being cannot be a
personal being, and a personal being cannot fail to be free
in some sense. Thus, the idea of freedom is not a postulate
for Bowne, but an ontological requirement of meaningful
existence and a presupposition of all descriptions. The
dignity and equality of all persons thus becomes part and
parcel of their ontological freedom, and seeking to develop
the freedom of persons is an ethical imperative beside which
none other can compare. Hence, Bowne favored the equality of
women and non-white races at a time when these views were
controversial. He did not limit the notion of personal
existence to human beings, recognizing as early as 1882 that
other beings, including animals, must be described as having
a personal form of existence.
However, while Bowne was an uncompromising apologist of
progressive morality, it led him to disparage the ways of
life of “savages” and “Indians,” not because of their race
or natural inferiority, but because he saw “primitive” ways
of life as morally inferior to the ways of “civilized men.”
Today this sort of cultural triumphalism is called
"colonialism," and it does harbor many racist and sexist
presuppositions. In this regard Bowne was very much a man of
the Victorian age. He did not credit the idea of an ascent
of man as either naturalized or divinely ordained, but he
did hold without apology the idea that not all ways of life
have achieved the same level of moral excellence, and some
ways of life, principally "sub-European" ways, deserved our
round condemnation. His model of a morally advanced life was
that of city-dwelling Anglo-Europeans wherever they might be
found. Yet, Bowne was anti-imperialist and regarded
nationalism and even patriotism as an indication of stunted
moral growth on the part of those who defended them. While
he took a dim view of human nature, Bowne still believed
there was reason to hope that we might become less
self-destructive, and clarity of thought could only help.
In particular Bowne thought that the mode of relating in
the family unit probably holds our best clues to moral
progress. While the situation of the family in Bowne’s age,
as in our own, was nothing to praise, Bowne argued that it
was the best set of moral relations we have, and that moral
progress will be achieved by the expansion of the sphere of
moral concern to include the consideration of wider and
wider circles of individuals, a “family of humankind” rather
than a “kingdom of ends.”
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John Dewey

American philosopher and educator
born Oct. 20, 1859, Burlington, Vt., U.S.
died June 1, 1952, New York, N.Y.
Main
American philosopher and educator who was one of the
founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism, a
pioneer in functional psychology, and a leader of the
progressive movement in education in the United States.
Early life
The son of a grocer in Vermont, Dewey attended the public
schools of Burlington and there entered the University of
Vermont. After graduating from the university in 1879, Dewey
taught high school for three years. In the fall of 1882 he
entered Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, for advanced
study in philosophy. There he came under the influence of
George Sylvester Morris, who was a leading exponent of
Neo-Hegelianism, a revival of the thought of the
early-19th-century German philosopher Hegel. Dewey found in
this philosophy, with its emphasis on the spiritual and
organic nature of the universe, what he had been vaguely
groping for, and he eagerly embraced it.
After being awarded the Ph.D. degree by Johns Hopkins
University in 1884, Dewey, in the fall of that year, went to
the University of Michigan, where, at the urging of Morris,
he had been appointed an instructor in philosophy and
psychology. With the exception of the academic year 1888–89,
when he served as professor of philosophy at the University
of Minnesota, Dewey spent the next 10 years at Michigan.
During this time his philosophical endeavours were devoted
mainly to an intensive study of Hegel and the British
Neo-Hegelians and to the new experimental physiological
psychology then being advanced in the United States by G.
Stanley Hall and William James.
Dewey’s interest in education began during his years at
Michigan. His readings and observations revealed that most
schools were proceeding along lines set by early traditions
and were failing to adjust to the latest findings of child
psychology and to the needs of a changing democratic social
order. The search for a philosophy of education that would
remedy these defects became a major concern for Dewey and
added a new dimension to his thinking.
Philosophical thought
Dewey left Michigan in 1894 to become professor of
philosophy and chairman of the department of philosophy,
psychology, and pedagogy at the University of Chicago.
Dewey’s achievements there brought him national fame. The
increasing dominance of evolutionary biology and psychology
in his thinking led him to abandon the Hegelian theory of
ideas, which views them as somehow mirroring the rational
order of the universe, and to accept instead an
instrumentalist theory of knowledge, which conceives of
ideas as tools or instruments in the solution of problems
encountered in the environment. These same disciplines
contributed somewhat later to his rejection of the Hegelian
notion of an Absolute Mind manifesting itself as a
rationally structured, material universe and as realizing
its goals through a dialectic of ideas. Dewey found more
acceptable a theory of reality holding that nature, as
encountered in scientific and ordinary experience, is the
ultimate reality and that man is a product of nature who
finds his meaning and goals in life here and now.
Since these doctrines, which were to remain at the centre
of all of Dewey’s future philosophizing, also furnished the
framework in which Dewey’s colleagues in the department
carried on their research, a distinct school of philosophy
was in operation. This was recognized by William James in
1903, when a collection of essays written by Dewey and seven
of his associates in the department, Studies in Logical
Theory, appeared. James hailed the book enthusiastically and
declared that with its publication a new school of
philosophy, the Chicago school, had made its appearance.
Dewey’s philosophical orientation has been labeled a form
of pragmatism, though Dewey himself seemed to favour the
term “instrumentalism,” or “experimentalism.” William
James’s The Principles of Psychology early stimulated
Dewey’s rethinking of logic and ethics by directing his
attention to the practical function of ideas and concepts,
but Dewey and the Chicago school of pragmatists went farther
than James had gone in that they conceived of ideas as
instruments for transforming the uneasiness connected with
the experience of having a problem into the satisfaction of
some resolution or clarification of it.
Dewey’s preferred mode of inquiry was scientific
investigation; he thought the experimental methods of modern
science provided the most promising approach to social and
ethical as well as scientific problems. He rejected the idea
of a fixed and immutable moral law derivable from
consideration of the essential nature of man, since such a
traditional philosophical method denied the potential
application and promise of newer empirical and scientific
methods.
Dewey developed from these views a philosophical ground
for democracy and liberalism. He conceived of democracy not
as a mere form of government, but rather as a mode of
association which provides the members of a society with the
opportunity for maximum experimentation and personal growth.
The ideal society, for Dewey, was one that provided the
conditions for ever enlarging the experience of all its
members.
Dewey’s contributions to psychology were also noteworthy.
Many of the articles he wrote at that time are now accepted
as classics in psychological literature and assure him a
secure place in the history of psychology. Most significant
is the essay “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” which
is generally taken to mark the beginnings of functional
psychology—i.e., one that focuses on the total organism in
its endeavours to adjust to the environment.
Educational theory and practice. Dewey’s work in
philosophy and psychology was largely centred in his major
interest, educational reform. In formulating educational
criteria and aims, he drew heavily on the insights into
learning offered by contemporary psychology as applied to
children. He viewed thought and learning as a process of
inquiry starting from doubt or uncertainty and spurred by
the desire to resolve practical frictions or relieve strain
and tension. Education must therefore begin with experience,
which has as its aim growth and the achievement of maturity.
Dewey’s writings on education, notably his The School and
Society (1899) and The Child and the Curriculum (1902),
presented and defended what were to remain the chief
underlying tenets of the philosophy of education he
originated. These tenets were that the educational process
must begin with and build upon the interests of the child;
that it must provide opportunity for the interplay of
thinking and doing in the child’s classroom experience; that
the teacher should be a guide and coworker with the pupils,
rather than a taskmaster assigning a fixed set of lessons
and recitations; and that the school’s goal is the growth of
the child in all aspects of its being.
Among the results of Dewey’s administrative efforts were
the establishment of an independent department of pedagogy
and of the University of Chicago’s Laboratory Schools, in
which the educational theories and practices suggested by
psychology and philosophy could be tested. The Laboratory
Schools, the original unit of which began operation in 1896,
attracted wide attention and enhanced the reputation of the
University of Chicago as a foremost centre of progressive
educational thought. Dewey headed the Laboratory Schools
from 1903 to 1904.
Dewey’s ideas and proposals strongly affected educational
theory and practice in the United States. Aspects of his
views were seized upon by the “progressive movement” in
education, which stressed the student-centred rather than
the subject-centred school, education through activity
rather than through formal learning, and laboratory,
workshop, or occupational education rather than the mastery
of traditional subjects. But though Dewey’s own faith in
progressive education never wavered, he came to realize that
the zeal of his followers introduced a number of excesses
and defects into progressive education. Indeed, in
Experience and Education (1938) he sharply criticized
educators who sought merely to interest or amuse students,
disregarded organized subject matter in favour of mere
activity on the part of students, and were content with mere
vocational training.
During the last two decades of Dewey’s life, his
philosophy of education was the target of numerous and
widespread attacks. Progressive educational practices were
blamed for the failure of some American school systems to
train pupils adequately in the liberal arts and for their
neglect of such basic subjects as mathematics and science.
Furthermore, critics blamed Dewey and his progressive ideas
for what the former viewed as an insufficient emphasis on
discipline in the schools.
Career at Columbia University
Disagreements between President William Rainey Harper of the
University of Chicago and Dewey led, in 1904, to Dewey’s
resignation of his posts and to his acceptance of a
professorship of philosophy at Columbia University in New
York City. Dewey was associated with Columbia for 47 years,
first as professor and then as professor emeritus of
philosophy. During his 25 years of active teaching, his fame
and the significance of what he had to say attracted
thousands of students from home and abroad to his classes,
and he became one of the most widely known and influential
teachers in America. Dewey’s influence extended even further
after he taught and lectured in countries such as Japan
(1919), China (1919–21), Turkey (1924), Mexico (1926), and
the Soviet Union (1928).
Dewey’s scholarly output at Columbia was enormous; one
bibliography devotes approximately 125 pages to listing the
titles of his publications during these years. His thought
covered a wide range of topics, including logic and theory
of knowledge, psychology, education, social philosophy, fine
arts, and religion. Major works dealing with each of these
fields appeared over the years and clearly established Dewey
as the foremost philosopher in America and as one of the
nation’s most productive scholars. His Experience and
Nature, published in 1925, brings together in a systematic
way the more important aspects of his philosophy and is
generally regarded as his magnum opus.
His interest in current affairs prompted Dewey to
contribute regularly to liberal periodicals, especially The
New Republic. His articles focused on domestic, foreign, and
international developments and were designed to reach a wide
reading public. Because of his skill in analyzing and
interpreting events, he soon was rated as among the best of
American commentators and social critics.
Dewey also gave his time and energy to the support of
organizations and causes in which he believed. In 1895 he
was a founding member of the National Herbart Society
(renamed the National Society for the Study of Education in
1902), and he served two terms as chairman (1903–05) of the
National Society of College Teachers of Education, which he
had helped establish in 1902. Dewey became one of the
founders and the first president of the American Association
of University Professors in 1915, and the next year he
became a charter member of the first teachers’ union in New
York City. He helped found the New School for Social
Research in 1919 and the University-in-Exile in 1933,
established for scholars being persecuted in countries under
totalitarian regimes. In 1937, at age 78, he headed a
commission of inquiry that went to Mexico City to hear Leon
Trotsky’s rebuttal of the charges made against him in the
Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937.
Dewey retired from the Columbia faculty in 1930, after
which he concentrated on public affairs while continuing to
write. Among his books on psychology and philosophy are
Psychology (1887), Ethics (cowritten with James Tufts;
1908), Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and
Conduct (1922), The Quest for Certainty (1929), Art as
Experience (1934), Logic, the Theory of Inquiry (1938), and
Freedom and Culture (1939). His chief later writings on
education are Democracy and Education (1916) and Experience
and Education (1938).
George Dykhuizen
Clarence Henry Faust
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