ESSAY TOPICS:

perkins_2011_week1_1 perkins_2011_week2_2 perkins_2011_week3_3 perkins_2011_week6_5

Assignment 3 Pick one of the following essay topics. ESSAY TOPICS: 1. Compare and contrast the goals of writers in weeks ten through twelve with those of earlier writers we’ve read in weeks one through four or six through eight. 2. Examine and explain in detail the Modernist Movement. 3. Explore the Paris writers of this era. 4. Explain how several writers of can be seen as transition figures between two literary movements and two historical periods. 5. Examine the historical events between the two world wars. Why was this referred to as The Lost Generation? Use our authors as reference and resources. 6. Examine the Multiculturalism Movement 7. Explain in detail the importance of nature, emotions, the individual in any two movements we’ve covered in weeks ten through twelve. 8. Examine and explain Postmodernism encorporating at least some of our authors as reference. 9. Examine the shift from Postmodernism back to Realism. ESSAY INSTRUCTIONS: Your submissions should always be in MLA Style: Essay three will be 750-1,000 words required. Please recall that the 750-word range is the minimum requirement and just meets the assignment for an average grade consideration. Quality work, however, may slide the earned grade some, but not likely by two rubric levels. In the upper left-hand corner of the paper, place your name, the professor’s name, the course name, and the due date for the assignment on consecutive lines. Double space your information from your name onward. All papers should be in size 10 or 12 Times New Roman font, with one-inch margins all the way around your paper. All paragraph indentations should be indented five spaces (one tab) from the left margin. All work is to be left justified. When quoting lines in literature, please research the proper way to cite short stories, plays, or poems. You should make use of the online APUS library. Avoid all uses of Wikipedia (or any encyclopedia or dictionary) and reference guides. Be careful that you don’t create a cut and paste paper of information from your various sources. You may not use previously published material; your ideas are to be new and freshly constructed. Also, take great care not to plagiarize; if in doubt, cite the source.

1

Week One: Introduction to
American Literature Post
Civil War

Library of the Future® Emily Dickinson I’m nobody, who are you

© McGraw−Hill, Inc., 1995

Emily Dickinson

Poems: Second Series
1891

LIFE

I.

I’M nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

2 American Literature Since the Civil War

Library of the Future® Emily Dickinson The brain is wider than the
sky

© McGraw−Hill, Inc., 1995
Emily Dickinson

Poems: Third Series
1896

LIFE

XLIII.

THE brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,

The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,

The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,

And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

Emily Dickinson, The brain is wider than the sky 3

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature

Walt Whitman Author Bio

© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

WALT WHITMAN

(1819–1892)

Walt Whitman is important to our literature first of all because he was a great
poet. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” would be masterpieces in any litera-
ture. Second, as an artist he had the kind of courage and vision upon which new
epochs are founded. In 1855 he was the first voice of the revolution which after
1870 swept over European literature and much later reached the United States.

That kind of genius which is uncommon sense made him know that the time
had come for many barriers to fall—barriers to the welfare and the expression of
the individual, which he valued above all else. Thus, in advance of the “new” psy-
chology he insisted on the unity of the personality and the significant importance
of all experience. He extolled the values of the common, the miracle of the mouse,
the wholesome soundness of the calloused hand, the body’s sweat. He attempted
“to make illustrious” the “procreative urge of the universe,” or humans.

Whitman’s free verse provided an example that slowly communicated itself to
later poets who likewise sought to refresh their art. His use of rhythm as a fluid
instrument of verse demonstrated a range of possibilities beyond that of conven-
tional meter. He wrote symphonically, associating themes and melodies with great
freedom and suggestiveness; he abandoned conventional and hackneyed poetic
figures and drew his symbolism freshly from experience. He remains one of our
most important poets because he announced and instructed a new age; but he is
equally important as a defender of the central American idealism of the past. Spir-
itually he sprang from the tradition that Emerson represented—his was the tran-
scendental or intuitional temperament that trusts the innate spiritual intimations
of the individual and makes the individual responsible to them. On the plane of
political thought he was also an apostle of individualism and represented the
nineteenth-century projection of Jeffersonian idealism.

Walter Whitman was born on a farm on Long Island, then rural countryside,
on May 31, 1819; his father was of British, his mother of Dutch, ancestry. Walter
Whitman senior, a carpenter as well as a farmer, twice in Walt’s youth tried his
fortune at house building in Brooklyn, at that time not quite a city in size. Thus
the young poet experienced a vital cross section of American common life: rural
Long Island, with its farmers and fishermen, its sailors and clammers, and the
hamlets in which they lived; the nascent urban community of Brooklyn, where a
boy could still catch fish in a nearby pond; the great harbor with its ships, and
across the water the spires of Manhattan, visited by means of the exciting ferry-
boats, and later to become for the poet always “my city.” As a boy he had five
years of common schooling in Brooklyn, then in 1830 began work as an office
boy. But by natural instinct he turned to the printing offices. Until the early fifties
he worked as a journalist, attaining a considerable position as editor of the Brook-
lyn Eagle (1846–1848). On the way up he was an apprentice on the Long Island
Patriot (1832) and a journeyman printer in New York. Then, after teaching in
various country schools on Long Island while contributing to local newspapers, he
founded at Huntington his own weekly newspaper, the Long Islander, in 1838. In
1839 he was a compositor on the Long Island Democrat, and in 1840, at twenty-
one, he stumped the island for Van Buren during the presidential campaign. Dur-

4 American Literature Since the Civil War

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature
Walt Whitman Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

ing the next six years he was in New York, as newspaperman and as editor of the
Aurora, the Tatler, and the New York Democrat. When he took over the Eagle in
Brooklyn in 1846 he was seasoned in his profession, and he gained recognition in
the New York area during his editorship. He resigned in 1848 because the backers
of the paper, faced with the split in the Democratic party caused by the Mexican
War, found it expedient to support compromise with the southern Democrats,
while their editor was an unswerving free-soil Democrat. Probably for adven-
ture’s sake, Whitman then took the editorship of the New Orleans Crescent, trav-
eling southward partly by Mississippi steamboat with his brother Jeff; he returned
in six months to edit the Brooklyn Freeman.

But now he had in mind his great project. Shaken by the ominous shadows
that gathered over the country as “the irrepressible conflict” took shape in the
Mexican War, he had conceived of a book to interpret American democratic ideal-
ism as he had experienced it. It was to be a poem in a new form with which he
had been experimenting since perhaps 1847. He gave up his newspaper work and,
living with his parents in Brooklyn, worked part-time as a carpenter while writing
Leaves of Grass. The first edition went on sale in New York probably on July 4,
1855. It had been privately printed, as were all but two of the first seven editions.
The frankness of Leaves of Grass, together with its revolutionary form, precluded
the possibility of wide reception. It was simply about sixty years ahead of its time,
and Whitman, realizing this, accepted the situation with equanimity, knowing
“the amplitude of time.” There was a dribble of orders for each successive edition,
most of them sold from his home, wherever it then might be.

But it is a mistake to suppose that the author was neglected. Emerson wrote
his famous message, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” less than three
weeks after Whitman sent him a copy. Within the year Thoreau and Bronson Al-
cott had ferreted out the author’s dwelling in Brooklyn, and Emerson himself soon
paid a visit. So through the years, leaders of thought saw the greatness of what he
was doing. By 1868 the young John Burroughs had written a book on Whitman,
and William Michael Rossetti had responded to a growing interest among English
intellectuals by publishing an English edition. During the 1870s Whitman’s name
began to be mentioned by German critics, and within another decade translations
of his poems in German and French made him famous on the Continent. Still, most
Americans ignored his work, and he lived in poverty all his life.

From 1855 until 1862, he subsisted by literary hack work and journalism in
Brooklyn, meanwhile enlarging his poems for the second edition of 1856 and the
fundamental edition of 1860. There the poems began to fall into position as parts
of a single “poem,” as the author said. It was to represent life in terms of one life,
which had to be seen through the poet’s eyes, yet he would be reporting only what
seemed true and important to everyone.

In 1862 his brother George was wounded, and Whitman went to the war
front in Virginia. Finding his brother’s condition not serious, he remained in Wash-
ington as a volunteer war nurse, visiting hospitals for a part of every day and sup-
porting himself by part-time work in the army paymaster’s office. This was the
experience which led to the poems of Drum-Taps (1865). “When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom’d,” written for the second issue of this book, after the assas-
sination of Lincoln that April, provided a passionate climax for the theme of the
entire volume in its veneration of the president, who represented for Whitman a
shining example of democratic comradeship and love for humanity.

Walt Whitman: Author Bio 5

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature
Walt Whitman Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

In 1865 Whitman was appointed clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, only to be
discharged in six months by Secretary Harlan because of the unsavory reputation of
his book. At once appointed to the attorney general’s office, he rather gained by the
experience because his eloquent friend William Douglas O’Connor, in his fiery pam-
phlet The Good Gray Poet (1866), published a fine vindication of Whitman’s work.

The poet held his position in Washington until 1874, and during that time
published, again at his own expense, two more editions of Leaves of Grass. In
1873, at fifty-four, he suffered a paralytic stroke and soon was an invalid at the
home of his brother George in Camden, New Jersey. He never again recovered his
full vitality, although he was well enough, on occasion, to give a public reading or
lecture nearby or to visit Burroughs, now an established naturalist, at his Hudson
River farm. In 1879 he made his long-anticipated transcontinental journey, as far
west as Nevada.

In 1881 Leaves of Grass found a publisher in Osgood and Company of Boston
and sold well until the district attorney classified it as “obscene literature” and or-
dered the cancellation of “A Woman Waits for Me,” “To a Common Prostitute,”
and certain isolated phrases. Whitman refused to comply. He took the plates to
Rees Welsh, later David McKay, in Philadelphia, where his works were published
for many years thereafter. In 1882 he published his best prose essays as Specimen
Days and Collect. For the first time his volumes had a considerable sale. He was
able to buy his own little house, now famous, on Mickle Street in Camden, and in
the last decade of his life it became a place of pilgrimage for many American and
British visitors. Until his death in 1892 he was never far from the edge of poverty,
but as he said, in his own time he had “really arrived.” The 1892 edition of Leaves
of Grass, which he signed on his deathbed, is one of America’s great books, and it
has had worldwide influence.

The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, begun under the editorship of Gay Wilson Allen and Scul-
ley Bradley, remains a work in progress. Whitman’s writings were collected earlier as The Complete
Writings of Walt Whitman, 10 vols., edited by R. M. Bucke and others, 1902, a limited edition long out
of print. There are many editions of Leaves of Grass and the major prose essays. Harold W. Blodgett
and Sculley Bradley edited the useful Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, 1965, and the
Norton Critical Edition of Leaves of Grass, 1973. Sculley Bradley, H. W. Blodgett, William White, and
Arthur Gelb edited Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 3
vols., 1980. Edwin H. Miller edited Selected Letters of Walt Whitman, 1990. Ted Genoways, Walt Whit-
man: The Correspondence, Vol. 7, 2004, completes a full collection begun by Miller.

Jerome Loving’s Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, 1999, and Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A
Life, 1980, are excellent biographies. Paul Zweig’s Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, 1984, com-
bines the life and the poems.

Of the many earlier biographies, those still in use include Emory Holloway, Whitman, an Interpreta-
tion in Narrative, 1926; Newton Arvin, Whitman, 1938; H. S. Canby, Walt Whitman, an American,
1943; Frederick Schyberg, Walt Whitman, translated from the Danish by Evie Allen, 1951; Gay W.
Allen, The Solitary Singer: Walt Whitman, 1955, 3rd ed., revised, 1967, thoroughly dependable and a
bibliographical source as well; and a distinguished critical biography, Roger Asselineau, The Evolution
of Walt Whitman, 2 vols., translated from the French, Cambridge, Mass., 1960, 1962.

Useful studies include Edwin H. Miller, Walt Whitman’s Poetry: A Psychological Journey, 1968;
Thomas L. Brasher, Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, 1970; Joseph J. Rubin, The Historic
Whitman, 1973; Floyd Stovall, The Foreground of “Leaves of Grass,” 1974; Harold Aspiz, Walt Whit-
man and the Body Beautiful, 1980; M. Wynn Thomas, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry, 1987;
Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet, 1988; Kerry C. Larson, Whitman’s Drama of Consensus,
1988; Kenneth Price, Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century, 1990; Michael Moon, Dissemi-
nating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in “Leaves of Grass,” 1992; and David S. Reynolds, Walt
Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, 1995.

The following texts of Leaves of Grass are those of the last authorized edition, Philadelphia,
1891–1892; the “preface” is that of the first edition, 1855.

6 American Literature Since the Civil War

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature

Walt Whitman I Saw in Louisiana a
Live−Oak Growing

© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007
WALT WHITMAN

From CALAMUS1

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its

friend near, for I knew I could not, 5
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined

around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; 10
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide

flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

1860, 1867

1. The “Calamus” poems first appeared in the third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860). The calamus, a
species of water reed, sometimes appears in myth and literature, as it does here, as a symbol of male
comradeship.

Walt Whitman, I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing 7

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature

Walt Whitman A Noiseless Patient Spider © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

WALT WHITMAN

From WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. 5

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. 10
1868 1881

8 American Literature Since the Civil War

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature

Mark Twain Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

MARK TWAIN

(1835–1910)

The pattern of the life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or “Mark Twain,” for
seventy-five years was the pattern of America—from frontier community to in-
dustrial urbanity, from riverboats to railroads, from an aggressive, bumptious
adolescence toward a troubled and powerful maturity. His intuitive and romantic
response to that life was colored simultaneously by healthy skepticism and a
strong suspicion that the geography and citizens of America were not conforming
to scriptural patterns of the Promised Land. This discrepancy between the Ameri-
can expectation and the disturbing reality, to which many writers have reacted
with bitterness, or with gloomy acceptance and alarms, provoked Mark Twain to
adopt the critical weapons of the humorist.

The inheritor of an indigenous tradition of humor compounded of Indian and
Negro legend, New England wryness and dryness, and frontier extravagance,
Mark Twain spent his early years in an ideal location for such influences to mold
his life and his writing. Hannibal, Missouri, strategically placed on the banks of
the Mississippi, in the period before the Civil War saw the commerce and travelers
of a nation pass its wharfs and look westward from its streets. For a perceptive
boy, such experiences were not to be forgotten, and later he preserved them in
books that are world classics of the remembrance of a lost and happy time. His
youth was typical of life in a fluid, diverse, yet morally exacting community in a
chaotic period. His schooling was brief, and at eighteen he went to Philadelphia,
New York, and Washington, doing itinerant newspaper work and sending his first
travel letters to his brother Orion, who published them in his Muscatine Journal.
He followed his brother to Keokuk, then moved on to Cincinnati, and from there
embarked on an intended journey to South America, with the amusing results re-
counted in Life on the Mississippi. Once he was on the river, his boyhood ambition
to be a pilot returned, and discarding all thoughts of the Amazon, he persuaded
Horace Bixby, a famous pilot, to school him in the intricate art of Mississippi nav-
igation. After less than two years as a “cub,” Twain received his pilot’s license; the
Civil War then put an end to piloting, but his nostalgic love of the river life was
forever fixed in his pseudonym, “Mark Twain,” the leadsman’s cry meaning a
two-fathom sounding, or “safe water.”

The Civil War brought change and tension to the Clemens family, who were,
like so many, divided in their loyalty and allegiance. Orion Clemens, a strong
Union man, campaigned for Lincoln and was appointed secretary of the Nevada
Territory. Troubled by his brother’s inclination toward the southern tradition of
the family, Orion persuaded him, rather easily, to go west as his assistant, although
he did not need one. In 1861 they traveled by stagecoach across the plains to Car-
son City, a journey described with hilarious half-truth and half-fiction in Rough-
ing It. Neither the political job nor subsequent ventures in mining were profitable,
and Twain began contributing letters, signed “Josh,” to the Virginia City Territo-
rial Enterprise, which led to his joining its staff in 1862. From that time he was to
remain a writer, although he occasionally lectured and ventured into business on
the side. The “Jumping Frog” story, now famous as “The Notorious Jumping Frog

Mark Twain: Author Bio 9

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature
Mark Twain Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

of Calaveras County,” published in the New York Saturday Press in 1865, brought
him national attention; on the West Coast he was already well known as a jour-
nalistic associate of Bret Harte and Artemus Ward, remembered for his humorous
sketches in various papers and for a successful reportorial trip to Hawaii. A com-
mission from the Alta California to write a series of travel letters now enabled
him for the first time to go to Europe.

Twain’s excursion on the Quaker City to Europe and the Holy Land resulted in
The Innocents Abroad (1869), a best-seller, followed by an equally successful lec-
ture tour. In 1870, he married Olivia Langdon and settled down as editor of the
Buffalo Express, but he soon moved to Hartford. His first effort at a novel, The
Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, was a bit-
ter yet amusing narrative of post–Civil War political and business corruption and
offers interesting parallels with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(1889), a comic critique of society in a fantastic vein. These books, with their quizzi-
cal and detached humor, suggest Twain’s ability to view his age with qualified affec-
tion while satirizing the economic and spiritual disorders, the narrow insularity, of
mid-nineteenth-century America. Yet that American provincialism, exploited for
comic effect in The Innocents Abroad and in the later travel books, A Tramp Abroad
(1880) and the classic Life on the Mississippi (1883), never overshadowed his love
of the American land and its people. That love, intensified by childhood memories,
evoked his two unquestioned masterpieces.

Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884) combine recollections of
Hannibal in Twain’s youth, the spell of a great river, and the intangible quality of an
art that relies on simplicity for its greatest effect. On one level, the nostalgic account
of childhood, on another, the social and moral record and judgment of an epoch in
American history, the two books have attained the position of classics in the world’s
literature. They were followed by lesser works, such as The American Claimant
(1892), The £1,000,000 Bank-Note (1893), The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson
(1894), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), and Following the Equator
(1897), the last of the travel volumes. Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer,
Detective (1896) ended Twain’s employment of Huck and Tom in fiction.

The tradition of American humor, from colonial folk myth and Poor Richard’s
Almanack to the Yankee wit of Lowell’s Biglow Papers, spreading through the na-
tional press from Josh Billings, John Phoenix, Artemus Ward, and unnumbered,
forgotten local humorists, followed the pattern of any folk literature in its imme-
diate and intuitive response to cultural and social patterns. Mark Twain is America’s
greatest humorist not only because of his unsurpassed mastery of that essential
pattern but also because his humor served to point up errors in American life—its
gaucheries, pretenses, and political debilities—and at the same time expressed a
faith in the American dream, optimistic and unquenchable.

The discrepancy between that dream and its questionable fulfillment, so obvi-
ous to the writers of the twentieth century, found expression also in Mark Twain’s
personal life. His literary successes and popularity in America and abroad were
contrasted with emotional complexities, tragic losses, and business disappoint-
ments; his later writings evidence a skepticism saved from petulance by a great
artist’s sincerity. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), and The Mysteri-

10 American Literature Since the Civil War

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature
Mark Twain Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

ous Stranger (1916) are indictments of more than national cupidity and hypocrisy;
they are troubled inquiries into the nature of the human race. And they appear to
be at strange variance with such books as Tom Sawyer unless the reader recog-
nizes in Twain the dichotomy of personality that William Dean Howells may have
had in mind when he called him “the Lincoln of our literature.”

Several multivolume editions of Mark Twain have been published, of which the most recent is The
Oxford Mark Twain, in 29 vols., 1996, facsimiles of the first American editions. Earlier are the Author’s
National Edition, in 25 vols., 1907–1918, and the rare but excellent The Writings of Mark Twain, 37
vols., edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, 1922–1925. A definitive edition of the works was published jointly
by the University of Iowa and the University of California, and a documentary collection of Mark Twain
Papers is available from the University of California.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider, 1959, includes material not in the
1924 edition by Albert Bigelow Paine or in Mark Twain in Eruption, edited by Bernard De Voto, 1940.
The authorized life by Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography, 3 vols., 1912, was reissued in
1935. This is supplemented by DeLancey Ferguson, Mark Twain, Man and Legend, 1943; by Bernard
De Voto, Mark Twain’s America, 1932; by Dixon Wecter’s Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 1952; by Justin Ka-
plan’s excellent Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 1966; and by Everett Emerson’s Mark Twain: A Literary
Life, 2000. Mark Twain’s Letters, in 5 vols. to date, are part of the University of California Mark Twain
Papers series. Important earlier collections of correspondence are Mark Twain’s Letters, 2 vols., edited
by Albert Bigelow Paine, 1917; The Love Letters of Mark Twain, edited by Dixon Wecter, 1949; Mark
Twain—Howells Letters, 2 vols., edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, 1960; and Mark
Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, edited byA. Grove Day, 1966. Charles Neider edited The Complete Short
Stories, 1957, The Complete Essays, 1963, and The Complete Travel Books, 2 vols., 1967. Letters from
the Earth, miscellaneous sketches, was edited by Bernard De Voto in 1939 and published in 1962.

Critical studies include Edward Wagenknecht, Mark Twain: The Man and His Work, 1935 (revised,
1967); K. A. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, 1959; W. Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn,
1960; R. B. Salomon, Twain and the Image of History, 1961; A. E. Stone, Jr., The Innocent Eye * * *,
1961; Douglas Grant, Mark Twain, 1963; H. N. Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer,
1962; Louis Budd, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher, 1962; Pascal Covico, Mark Twain’s Humor: The
Image of a World, 1962; Robert Wiggins, Mark Twain: Jackleg Novelist, 1964; Margaret Duckett, Mark
Twain and Bret Harte, 1965; James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, 1966; Robert Regan,
Unpromising Heroes: Mark Twain and His Characters, 1966; Fred W. Lorch, The Trouble Begins at
Eight: Mark Twain’s Lecture Tours, 1968; Maxwell Geismar, Mark Twain: An American Prophet, 1970;
Hamlin Hill, Mark Twain: God’s Fool, 1973; William M. Gibson, The Art of Mark Twain, 1976; Louis
Budd, Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality, 1983; Richard Bridgman, Traveling in
Mark Twain, 1987; David R. Sewell, Mark Twain’s Languages: Discourse, Dialogue, and Linguistic Va-
riety, 1987; Harold Beaver, Huckleberry Finn, 1987; Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Iden-
tity in Mark Twain’s America, 1989; Sherwood Cummings, Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a
Mind, 1989; J. Lauber, The Inventions of Mark Twain, 1990; Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, Mark Twain
in the Company of Women, 1994; and R. Kent Rasmussen, Mark Twain A–Z: The Essential Reference
to His Life and Writings, 1995.

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Mark Twain How to Tell a Story © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

MARK TWAIN

How to Tell a Story

The Humorous Story an American Development.
—Its Difference from Comic and Witty Stories.

I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know
how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily in the company of the
most expert story-tellers for many years.

There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I
will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story
is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon
the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around
as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty
stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently
along, the others burst.

The humorous story is strictly a work of art—high and delicate art—and only
an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story;
anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story—understand, I mean by
word of mouth, not print—was created in America, and has remained at home.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact
that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of
the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has
ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he
gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy
that he will repeat the “nub” of it and glance around from face to face, collecting
applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see.

Very often, of course, the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes
with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it. Then the listener must
be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from that nub by drop-
ping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretence that he does not
know it is a nub.

Artemus Ward used that trick a good deal; then when the belated audience
presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if wonder-
ing what they had found to laugh at. Dan Setchell used it before him, Nye and
Riley and others use it to-day.

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you—
every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he ital-
icizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains
it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to re-
nounce joking and lead a better life.

Let me set down an instance of the comic method, using an anecdote which
has been popular all over the world for twelve or fifteen hundred years. The teller
tells it in this way:

12 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Selections from American
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Mark Twain How to Tell a Story © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

THE WOUNDED SOLDIER

In the course of a certain battle a soldier whose leg had been shot off appealed to another
soldier who was hurrying by to carry him to the rear, informing him at the same time of the
loss which he had sustained; whereupon the generous son of Mars, shouldering the unfortu-
nate, proceeded to carry out his desire. The bullets and cannon-balls were flying in all direc-
tions, and presently one of the latter took the wounded man’s head off—without, however,
his deliverer being aware of it. In no long time he was hailed by an officer, who said:

“Where are you going with that carcass?”
“To the rear, sir—he’s lost his leg!”
“His leg, forsooth?” responded the astonished officer; “you mean his head, you booby.”
Whereupon the soldier dispossessed himself of his burden, and stood looking down

upon it in great perplexity. At length he said:
“It is true, sir, just as you have said.” Then after a pause he added, “But he TOLD me IT

WAS HIS LEG!!!!!”

Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous horse-
laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gaspings and shriekings
and suffocatings.

It takes only a minute and a half to tell that in its comic-story form; and isn’t
worth the telling, after all. Put into the humorous-story form it takes ten minutes,
and is about the funniest thing I have ever listened to—as James Whitcomb Riley
tells it.

He tells it in the character of a dull-witted old farmer who has just heard it
for the first time, thinks it is unspeakably funny, and is trying to repeat it to a
neighbor. But he can’t remember it; so he gets all mixed up and wanders helplessly
round and round, putting in tedious details that don’t belong in the tale and only
retard it; taking them out conscientiously and putting in others that are just as
useless; making minor mistakes now and then and stopping to correct them and
explain how he came to make them; remembering things which he forgot to put in
in their proper place and going back to put them in there; stopping his narrative a
good while in order to try to recall the name of the soldier that was hurt, and fi-
nally remembering that the soldier’s name was not mentioned, and remarking
placidly that the name is of no real importance, anyway—better, of course, if one
knew it, but not essential, after all—and so on, and so on, and so on.

The teller is innocent and happy and pleased with himself, and has to stop
every little while to hold himself in and keep from laughing outright; and does
hold in, but his body quakes in a jelly-like way with interior chuckles; and at the
end of the ten minutes the audience have laughed until they are exhausted, and
the tears are running down their faces.

The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness of the old
farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result is a performance which is thoroughly
charming and delicious. This is art—and fine and beautiful, and only a master can
compass it; but a machine could tell the other story.

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and some-
times purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is
the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. Another feature is the slur-
ring of the point. A third is the dropping of a studied remark apparently without
knowing it, as if one were thinking aloud. The fourth and last is the pause.

Artemus Ward dealt in numbers three and four a good deal. He would begin
to tell with great animation something which he seemed to think was wonderful;

Mark Twain, How to Tell a Story 13

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Selections from American
Literature
Mark Twain How to Tell a Story © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

then lose confidence, and after an apparently absentminded pause add an incon-
gruous remark in a soliloquizing way; and that was the remark intended to ex-
plode the mine—and it did.

For instance, he would say eagerly, excitedly, “I once knew a man in New
Zealand who hadn’t a tooth in his head”—here his animation would die out; a
silent, reflective pause would follow, then he would say dreamily, and as if to him-
self, “and yet that man could beat a drum better than any man I ever saw.”

The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a fre-
quently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain
and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length—no more and no less— or
it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive
point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is in-
tended—and then you can’t surprise them, of course.

On the platform I used to tell a negro ghost story that had a pause in front of
the snapper on the end, and that pause was the most important thing in the whole
story. If I got it the right length precisely, I could spring the finishing ejaculation
with effect enough to make some impressible girl deliver a startled little yelp and
jump out of her seat—and that was what I was after. This story was called “The
Golden Arm,” and was told in this fashion. You can practise with it yourself—
and mind you look out for the pause and get it right.

THE GOLDEN ARM

Once ’pon a time dey wuz a monsus mean man, en he live ’way out in de prairie
all ’lone by hisself, ’cep’n he had a wife. En bimeby she died, en he tuck en toted
her way out dah in de prairie en buried her. Well, she had a golden arm—all solid
gold, fum de shoulder down. He wuz pow’ful mean—pow’ful; en dat night he
couldn’t sleep, caze he want dat golden arm so bad.

When it come midnight he couldn’t stan’ it no mo’; so he git up, he did, en
tuck his lantern en shoved out thoo de storm en dug her up en got de golden arm;
en he bent his head down ’gin de win’, en plowed en plowed en plowed thoo de
snow. Den all on a sudden he stop (make a considerable pause here, and look star-
tled, and take a listening attitude) en say: “My lan’, what’s dat!”

En he listen— en listen— en de win’ say (set your teeth together and imitate the
wailing and wheezing singsong of the wind), “Bzzz-z-zzz”—en den, way back yon-
der whah de grave is, he hear a voice!—he hear a voice all mix’ up in de win’—can’t
hardly tell ’em ’part—“Bzzz-zzz—W-h-o—g-o-t—m-y—g-o-l-d-e-n arm?—zzz—
zzz—W-h-o g-o-t m-y g-o-l-d-e-n arm? (You must begin to shiver violently now.)

En he begin to shiver en shake, en say, “Oh, my! Oh, my lan’!” en de win’
blow de lantern out, en de snow en sleet blow in his face en mos’ choke him, en he
start a-plowin’ knee-deep towards home mos’ dead, he so sk’yerd—en pooty soon
he hear de voice again, en (pause) it ’us comin’ after him! “Bzzz—zzz—zzz—
W-h-o—g-o-t—m-y—g-o-l-d-e-n—arm?”

When he git to de pasture he hear it agin—closter now, en a-comin’!—
a-comin’ back dah in de dark en de storm—(repeat the wind and the voice). When
he git to de house he rush up-stairs en jump in de bed en kiver up, head and years,
en lay dah shiverin’ en shakin’— en den way out dah he hear it agin!— en a-comin’!

14 American Literature Since the Civil War

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En bimeby he hear (pause—awed, listening attitude)—pat—pat—pat—hit’s a-comin’
up-stairs! Den he hear de latch, en he know it’s in de room!

Den pooty soon he know it’s a-stannin’ by de bed! (Pause). Den—he know it’s
a-bendin’ down over him— en he cain’t skasely git his breath! Den— den—he seem
to feel someth’n c-o-l-d, right down ’most agin his head! (Pause.)

Den de voice say, right at his year—“W-h-o—g-o-t—m-y—g-o-l-d-e-n arm?”
(You must wail it out very plaintively and accusingly; then you stare steadily and
impressively into the face of the farthest-gone auditor—a girl, preferably—and let
that awe-inspiring pause begin to build itself in the deep hush. When it has reached
exactly the right length, jump suddenly at that girl and yell, “You’ve got it!”

If you’ve got the pause right, she’ll fetch a dear little yelp and spring right out
of her shoes. But you must get the pause right; and you will find it the most trou-
blesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook.)

1897

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MARK TWAIN

From Roughing It1

[When the Buffalo Climbed a Tree]

Next morning just before dawn, when about five hundred and fifty miles from
St. Joseph,2 our mud-wagon3 broke down. We were to be delayed five or six hours,
and therefore we took horses, by invitation, and joined a party who were just
starting on a buffalo hunt. It was noble sport galloping over the plain in the dewy
freshness of the morning, but our part of the hunt ended in disaster and disgrace,
for a wounded buffalo bull chased the passenger Bemis nearly two miles, and then
he forsook his horse and took to a lone tree. He was very sullen about the matter
for some twenty-four hours, but at last he began to soften little by little, and fi-
nally he said:

“Well, it was not funny, and there was no sense in those gawks making them-
selves so facetious over it. I tell you I was angry in earnest for awhile. I should have
shot that long gangly lubber they called Hank, if I could have done it without crip-
pling six or seven other people—but of course I couldn’t, the old ‘Allen’s’4 so con-
founded comprehensive. I wish those loafers had been up in the tree; they wouldn’t
have wanted to laugh so. If I had had a horse worth a cent—but no, the minute he
saw that buffalo bull wheel on him and give a bellow, he raised straight up in the
air and stood on his heels. The saddle began to slip, and I took him round the neck
and laid close to him, and began to pray. Then he came down and stood up on the
other end awhile, and the bull actually stopped pawing sand and bellowing to con-
template the inhuman spectacle. Then the bull made a pass at him and uttered a
bellow that sounded perfectly frightful, it was so close to me, and that seemed to
literally prostrate my horse’s reason, and make a raving distracted maniac of him,
and I wish I may die if he didn’t stand on his head for a quarter of a minute and
shed tears. He was absolutely out of his mind—he was, as sure as truth itself, and
he really didn’t know what he was doing. Then the bull came charging at us, and my
horse dropped down on all fours and took a fresh start—and then for the next ten
minutes he would actually throw one handspring after another so fast that the bull
began to get unsettled, too, and didn’t know where to start in—and so he stood
there sneezing, and shoveling dust over his back, and bellowing every now and
then, and thinking he had got a fifteen-hundred dollar circus horse for breakfast,
certain. Well, I was first out on his neck—the horse’s, not the bull’s—and then un-
derneath, and next on his rump, and sometimes head up, and sometimes heels—
but I tell you it seemed solemn and awful to be ripping and tearing and carrying on
so in the presence of death, as you might say. Pretty soon the bull made a snatch

1. The sketches in Roughing It were based on Twain’s memories, generously intermingled with elements
of the tall tale, of his overland trip to Nevada in 1861 in company with his brother Orion, who had been
appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Orion kept a journal which Mark drew on for certain facts.
The present text of Roughing It is based on the first edition of 1872.
2. The Missouri gateway to the frontier, from which the overland stages started westward.
3. A less comfortable type of stagecoach, with open sides and simple benches.
4. A revolver named after its inventor, often called a “pepperbox” because it had six barrels.

16 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Companies, 2007

for us and brought away some of my horse’s tail (I suppose, but do not know, being
pretty busy at the time), but something made him hungry for solitude and sug-
gested to him to get up and hunt for it. And then you ought to have seen that spider-
legged old skeleton go! and you ought to have seen the bull cut out after him,
too—head down, tongue out, tail up, bellowing like everything, and actually mow-
ing down the weeds, and tearing up the earth, and boosting up the sand like a
whirlwind! By George, it was a hot race! I and the saddle were back on the rump,
and I had the bridle in my teeth and holding on to the pommel with both hands.
First we left the dogs behind; then we passed a jackass rabbit;5 then we overtook a
cayote,6 and were gaining on an antelope when the rotten girths let go and threw
me about thirty yards off to the left, and as the saddle went down over the horse’s
rump he gave it a lift with his heels that sent it more than four hundred yards up in
the air, I wish I may die in a minute if he didn’t. I fell at the foot of the only solitary
tree there was in nine counties adjacent (as any creature could see with the naked
eye), and the next second I had hold of the bark with four sets of nails and my teeth,
and the next second after that I was astraddle of the main limb and blaspheming
my luck in a way that made my breath smell of brimstone. I had the bull, now, if
he did not think of one thing. But that one thing I dreaded. I dreaded it very seri-
ously. There was a possibility that the bull might not think of it, but there were
greater chances that he would. I made up my mind what I would do in case he did.
It was a little over forty feet to the ground from where I sat. I cautiously unwound
the lariat from the pommel of my saddle—”

“Your saddle? Did you take your saddle up in the tree with you?”
“Take it up in the tree with me? Why, how you talk. Of course I didn’t. No

man could do that. It fell in the tree when it came down.”
“Oh—exactly.”
“Certainly. I unwound the lariat, and fastened one end of it to the limb. It

was the very best green raw-hide, and capable of sustaining tons. I made a slip-
noose in the other end, and then hung it down to see the length. It reached down
twenty-two feet—half way to the ground. I then loaded every barrel of the Allen
with a double charge. I felt satisfied. I said to myself, if he never thinks of that one
thing that I dread, all right—but if he does, all right anyhow—I am fixed for him.
But don’t you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that always hap-
pens? Indeed it is so. I watched the bull, now, with anxiety—anxiety which no one
can conceive of who has not been in such a situation and felt that at any moment
death might come. Presently a thought came into the bull’s eye. I knew it! said I—
if my nerve fails now, I am lost. Sure enough, it was just as I had dreaded, he
started in to climb the tree—”

“What, the bull?”
“Of course—who else?”
“But a bull can’t climb a tree.”
“He can’t, can’t he? Since you know so much about it, did you ever see a

bull try?”
“No! I never dreamt of such a thing.”

5. A large rabbit indigenous to the West, jokingly said to resemble a miniature donkey.
6. Twain’s spelling for “coyote,” a prairie wolf.

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Companies, 2007

“Well, then, what is the use of your talking that way, then? Because you never
saw a thing done, is that any reason why it can’t be done?”

“Well, all right—go on. What did you do?”
“The bull started up, and got along well for about ten feet, then slipped and

slid back. I breathed easier. He tried it again—got up a little higher—slipped again.
But he came at it once more, and this time he was careful. He got gradually higher
and higher, and my spirits went down more and more. Up he came—an inch at a
time—with his eyes hot, and his tongue hanging out. Higher and higher—hitched
his foot over the stump of a limb, and looked up, as much as to say, ‘You are my
meat, friend.’ Up again—higher and higher, and getting more excited the closer he
got. He was within ten feet of me! I took a long breath,—and then said I, ‘It is now
or never.’ I had the coil of the lariat all ready; I paid it out slowly, till it hung right
over his head; all of a sudden I let go of the slack, and the slip-noose fell fairly
round his neck! Quicker than lightning I out with the Allen and let him have it in
the face. It was an awful roar, and must have scared the bull out of his senses. When
the smoke cleared away, there he was, dangling in the air, twenty foot from the
ground, and going out of one convulsion into another faster than you could count!
I didn’t stop to count, anyhow—I shinned down the tree and shot for home.”

“Bemis, is all that true, just as you have stated it?”
“I wish I may rot in my tracks and die the death of a dog if it isn’t.”
“Well, we can’t refuse to believe it, and we don’t. But if there were some

proofs—”
“Proofs! Did I bring back my lariat?”
“No.”
“Did I bring back my horse?”
“No.”
“Did you ever see the bull again?”
“No.”
“Well, then, what more do you want? I never saw anybody as particular as

you are about a little thing like that.”
I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the

skin of his teeth.
1872

18 American Literature Since the Civil War

19

Week Two: Freedom and
the Gilded Age

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature

Crosscurrents Freedom and the Gilded
Age

© The McGraw−Hill
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CROSSCURRENTS
Freedom and the Gilded Age

Once the storm of the Civil War had passed, American skies brightened over aland of renewed promise and challenge. Freedom from armed conflict
brought new freedoms of movement and opportunity. Ever-expanding railroads
carried passengers and goods over vast tracts with a speed undreamed of in the
days of horses and canal boats. Telegraph wires cut the days and weeks of earlier
communication to minutes and hours.

Northern industries thrived. McCormick’s reaper enabled a rapid expansion of
gigantic fields of midwestern wheat. As commerce flourished and banks multiplied,
an economy of untested and largely unregulated opportunity engendered a new
class of wealthy Americans, some of whom owed their riches to an environment rife
with opportunism and graft.

Left with a broken economy and a wrecked system of labor, the South profited
little from these changes. Plantation owners found the economics of the new agri-
culture difficult or impossible. Slaves, accustomed to a scale of living far removed
from the wealth of both the Old South and the new industrial North, scarcely knew
how to assess the possibilities of freedom. Poor but unshackled, they dreamed
dreams the nation found difficult or impossible to accommodate. Reconstruction
briefly provided opportunities of upward mobility (the first African Americans
elected to the United States Senate were southerners), but reluctance and festering
wounds soon forced the races toward nominal “separate but equal” social codes
that resolved immediate tensions even as they masked long-term inequities and in-
justices.

The following selections provide brief perspectives on the first two decades
after the war’s end in 1865. Walt Whitman and Henry Adams discuss the brass
that too often lay beneath the surface glitter of the Gilded Age. George Washing-
ton Cable and Booker T. Washington examine racial challenges and accommoda-
tions that accompanied emancipation in the South.

WALT WHITMAN
(1819–1892)

Whitman’s preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass rings with the enthusi-
asm of a poet newly proficient in his powers, confident of his and his country’s
greatness. After the Civil War, in his prose pamphlet Democratic Vistas (1871),
the bright future he earlier envisioned is darkened by somber tones of admonish-
ment in a time gone wrong.

20 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Crosscurrents Freedom and the Gilded
Age
© The McGraw−Hill
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From Democratic Vistas

* * *
It may be claim’d (and I admit the weight of the claim) that common and general
worldly prosperity, and a populace well-to-do, and with all life’s material com-
forts, is the main thing, and is enough. It may be argued that our republic is, in
performance, really enacting today the grandest arts, poems, etc., by beating up
the wilderness into fertile farms, and in her railroads, ships, machinery, etc. And it
may be ask’d, Are these not better, indeed, for America, than any utterances even
of greatest rhapsode, artist, or literatus?

I too hail those achievements with pride and joy: then answer that the soul of
man will not with such only—nay, not with such at all—be finally satisfied; but
needs what, (standing on these and on all things, as the feet stand on the ground),
is addressed to the loftiest, to itself alone.

Out of such considerations, such truths, arises for treatment in these Vistas
the important question of character, of an American stock-personality, with litera-
tures and arts for outlets and return-expressions, and, of course, to correspond,
within outlines common to all. To these, the main affair, the thinkers of the United
States, in general so acute, have either given feeblest attention, or have remain’d,
and remain, in a state of somnolence.

For my part, I would alarm and caution even the political and business reader,
and to the utmost extent, against the prevailing delusion that the establishment of
free political institutions, and plentiful intellectual smartness, with general good
order, physical plenty, industry, etc. (desirable and precious advantages as they all
are), do, of themselves, determine and yield to our experiment of democracy the
fruitage of success. With such advantages at present fully, or almost fully, pos-
sess’d—the Union just issued, victorious, from the struggle with the only foes it
need ever fear (namely, those within itself, the interior ones), and with unprece-
dented materialistic advancement—society, in these States, is canker’d, crude, su-
perstitious and rotten. Political, or law-made society is, and private, or voluntary
society, is also. In any vigor, the element of the moral conscience, the most impor-
tant, the verteber to State or man, seems to me either entirely lacking, or seriously
enfeebled or ungrown.

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physi-
cian diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at
heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have
left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in (for all
this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself be-
liev’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The
spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men
believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness
rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun
of. A lot of churches, sects, etc., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the
name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit,
the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and
candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course
of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south, and west, to investi-
gate frauds, has talked much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the

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business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely
greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their
branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption,
bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities
reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In
fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims
at all, only to kill time. In business (this all-devouring modern word, business),
the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the
fable ate up all the other serpents, and moneymaking is our magician’s serpent, re-
maining today sole master of the field. The best class we show, is but a mob of
fashionably dress’d speculators and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic
farce, enacted on the visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors
are to be discover’d, existing crudely and going on in the background, to advance
and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less terrible. I say that our
New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their
sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly deceptive
superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social
aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and aesthetic results. In vain
do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the an-
tique, beyond Alexander’s, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we
annex’d Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for
Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more
thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul. * * *

1871

HENRY ADAMS
(1838–1918)

The great-grandson and grandson of presidents John Adams and John Quincy
Adams, Henry Adams won fame as a historian, novelist, and memoirist. In his
autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams (1907), he considered the ways
in which his patrician upbringing failed to prepare him for life in the rapidly
changing world of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The following passages
refer to his early years in Washington during the Grant administration, a period
famous for its political corruption. Referring to himself in the third person, Adams
distances his younger self from the older and wiser man he has become.

From The Education of Henry Adams

Chapter XVII: President Grant (1869)

* * * One seldom can see much education in the buck of a broncho; even less in
the kick of a mule. The lesson it teaches is only that of getting out of the animal’s
way. This was the lesson that Henry Adams had learned over and over again in
politics since 1860.

At least four-fifths of the American people—Adams among the rest—had
united in the election of General Grant to the Presidency, and probably had been

22 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Crosscurrents Freedom and the Gilded
Age
© The McGraw−Hill
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more or less affected in their choice by the parallel they felt between Grant and
Washington. Nothing could be more obvious. Grant represented order. He was a
great soldier, and the soldier always represented order. He might be as partisan as
he pleased, but a general who had organized and commanded half a million or a
million men in the field, must know how to administer. Even Washington, who
was, in education and experience, a mere cave-dweller, had known how to orga-
nize a government, and had found Jeffersons and Hamiltons to organize his de-
partments. The task of bringing the Government back to regular practices, and of
restoring moral and mechanical order to administration, was not very difficult; it
was ready to do it itself, with a little encouragement. No doubt the confusion, es-
pecially in the old slave States and in the currency, was considerable, but the gen-
eral disposition was good, and every one had echoed the famous phrase: “Let us
have peace.”

Adams was young and easily deceived, in spite of his diplomatic adventures,
but even at twice his age he could not see that this reliance on Grant was unrea-
sonable. Had Grant been a Congressman one would have been on one’s guard, for
one knew the type. One never expected from a Congressman more than good in-
tentions and public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the
lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all. Indeed, one
day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in deal-
ing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: “You can’t use tact
with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him
on the snout!” Adams knew far too little, compared with the Secretary, to contra-
dict him, though he thought the phrase somewhat harsh even as applied to the av-
erage Congressman of 1869—he saw little or nothing of later ones—but he knew
a shorter way of silencing criticism. He had but to ask: “If a Congressman is a
hog, what is a Senator?” This innocent question, put in a candid spirit, petrified
any executive officer that ever sat a week in his office. Even Adams admitted that
Senators passed belief. The comic side of their egotism partly disguised its extrav-
agance, but faction had gone so far under Andrew Johnson1 that at times the
whole Senate seemed to catch hysterics of nervous bucking without apparent rea-
son. Great leaders, like Sumner and Conkling, could not be burlesqued; they were
more grotesque than ridicule could make them; even Grant, who rarely sparkled
in epigram, became witty on their account; but their egotism and factiousness
were no laughing matter. They did permanent and terrible mischief, as Garfield
and Blaine, and even McKinley and John Hay, were to feel. The most troublesome
task of a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.

Therefore no one, and Henry Adams less than most, felt hope that any Presi-
dent chosen from the ranks of politics or politicians would raise the character of
government; and by instinct if not by reason, all the world united on Grant. The
Senate understood what the world expected, and waited in silence for a struggle
with Grant more serious than that with Andrew Johnson. Newspaper-men were
alive with eagerness to support the President against the Senate. The newspaper-

1. Andrew Johnson (1808–1875), seventeenth president of the United States. The men named below
are Charles Sumner, U.S. senator from Massachusetts; Roscoe Conkling, U.S. representative and senator
from New York; James A. Garfield (1831–1881), twentieth president, March–September 1881 (assassi-
nated); James G. Blaine, Garfield’s secretary of state; William McKinley (1843–1901), twenty-fifth pres-
ident, 1897–1901 (assassinated); John Hay, secretary of state to McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

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man is, more than most men, a double personality; and his person feels best satis-
fied in its double instincts when writing in one sense and thinking in another. All
newspaper-men, whatever they wrote, felt alike about the Senate. Adams floated
with the stream. He was eager to join in the fight which he foresaw as sooner or
later inevitable. He meant to support the executive in attacking the Senate and
taking away its two-thirds vote and power of confirmation, nor did he much care
how it should be done, for he thought it safer to effect the revolution in 1870 than
to wait till 1920.

With this thought in mind, he went to the Capitol to hear the names an-
nounced which should reveal the carefully guarded secret of Grant’s Cabinet. To
the end of his life, he wondered at the suddenness of the revolution which actually,
within five minutes, changed his intended future into an absurdity so laughable as
to make him ashamed of it. He was to hear a long list of Cabinet announcements
not much weaker or more futile than that of Grant, and none of them made him
blush, while Grant’s nominations had the singular effect of making the hearer
ashamed, not so much of Grant, as of himself. He had made another total miscon-
ception of life—another inconceivable false start. Yet, unlikely as it seemed, he
had missed his motive narrowly, and his intention had been more than sound, for
the Senators made no secret of saying with senatorial frankness that Grant’s nom-
inations betrayed his intent as plainly as they betrayed his incompetence. A great
soldier might be a baby politician. * * *

Badeau2 took Adams to the White House one evening and introduced him to
the President and Mrs. Grant. First and last, he saw a dozen Presidents at the
White House, and the most famous were by no means the most agreeable, but he
found Grant the most curious object of study among them all. About no one did
opinions differ so widely. Adams had no opinion, or occasion to make one. A
single word with Grant satisfied him that, for his own good, the fewer words he
risked, the better. Thus far in life he had met with but one man of the same intel-
lectual or unintellectual type—Garibaldi.3 Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a
trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted for nothing; only the
energy counted. The type was pre-intellectual, archaic, and would have seemed so
even to the cave-dwellers. Adam, according to legend, was such a man.

In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with differences and
variations, as normal; men whose energies were the greater, the less they wasted
on thought; men who sprang from the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of them-
selves and of others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in out-
ward appearance; always needing stimulants; but for whom action was the highest
stimulant—the instinct of fight. * * *

Adams did not feel Grant as a hostile force; like Badeau he saw only an un-
certain one. When in action he was superb and safe to follow; only when torpid
he was dangerous. To deal with him one must stand near, like Rawlins,4 and prac-
tice more or less sympathetic habits. Simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall
Street or State Street, he resorted, like most men of the same intellectual caliber, to

2. Adam Badeau (1831–1895), Washington newspaperman, had served in the army with Grant and
later became a diplomat and writer.
3. Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), Italian patriot and general.
4. John Aaron Rawlins (1831–1869) had served with Grant during the Civil War and became his secre-
tary of war.

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commonplaces when at a loss for expression: “Let us have peace!” or, “The best
way to treat a bad law is to execute it”; or a score of such reversible sentences
generally to be gauged by their sententiousness; but sometimes he made one doubt
his good faith; as when he seriously remarked to a particularly bright young
woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. In Mark Twain, this
suggestion would have taken rank among his best witticisms; in Grant it was a
measure of simplicity not singular. Robert E. Lee5 betrayed the same intellectual
commonplace, in a Virginian form, not to same degree, but quite distinctly enough
for one who knew the American. What worried Adams was not the commonplace;
it was, as usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Tere-
bratula,6 as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have
been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset
evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexan-
der the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called—and should
actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made
evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as Grant’s own commonplaces
to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washing-
ton to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

Education became more perplexing at every phase. No theory was worth the
pen that wrote it. America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-
century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have
lived in a cave and worn skins. Darwinists ought to conclude that America was re-
verting to the stone age, but the theory of reversion was more absurd than that of
evolution. Grant’s administration reverted to nothing. One could not catch a trait
of the past, still less of the future. It was not even sensibly American. Not an offi-
cial in it, except perhaps Rawlins whom Adams never met, and who died in Sep-
tember, suggested an American idea. * * *

1907

GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE
(1844–1925)

In its first issue for 1885, the Century magazine carried an excerpt from Huckle-
berry Finn, featuring Huck and Jim discussing wealth and power, and with it
Cable’s essay “The Freedman’s Case in Equity,” on the moral imperative to achieve
a level of full freedom and equal treatment for ex-slaves, who as freedmen found
themselves still bound by chains of discrimination and economic servitude. Al-
though he wrote as a son and grandson of slaveholders and a veteran who served
in the Confederate army from 1862, when he turned eighteen, until the end of the
war in 1865, his sentiments were too strong for southerners still feeling the sting
of military defeat and laboring under the hardships of Reconstruction. No longer
comfortable in Louisiana, he moved to Massachusetts in the same year that the
essay appeared.

5. Lee (1807–1870) was commander in chief of the Confederate army in the Civil War.
6. Ancient brachiopod, little changed by evolution.

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From The Freedman’s Case in Equity

[The Perpetual Alien]

* * *
Generations of American nativity made no difference; his children and children’s
children were born in sight of our door, yet the old notion held fast. He increased
to vast numbers, but it never wavered. He accepted our dress, language, religion,
all the fundamentals of our civilization, and became forever expatriated from his
own land; still he remained, to us, an alien. Our sentiment went blind. It did not
see that gradually, here by force and there by choice, he was fulfilling a host of
conditions that earned at least a solemn moral right to that naturalization which
no one at first had dreamed of giving him. Frequently he even bought back the
freedom of which he had been robbed, became a tax-payer, and at times an educa-
tor of his children at his own expense; but the old idea of alienism passed laws to
banish him, his wife, and children by thousands from the state, and threw him
into loathsome jails as a common felon for returning to his native land.

It will be wise to remember that these were the acts of an enlightened, God-
fearing people, the great mass of whom have passed beyond all earthly account-
ability. They were our fathers. I am the son and grandson of slave-holders. These
were their faults; posterity will discover ours; but these things must be frankly,
fearlessly taken into account if we are ever to understand the true interests of our
peculiar state of society.

Why, then, did this notion that the man of color must always remain an alien
stand so unshaken? We may readily recall how, under ancient systems, he rose not
only to high privileges, but often to public station and power. Singularly, with us
the trouble lay in a modern principle of liberty. The whole idea of American gov-
ernment rested on all men’s equal, inalienable right to secure their life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness by governments founded in their own consent. Hence,
our Southern forefathers, shedding their blood, or ready to shed it, for this prin-
ciple, yet proposing in equal good conscience to continue holding the American
black man and mulatto and quadroon in slavery, had to anchor that conscience,
their conduct, and their laws in the conviction that the man of African tincture
was, not by his master’s arbitrary assertion merely, but by nature and unalterably,
an alien. If that hold should break, one single wave of irresistible inference would
lift our whole Southern social fabric and dash it upon the rocks of negro emanci-
pation and enfranchisement. How was it made secure? Not by books, though they
were written among us from every possible point of view, but, with the mass of
our slave-owners, by the calm hypothesis of a positive, intuitive knowledge. To
them the statement was an axiom. They abandoned the methods of moral and in-
tellectual reasoning, and fell back upon this assumption of a God-given instinct,
nobler than reason, and which it was an insult to a freeman to ask him to prove
on logical grounds.

Yet it was found not enough. The slave multiplied. Slavery was a dangerous
institution. Few in the South to-day have any just idea how often the slave plotted
for his freedom. Our Southern ancestors were a noble, manly people, springing
from some of the most highly intelligent, aspiring, upright, and refined nations of
the modern world; from the Huguenot, the French Chevalier, the Old Englander,
the New Englander. Their acts were not always right; whose are? But for their

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peace of mind they had to believe them so. They therefore spoke much of the
negro’s contentment with that servile condition for which nature had designed
him. Yet there was no escaping the knowledge that we dared not trust the slave
caste with any power that could be withheld from them. So the perpetual alien
was made also a perpetual menial, and the belief became fixed that this, too, was
nature’s decree, not ours.

Thus we stood at the close of the civil war. There were always a few South-
erners who did not justify slavery, and many who cared nothing whether it was
just or not. But what we have described was the general sentiment of good South-
ern people. * * *

It is the fashion to say we paused to let the “feelings engendered by the war”
pass away, and that they are passing. But let not these truths lead us into error.
The sentiments we have been analyzing, and upon which we saw the old compul-
sory reconstruction go hard aground—these are not the “feelings engendered by
the war.” We must disentangle them from the “feelings engendered by the war,”
and by reconstruction. They are older than either. But for them slavery would have
perished of itself, and emancipation and reconstruction been peaceful revolutions.

Indeed, as between master and slave, the “feelings engendered by the war”
are too trivial, or at least were too short-lived, to demand our present notice. One
relation and feeling the war destroyed: the patriarchal tie and its often really ten-
der and benevolent sentiment of dependence and protection. When the slave be-
came a freedman the sentiment of alienism became for the first time complete. The
abandonment of this relation was not one-sided; the slave, even before the master,
renounced it. Countless times, since reconstruction began, the master has tried, in
what he believed to be everybody’s interest, to play on that old sentiment. But he
found it a harp without strings. The freedman could not formulate, but he could
see, all our old ideas of autocracy and subserviency, of master and menial, of an
arbitrarily fixed class to guide and rule, and another to be guided and ruled. He
rejected the overture. The old master, his well-meant condescensions slighted,
turned away estranged, and justified himself in passively withholding that simpler
protection without patronage which any one American citizen, however exalted,
owes to any other, however humble. Could the freedman in the bitterest of those
days have consented to throw himself upon just that one old relation, he could
have found a physical security for himself and his house such as could not, after
years of effort, be given him by constitutional amendments, Congress, United
States marshals, regiments of regulars, and ships of war. But he could not; the very
nobility of the civilization that had held him in slavery had made him too much a
man to go back to that shelter; and by his manly neglect to do so he has proved to
us who once ruled over him that, be his relative standing among the races of men
what it may, he is worthy to be free.

To be a free man is his still distant goal. Twice he has been a freedman. In the
days of compulsory reconstruction he was freed in the presence of his master by
that master’s victorious foe. In these days of voluntary reconstruction he is virtu-
ally freed by the consent of his master, but the master retaining the exclusive right
to define the bounds of his freedom. Many everywhere have taken up the idea that
this state of affairs is the end to be desired and the end actually sought in recon-
struction as handed over to the States. I do not charge such folly to the best intelli-
gence of any American community; but I cannot ignore my own knowledge that
the average thought of some regions rises to no better idea of the issue. The belief

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is all too common that the nation, having aimed at a wrong result and missed, has
left us of the Southern States to get now such other result as we think best. I say
this belief is not universal. There are those among us who see that America has no
room for a state of society which makes its lower classes harmless by abridging
their liberties, or, as one of the favored class lately said to me, has “got ’em so
they don’t give no trouble.” There is a growing number who see that the one thing
we cannot afford to tolerate at large is a class of people less than citizens; and that
every interest in the land demands that the freedman be free to become in all
things, as far as his own personal gifts will lift and sustain him, the same sort of
American citizen he would be if, with the same intellectual and moral caliber, he
were white.

Thus we reach the ultimate question of fact. Are the freedman’s liberties suf-
fering any real abridgment? The answer is easy. The letter of the laws, with but
few exceptions, recognizes him as entitled to every right of an American citizen;
and to some it may seem unimportant that there is scarcely one public relation of
life in the South where he is not arbitrarily and unlawfully compelled to hold to-
ward the white man the attitude of an alien, a menial, and a probable reprobate,
by reason of his race and color. One of the marvels of future history will be that it
was counted a small matter, by a majority of our nation, for six millions of people
within it, made by its own decree a component part of it, to be subjected to a sys-
tem of oppression so rank that nothing could make it seem small except the fact
that they had already been ground under it for a century and a half.

Examine it. It proffers to the freedman a certain security of life and property,
and then holds the respect of the community, that dearest of earthly boons, be-
yond his attainment. It gives him certain guarantees against thieves and robbers,
and then holds him under the unearned contumely of the mass of good men and
women. It acknowledges in constitutions and statutes his title to an American’s
freedom and aspirations, and then in daily practice heaps upon him in every public
place the most odious distinctions, without giving ear to the humblest plea con-
cerning mental or moral character. It spurns his ambition, tramples upon his lan-
guishing self-respect, and indignantly refuses to let him either buy with money, or
earn by any excellence of inner life or outward behavior, the most momentary im-
munity from these public indignities even for his wife and daughters. Need we
cram these pages with facts in evidence, as if these were charges denied and re-
quiring to be proven? They are simply the present avowed and defended state of
affairs peeled of its exteriors. * * *

The South stands on her honor before the clean equities of the issue. It is no
longer whether constitutional amendments, but whether the eternal principles of
justice, are violated. And the answer must—it shall—come from the South. And it
shall be practical. It will not cost much. We have had a strange experience: the
withholding of simple rights has cost us much blood; such concessions of them as
we have made have never yet cost a drop. The answer is coming. Is politics in the
way? Then let it clear the track or get run over, just as it prefers. But, as I have
said over and over to my brethren in the South, I take upon me to say again here,
that there is a moral and intellectual intelligence there which is not going to be
much longer beguiled out of its moral right of way by questions of political punc-
tilio, but will seek that plane of universal justice and equality which it is every
people’s duty before God to seek, not along the line of politics,—God forbid!—
but across it and across it and across it as many times as it may lie across the path,

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until the whole people of every once slaveholding State can stand up as one man,
saying, “Is the freedman a free man?” and the whole world shall answer, “Yes.”
1885

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
(1856–1915)

Born a slave in West Virginia, Booker T. Washington became one of the most in-
fluential men of his time. He was educated at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, a Re-
construction effort (the school was founded in 1868) to bring industrial education
to the new southern freedmen. Seeking the most practical path for the advance-
ment of his race, he preached a goal of economic self-sufficiency that would take
precedence over the struggle for political and civil rights, which seemed to him
unattainable in his time. Endorsing the concept of “separate but equal,” he sug-
gested that “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things
essential to mutual progress.”

In 1881 he founded Tuskegee Institute, an Alabama school devoted to indus-
trial education and teacher training, and from that built a national web of schools
and newspapers devoted to the betterment of African Americans. He published his
autobiography, Up from Slavery, in 1901. Two years later, in The Souls of Black
Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois began a historic revolt against the Washington ap-
proach as too accommodating to white culture, and in 1909 the NAACP was born.

From Up from Slavery

The Struggle for an Education

* * *
As soon as possible after reaching the grounds of the Hampton Institute, I pre-
sented myself before the head teacher for assignment to a class. Having been so
long without proper food, a bath, and change of clothing, I did not, of course,
make a very favourable impression upon her, and I could see at once that there
were doubts in her mind about the wisdom of admitting me as a student. I felt
that I could hardly blame her if she got the idea that I was a worthless loafer or
tramp. For some time she did not refuse to admit me, neither did she decide in my
favour, and I continued to linger about her, and to impress her in all the ways

I

could with my worthiness. In the meantime I saw her admitting other students,
and that added greatly to my discomfort, for I felt, deep down in my heart, that I
could do as well as they, if I could only get a chance to show what was in me.

After some hours had passed, the head teacher said to me: “The adjoining
recitation-room needs sweeping. Take the broom and sweep it.”

It occurred to me at once that here was my chance. Never did I receive an
order with more delight. I knew that I could sweep, for Mrs. Ruffner1 had thor-
oughly taught me how to do that when I lived with her.

I swept the recitation-room three times. Then I got a dusting-cloth and I
dusted it four times. All the woodwork around the walls, every bench, table, and

1. Washington had worked about “a year and a half” for Mrs. Viola Ruffner, “a ‘Yankee’ woman from
Vermont,” the wife of the owner of a West Virginia coal mine, where Washington had worked earlier.

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desk, I went over four times with my dusting-cloth. Besides, every piece of furni-
ture had been moved and every closet and corner in the room had been thoroughly
cleaned. I had the feeling that in a large measure my future depended upon the im-
pression I made upon the teacher in the cleaning of that room. When I was through,
I reported to the head teacher. She was a “Yankee” woman who knew just where
to look for dirt. She went into the room and inspected the floor and closets; then
she took her handkerchief and rubbed it on the woodwork about the walls, and
over the table and benches. When she was unable to find one bit of dirt on the
floor, or a particle of dust on any of the furniture, she quietly remarked, “I guess
you will do to enter this institution.”

I was one of the happiest souls on earth. The sweeping of that room was my
college examination, and never did any youth pass an examination for entrance
into Harvard or Yale that gave him more genuine satisfaction. I have passed sev-
eral examinations since then, but I have always felt that this was the best one I
ever passed. * * *

The sweeping of the recitation-room in the manner that I did it seems to have
paved the way for me to get through Hampton. Miss Mary F. Mackie, the head
teacher, offered me a position as janitor. This, of course, I gladly accepted, because
it was a place where I could work out nearly all the cost of my board. The work
was hard and taxing, but I stuck to it. I had a large number of rooms to care for,
and had to work late into the night, while at the same time I had to rise by four
o’clock in the morning, in order to build the fires and have a little time in which
to prepare my lessons. In all my career at Hampton, and ever since I have been
out in the world, Miss Mary F. Mackie, the head teacher to whom I have referred,
proved one of my strongest and most helpful friends. Her advice and encourage-
ment were always helpful and strengthening to me in the darkest hour.

I have spoken of the impression that was made upon me by the buildings and
general appearance of the Hampton Institute, but I have not spoken of that which
made the greatest and most lasting impression upon me, and that was a great
man—the noblest, rarest human being that it has ever been my privilege to meet. I
refer to the late General Samuel C. Armstrong.2

It has been my fortune to meet personally many of what are called great char-
acters, both in Europe and America, but I do not hesitate to say that I never met
any man who, in my estimation, was the equal of General Armstrong. Fresh from
the degrading influences of the slave plantation and the coal-mines, it was a rare
privilege for me to be permitted to come into direct contact with such a character
as General Armstrong. I shall always remember that the first time I went into his
presence he made the impression upon me of being a perfect man; I was made to
feel that there was something about him that was superhuman. It was my privilege
to know the General personally from the time I entered Hampton till he died, and
the more I saw of him the greater he grew in my estimation. One might have re-
moved from Hampton all the buildings, class-rooms, teachers, and industries, and
given the men and women there the opportunity of coming into daily contact with
General Armstrong, and that alone would have been a liberal education. The older
I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from
books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact

2. Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1839–1893). A major general in the Union army in the Civil War, he
became an agent of the Freedman’s Bureau in Virginia and was instrumental in founding Hampton In-
stitute.

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with great men and women. Instead of studying books so constantly, how I wish
that our schools and colleges might learn to study men and things!

* * * After having been for a while at Hampton, I found myself in difficulty
because I did not have books and clothing. Usually, however, I got around the
trouble about books by borrowing from those who were more fortunate than my-
self. As to clothes, when I reached Hampton I had practically nothing. Everything
that I possessed was in a small hand satchel. My anxiety about clothing was in-
creased because of the fact that General Armstrong made a personal inspection of
the young men in ranks, to see that their clothes were clean. Shoes had to be pol-
ished, there must be no buttons off the clothing, and no grease-spots. To wear one
suit of clothes continually, while at work and in the schoolroom, and at the same
time keep it clean, was rather a hard problem for me to solve. In some way I man-
aged to get on till the teachers learned that I was in earnest and meant to succeed,
and then some of them were kind enough to see that I was partly supplied with
second-hand clothing that had been sent in barrels from the North. These barrels
proved a blessing to hundreds of poor but deserving students. Without them I
question whether I should ever have gotten through Hampton.

When I first went to Hampton I do not recall that I had ever slept in a bed that
had two sheets on it. In those days there were not many buildings there, and room
was very precious. There were seven other boys in the same room with me; most of
them, however, students who had been there for some time. The sheets were quite
a puzzle to me. The first night I slept under both of them, and the second night I
slept on top of both of them; but by watching the other boys I learned my lesson in
this, and have been trying to follow it ever since and to teach it to others.

I was among the youngest of the students who were in Hampton at that time.
Most of the students were men and women—some as old as forty years of age. As
I now recall the scene of my first year, I do not believe that one often has the op-
portunity of coming into contact with three or four hundred men and women who
were so tremendously in earnest as these men and women were. Every hour was
occupied in study or work. Nearly all had had enough actual contact with the
world to teach them the need of education. Many of the older ones were, of
course, too old to master the text-books very thoroughly, and it was often sad to
watch their struggles; but they made up in earnestness much of what they lacked
in books. Many of them were as poor as I was, and, besides having to wrestle with
their books, they had to struggle with a poverty which prevented their having the
necessities of life. Many of them had aged parents who were dependent upon
them, and some of them were men who had wives whose support in some way
they had to provide for.

The great and prevailing idea that seemed to take possession of every one was
to prepare himself to lift up the people at his home. No one seemed to think of
himself. And the officers and teachers, what a rare set of human beings they were!
They worked for the students night and day, in season and out of season. They
seemed happy only when they were helping the students in some manner. When-
ever it is written—and I hope it will be—the part that the Yankee teachers played
in the education of the Negroes immediately after the war will make one of the
most thrilling parts of the history of this country. The time is not far distant when
the whole South will appreciate this service in a way that it has not yet been able
to do.

1901

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Sarah Orne Jewett Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2000

Sarah Orne Jewett
(1849–1909)

R
Berwick, Maine, had once been a thriving inland seaport, but at the time of Sarah Orne Jewett’s
birth, the region was in decline. The shipbuilding and fishing that had been its economic base were
mostly gone, and the soil was not suitable for profitable farming. Accompanying her physician father
on his rounds, Jewett saw the suffering of people whose livelihood had vanished. She was particu-
larly struck by the plight of lone women, many the last remnants of once-prosperous families, liv-
ing in isolation and poverty. She also observed how the increasing tide of summer tourists patronized
the local people and looked down on them.

Her father was crucial to her intellectual development. Not only did she learn to observe peo-
ple through his sympathetic eyes, his interest in botany and zoology helped focus her attention
on her natural surroundings, and he made his extensive library of classic and contemporary writ-
ers available to her.

Because of chronic ill-health in childhood, Jewett had little formal education and had to aban-
don her dream of becoming a physician. Often, instead of attending classes at the local academy,
she spent time with her beloved father, talked with people in the homes of his patients, read or
explored the outdoors by herself. Her solitary observation, described in a letter as detail “that teases
the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper,’’ proved to be her
most effective preparation as a writer.

She read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel The Pearl of Orr’s Island, set on an island off the Maine
coast, when she was a teenager. For Jewett the book clarified the effectiveness of focusing on a
specific geographical location, and she resolved that she would portray the denizens of her world
with absolute realism and no romance. She hoped to illuminate “their grand, simple lives’’ and
demonstrate “that country people were not the awkward, ignorant set’’ that summer tourists took
them to be. Her first short stories, published before she was twenty, appeared under the pseudonyms
A. C. Eliot, Alice Eliot, and Sarah O. Sweet.

Frequently she traveled to Boston or New York, where prominent editors and authors were
included among her circle of friends. Several of these men, especially James Russell Lowell, edi-
tor of the Atlantic from 1857 to 1861, and his successors, James T. Fields (1861–1871) William Deen
Howells (1871–1881), and Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1881–1890), encouraged Jewett’s career.
Her story “Mr. Bruce” was published in the Atlantic in 1869, and with the encouragement of Howells
she published Deephaven, her first volume of sketches, in 1877.

The death of Dr. Jewett (1878) was traumatic for his daughter, whose career as a writer was
so newly begun. She dedicated Country By-Ways (1881) to him as “the best and wisest man I ever
knew; who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the
country by-ways.’’ The portrait of Dr. Leslie in A Country Doctor (1884) recreates his career; Jewett
also wrote poetry expressing the desolation she felt at his loss.

With her father gone, her friendship with Annie Fields, the editor’s wife, became her most
important relationship. After 1880, Jewett usually spent part of each winter in the Fields’s Boston
home and part of the summer at their summer cottage at Manchester-by-the-Sea. After James Fields
died in 1881, the two women regularly traveled together in Florida, the Caribbean, and Europe.
In successive European trips, they met some of the prominent British and American writers of

Jewett’s fiction, in addition to titles named above, includes Old Friends and New (1879); The Mate of the Daylight and Friends Ashore (1883);
A Marsh Island (1885); and The Tory Lover (1901), a historical romance. Collected editions include Stories and Tales (7 vols., 1910) and The Best
Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Willa Cather (2 vols., 1925). The Uncollected Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett was edited by Richard Cary
(1971). Letters was edited by Richard Cary (1956, revised 1967).

Studies include F. O. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett (1929); Richard Cary, Sarah Orne Jewett (1962); Margaret Thorp, Sarah Orne Jewett
(1966); Josephine Donovan, Sarah Orne Jewett (1980); and Sarah Way Sherman, Sarah Orne Jewett, An American Persephone (1989).

32 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Companies, 2000

the day, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti (1882), Mrs. Humphry Ward and
Mark Twain (1892), and Rudyard Kipling and Henry James (1898).

Jewett saw the villages of her region as microcosms of human experience, asserting that “the
great plays of life, the comedies and tragedies, with their lovers and conspirators and clowns’’
were being constantly reenacted in farmhouses and streets. With gentle irony she reported the van-
ity, greed, and jealousy, as well as the selflessness and nobility of her characters. Jewett’s collections
of stories and sketches include A White Heron and Other Stories (1886); The King of Folly Island
and Other People (1888); Tales of New England (1890); Strangers and Wayfarers (1890), the source
of the story reprinted below; A Native of Winby and Other Tales (1893); The Life of Nancy (1895);
and The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories (1899). Some stories were published in more than one
collection. Her best known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, appeared in 1896. Set in Dunnet
Landing, a coastal village, it is narrated by a sympathetic summer visitor who encourages the inhab-
itants to recount their own experiences.

After a fall from a carriage in 1902, in which her head and spine were injured, Jewett’s career
as a writer was effectively ended, but she continued to carry on an active correspondence and travel
to visit friends until her death following a stroke.

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Sarah Orne Jewett A White Heron © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

SARAH ORNE JEWETT

A White Heron1

I

The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight
o’clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the
trees. A little girl was driving home her cow, a plodding, dilatory, provoking crea-
ture in her behavior, but a valued companion for all that. They were going away
from whatever light there was, and striking deep into the woods, but their feet were
familiar with the path, and it was no matter whether their eyes could see it or not.

There was hardly a night the summer through when the old cow could be found
waiting at the pasture bars; on the contrary, it was her greatest pleasure to hide her-
self away among the huckleberry bushes, and though she wore a loud bell she had
made the discovery that if one stood perfectly still it would not ring. So Sylvia had
to hunt for her until she found her, and call Co’! Co’! with never an answering Moo,
until her childish patience was quite spent. If the creature had not given good milk
and plenty of it, the case would have seemed very different to her owners. Besides,
Sylvia had all the time there was, and very little use to make of it. Sometimes in
pleasant weather it was a consolation to look upon the cow’s pranks as an intelli-
gent attempt to play hide and seek, and as the child had no playmates she lent her-
self to this amusement with a good deal of zest. Though this chase had been so long
that the wary animal herself had given an unusual signal of her whereabouts, Sylvia
had only laughed when she came upon Mistress Moolly at the swampside, and
urged her affectionately homeward with a twig of birch leaves. The old cow was
not inclined to wander farther, she even turned in the right direction for once as
they left the pasture, and stepped along the road at a good pace. She was quite ready
to be milked now, and seldom stopped to browse. Sylvia wondered what her grand-
mother would say because they were so late. It was a great while since she had left
home at half-past five o’clock, but everybody knew the difficulty of making this er-
rand a short one. Mrs. Tilley had chased the horned torment too many summer
evenings herself to blame any one else for lingering, and was only thankful as she
waited that she had Sylvia, nowadays, to give such valuable assistance. The good
woman suspected that Sylvia loitered occasionally on her own account; there never
was such a child for straying about out-of-doors since the world was made! Every-
body said that it was a good change for a little maid who had tried to grow for eight
years in a crowded manufacturing town, but as for Sylvia herself, it seemed as if she
never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm. She thought often
with wistful compassion of a wretched geranium that belonged to a town neighbor.

“‘Afraid of folks,’” old Mrs. Tilley said to herself, with a smile, after she had
made the unlikely choice of Sylvia from her daughter’s houseful of children, and
was returning to the farm. “‘Afraid of folks,’ they said! I guess she won’t be trou-
bled no great with ’em up to the old place!” When they reached the door of the
lonely house and stopped to unlock it, and the cat came to purr loudly, and rub

1. First published in A White Heron and Other Stories, 1886, from which the present text is reprinted. Re-
published in Tales of New England, 1890.

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against them, a deserted pussy, indeed, but fat with young robins, Sylvia whispered
that this was a beautiful place to live in, and she never should wish to go home.

The companions followed the shady woodroad, the cow taking slow steps
and the child very fast ones. The cow stopped long at the brook to drink, as if the
pasture were not half a swamp, and Sylvia stood still and waited, letting her bare
feet cool themselves in the shoal water, while the great twilight moths struck softly
against her. She waded on through the brook as the cow moved away, and listened
to the thrushes with a heart that beat fast with pleasure. There was a stirring in
the great boughs overhead. They were full of little birds and beasts that seemed to
be wide awake, and going about their world, or else saying goodnight to each
other in sleepy twitters. Sylvia herself felt sleepy as she walked along. However, it
was not much farther to the house, and the air was soft and sweet. She was not
often in the woods so late as this, and it made her feel as if she were a part of the
gray shadows and the moving leaves. She was just thinking how long it seemed
since she first came to the farm a year ago, and wondering if everything went on
in the noisy town just the same as when she was there; the thought of the great
red-faced boy who used to chase and frighten her made her hurry along the path
to escape from the shadow of the trees.

Suddenly this little woods-girl is horror-stricken to hear a clear whistle not
very far away. Not a bird’s-whistle, which would have a sort of friendliness, but a
boy’s whistle, determined, and somewhat aggressive. Sylvia left the cow to what-
ever sad fate might await her, and stepped discreetly aside into the bushes, but she
was just too late. The enemy had discovered her, and called out in a very cheerful
and persuasive tone, “Halloa, little girl, how far is it to the road?” and trembling
Sylvia answered almost inaudibly, “A good ways.”

She did not dare to look boldly at the tall young man, who carried a gun over
his shoulder, but she came out of her bush and again followed the cow, while he
walked alongside.

“I have been hunting for some birds,” the stranger said kindly, “and I have
lost my way, and need a friend very much. Don’t be afraid,” he added gallantly.
“Speak up and tell me what your name is, and whether you think I can spend the
night at your house, and go out gunning early in the morning.”

Sylvia was more alarmed than before. Would not her grandmother consider
her much to blame? But who could have foreseen such an accident as this? It did
not seem to be her fault, and she hung her head as if the stem of it were broken,
but managed to answer “Sylvy,” with much effort when her companion again
asked her name.

Mrs. Tilley was standing in the doorway when the trio came into view. The
cow gave a loud moo by way of explanation.

“Yes, you’d better speak up for yourself, you old trial! Where’d she tucked
herself away this time, Sylvy?” But Sylvia kept an awed silence; she knew by in-
stinct that her grandmother did not comprehend the gravity of the situation. She
must be mistaking the stranger for one of the farmer-lads of the region.

The young man stood his gun beside the door, and dropped a lumpy game-
bag beside it; then he bade Mrs. Tilley good-evening, and repeated his wayfarer’s
story, and asked if he could have a night’s lodging.

“Put me anywhere you like,” he said. “I must be off early in the morning, be-
fore day; but I am very hungry, indeed. You can give me some milk at any rate,
that’s plain.”

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“Dear sakes, yes,” responded the hostess, whose long slumbering hospitality
seemed to be easily awakened. “You might fare better if you went out to the main
road a mile or so, but you’re welcome to what we’ve got. I’ll milk right off, and
you make yourself at home. You can sleep on husks or feathers,” she proffered
graciously. “I raised them all myself. There’s good pasturing for geese just below
here towards the ma’sh. Now step round and set a plate for the gentleman, Sylvy!”
And Sylvia promptly stepped. She was glad to have something to do, and she was
hungry herself.

It was a surprise to find so clean and comfortable a little dwelling in this New
England wilderness. The young man had known the horrors of its most primitive
housekeeping, and the dreary squalor of that level of society which does not rebel
at the companionship of hens. This was the best thrift of an old-fashioned farm-
stead, though on such a small scale that it seemed like a hermitage. He listened ea-
gerly to the old woman’s quaint talk, he watched Sylvia’s pale face and shining
gray eyes with ever growing enthusiasm, and insisted that this was the best supper
he had eaten for a month, and afterward the new-made friends sat down in the
door-way together while the moon came up.

Soon it would be berry-time, and Sylvia was a great help at picking. The cow
was a good milker, though a plaguy thing to keep track of, the hostess gossiped
frankly, adding presently that she had buried four children, so Sylvia’s mother,
and a son (who might be dead) in California were all the children she had left.
“Dan, my boy, was a great hand to go gunning,” she explained sadly. “I never
wanted for pa’tridges or gray squer’ls while he was to home. He’s been a great
wand’rer, I expect, and he’s no hand to write letters. There, I don’t blame him, I’d
ha’ seen the world myself if it had been so I could.”

“Sylvy takes after him,” the grandmother continued affectionately, after a
minute’s pause. “There ain’t a foot o’ ground she don’t know her way over, and
the wild creatures counts her one o’ themselves. Squer’ls she’ll tame to come an’
feed right out o’ her hands, and all sorts o’ birds. Last winter she got the jaybirds
to bangeing here, and I believe she’d ’a’ scanted herself of her own meals to have
plenty to throw out amongst ’em, if I hadn’t kep’ watch. Anything but crows, I
tell her, I’m willin’ to help support—though Dan he had a tamed one o’ them that
did seem to have reason same as folks. It was round here a good spell after he
went away. Dan an’ his father they didn’t hitch,—but he never held up his head
ag’in after Dan had dared him an’ gone off.”

The guest did not notice this hint of family sorrows in his eager interest in
something else.

“So Sylvy knows all about birds, does she?” he exclaimed, as he looked round
at the little girl who sat, very demure but increasingly sleepy, in the moonlight. “I
am making a collection of birds myself. I have been at it ever since I was a boy.”
(Mrs. Tilley smiled.) “There are two or three very rare ones I have been hunting
for these five years. I mean to get them on my own grounds if they can be found.”

“Do you cage ’em up?” asked Mrs. Tilley doubtfully, in response to this en-
thusiastic announcement.

“Oh no, they’re stuffed and preserved, dozens and dozens of them,” said the
ornithologist, “and I have shot or snared every one myself. I caught a glimpse of a
white heron a few miles from here on Saturday, and I have followed it in this di-
rection. They have never been found in this district at all. The little white heron, it

36 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Companies, 2007

is,” and he turned again to look at Sylvia with the hope of discovering that the
rare bird was one of her acquaintances.

But Sylvia was watching a hop-toad in the narrow footpath.
“You would know the heron if you saw it,” the stranger continued eagerly. “A

queer tall white bird with soft feathers and long thin legs. And it would have a nest
perhaps in the top of a high tree, made of sticks, something like a hawk’s nest.”

Sylvia’s heart gave a wild beat; she knew that strange white bird, and had
once stolen softly near where it stood in some bright green swamp grass, away
over at the other side of the woods. There was an open place where the sunshine
always seemed strangely yellow and hot, where tall, nodding rushes grew, and her
grandmother had warned her that she might sink in the soft black mud under-
neath and never be heard of more. Not far beyond were the salt marshes just this
side the sea itself, which Sylvia wondered and dreamed much about, but never
had seen, whose great voice could sometimes be heard above the noise of the
woods on stormy nights.

“I can’t think of anything I should like so much as to find that heron’s nest,”
the handsome stranger was saying. “I would give ten dollars to anybody who
could show it to me,” he added desperately, “and I mean to spend my whole vaca-
tion hunting for it if need be. Perhaps it was only migrating, or had been chased
out of its own region by some bird of prey.”

Mrs. Tilley gave amazed attention to all this, but Sylvia still watched the toad,
not divining, as she might have done at some calmer time, that the creature wished
to get to its hole under the door-step, and was much hindered by the unusual spec-
tators at that hour of the evening. No amount of thought, that night, could decide
how many wished-for treasures the ten dollars, so lightly spoken of, would buy.

The next day the young sportsman hovered about the woods, and Sylvia kept
him company, having lost her first fear of the friendly lad, who proved to be most
kind and sympathetic. He told her many things about the birds and what they knew
and where they lived and what they did with themselves. And he gave her a jack-
knife, which she thought as great a treasure as if she were a desert-islander. All day
long he did not once make her troubled or afraid except when he brought down
some unsuspecting singing creature from its bough. Sylvia would have liked him
vastly better without his gun; she could not understand why he killed the very birds
he seemed to like so much. But as the day waned, Sylvia still watched the young
man with loving admiration. She had never seen anybody so charming and delight-
ful; the woman’s heart, asleep in the child, was vaguely thrilled by a dream of love.
Some premonition of that great power stirred and swayed these young creatures
who traversed the solemn woodlands with soft-footed silent care. They stopped to
listen to a bird’s song; they pressed forward again eagerly, parting the branches—
speaking to each other rarely and in whispers; the young man going first and Sylvia
following, fascinated, a few steps behind, with her gray eyes dark with excitement.

She grieved because the longed-for white heron was elusive, but she did not
lead the guest, she only followed, and there was no such thing as speaking first. The
sound of her own unquestioned voice would have terrified her—it was hard enough
to answer yes or no when there was need of that. At last evening began to fall, and
they drove the cow home together, and Sylvia smiled with pleasure when they came
to the place where she heard the whistle and was afraid only the night before.

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II

Half a mile from home, at the farther edge of the woods, where the land was high-
est, a great pine-tree stood, the last of its generation. Whether it was left for a
boundary mark, or for what reason, no one could say; the woodchoppers who
had felled its mates were dead and gone long ago, and a whole forest of sturdy
trees, pines and oaks and maples, had grown again. But the stately head of this
old pine towered above them all and made a landmark for sea and shore miles
and miles away. Sylvia knew it well. She had always believed that whoever climbed
to the top of it could see the ocean; and the little girl had often laid her hand on
the great rough trunk and looked up wistfully at those dark boughs that the wind
always stirred, no matter how hot and still the air might be below. Now she
thought of the tree with a new excitement, for why, if one climbed it at break of
day could not one see all the world, and easily discover from whence the white
heron flew, and mark the place, and find the hidden nest?

What a spirit of adventure, what wild ambition! What fancied triumph and
delight and glory for the later morning when she could make known the secret! It
was almost too real and too great for the childish heart to bear.

All night the door of the little house stood open and the whippoorwills came
and sang upon the very step. The young sportsman and his old hostess were sound
asleep, but Sylvia’s great design kept her broad awake and watching. She forgot to
think of sleep. The short summer night seemed as long as the winter darkness, and
at last when the whippoorwills ceased, and she was afraid the morning would after
all come too soon, she stole out of the house and followed the pasture path through
the woods, hastening toward the open ground beyond, listening with a sense of
comfort and companionship to the drowsy twitter of a half-awakened bird, whose
perch she had jarred in passing. Alas, if the great wave of human interest which
flooded for the first time this dull little life should sweep away the satisfactions of
an existence heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest!

There was the huge tree asleep yet in the paling moonlight, and small and silly
Sylvia began with utmost bravery to mount to the top of it, with tingling, eager
blood coursing the channels of her whole frame, with her bare feet and fingers,
that pinched and held like bird’s claws to the monstrous ladder reaching up, up,
almost to the sky itself. First she must mount the white oak tree that grew along-
side, where she was almost lost among the dark branches and the green leaves
heavy and wet with dew; a bird fluttered off its nest, and a red squirrel ran to and
fro and scolded pettishly at the harmless housebreaker. Sylvia felt her way easily.
She had often climbed there, and knew that higher still one of the oak’s upper
branches chafed against the pine trunk, just where its lower boughs were set close
together. There, when she made the dangerous pass from one tree to the other, the
great enterprise would really begin.

She crept out along the swaying oak limb at last, and took the daring step
across into the old pine-tree. The way was harder than she thought; she must reach
far and hold fast, the sharp dry twigs caught and held her and scratched her like
angry talons, the pitch made her thin little fingers clumsy and stiff as she went
round and round the tree’s great stem, higher and higher upward. The sparrows
and robins in the woods below were beginning to wake and twitter to the dawn,

38 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Selections from American
Literature
Sarah Orne Jewett A White Heron © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

yet it seemed much lighter there aloft in the pine-tree, and the child knew she must
hurry if her project were to be of any use.

The tree seemed to lengthen itself out as she went up, and to reach farther and
farther upward. It was like a great main-mast to the voyaging earth; it must truly
have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this de-
termined spark of human spirit wending its way from higher branch to branch.
Who knows how steadily the least twigs held themselves to advantage this light,
weak creature on her way! The old pine must have loved his new dependent. More
than all the hawks, and bats, and moths, and even the sweet voiced thrushes, was
the brave, beating heart of the solitary gray-eyed child. And the tree stood still and
frowned away the winds that June morning while the dawn grew bright in the east.

Sylvia’s face was like a pale star, if one had seen it from the ground, when the
last thorny bough was past, and she stood trembling and tired but wholly tri-
umphant, high in the treetop. Yes, there was the sea with the dawning sun making
a golden dazzle over it, and toward that glorious east flew two hawks with slow-
moving pinions. How low they looked in the air from that height when one had
only seen them before far up, and dark against the blue sky. Their gray feathers
were as soft as moths; they seemed only a little way from the tree, and Sylvia felt
as if she too could go flying away among the clouds. Westward, the woodlands
and farms reached miles and miles into the distance; here and there were church
steeples, and white villages, truly it was a vast and awesome world!

The birds sang louder and louder. At last the sun came up bewilderingly
bright. Sylvia could see the white sails of ships out at sea, and the clouds that were
purple and rose-colored and yellow at first began to fade away. Where was the
white heron’s nest in the sea of green branches, and was this wonderful sight and
pageant of the world the only reward for having climbed to such a giddy height?
Now look down again, Sylvia, where the green marsh is set among the shining
birches and dark hemlocks; there where you saw the white heron once you will
see him again; look, look! a white spot of him like a single floating feather comes
up from the dead hemlock and grows larger, and rises, and comes close at last,
and goes by the landmark pine with steady sweep of wing and outstretched slen-
der neck and crested head. And wait! wait! do not move a foot or a finger, little
girl, do not send an arrow of light and consciousness from your two eager eyes,
for the heron has perched on a pine bough not far beyond yours, and cries back to
his mate on the nest and plumes his feathers for the new day!

The child gives a long sigh a minute later when a company of shouting cat-
birds comes also to the tree, and vexed by their fluttering and lawlessness the
solemn heron goes away. She knows his secret now, the wild, light, slender bird
that floats and wavers, and goes back like an arrow presently to his home in the
green world beneath. Then Sylvia, well satisfied, makes her perilous way down
again, not daring to look far below the branch she stands on, ready to cry some-
times because her fingers ache and her lamed feet slip. Wondering over and over
again what the stranger would say to her, and what he would think when she told
him how to find his way straight to the heron’s nest.

“Sylvy, Sylvy!” called the busy old grandmother again and again, but nobody
answered, and the small husk bed was empty and Sylvia had disappeared.

The guest waked from a dream, and remembering his day’s pleasure hurried
to dress himself that might it sooner begin. He was sure from the way the shy lit-

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tle girl looked once or twice yesterday that she had at least seen the white heron,
and now she must really be made to tell. Here she comes now, paler than ever, and
her worn old frock is torn and tattered, and smeared with pine pitch. The grand-
mother and the sportsman stand in the door together and question her, and the
splendid moment has come to speak of the dead hemlock-tree by the green marsh.

But Sylvia does not speak after all, though the old grandmother fretfully re-
bukes her, and the young man’s kind, appealing eyes are looking straight in her
own. He can make them rich with money; he has promised it, and they are poor
now. He is so well worth making happy, and he waits to hear the story she can tell.

No, she must keep silence! What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her
dumb? Has she been nine years growing and now, when the great world for the
first time puts out a hand to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird’s sake? The
murmur of the pine’s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white
heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the
morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron’s secret and
give its life away.

Dear loyalty, that suffered a sharp pang as the guest went away disappointed
later in the day, that could have served and followed him and loved him as a dog
loves! Many a night Sylvia heard the echo of his whistle haunting the pasture path
as she came home with the loitering cow. She forgot even her sorrow at the sharp
report of his gun and the sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the
ground, their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood.
Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been,—who can tell?
Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summer-time, remember!
Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child!

1886

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Charles W. Chesnutt Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
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CHARLES W. CHESNUTT

(1858–1932)

“The object of my writings would be not so much the elevation of the colored peo-
ple as the elevation of the whites—for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is
so insidious as to pervade a whole nation * * * a barrier to the moral progress of
the American people.” Charles Waddell Chesnutt was twenty-two when he wrote
those words. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he had grown up in Fayetteville, North Car-
olina. He had begun teaching at fourteen, had published his first story in a local
newspaper that same year, and embarked on a rigorous program of self-education.
At twenty-five he worked briefly in New York and then moved to Cleveland, where
he began a long, rewarding career as a lawyer and court stenographer.

His career as a pioneering black writer began in the 1880s, when his stories
began appearing first in McClure’s newly syndicated newspaper pages and then in
the Atlantic, and all but ended in 1905, when The Colonel’s Dream, his last pub-
lished book, appeared. At first a writer of short stories, he experienced some early
difficulty in gathering a collection that would interest a publisher, but when The
Conjure Woman (1899) appeared it was followed in rapid succession by The Wife
of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899) and a brief Life of Fred-
erick Douglass (1899). Encouraged by this success to turn his attention more fully
to literature, he quickly produced three novels, The House Behind the Cedars
(1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream. Although
they enjoyed some critical success, his books did not meet his expectations in sales,
and he began to immerse himself once again in court stenography. A prosperous
and respected member of the Cleveland community throughout the rest of his life,
he continued as a spokesman for racial justice, but he wrote little fiction. His last
novel, written when he was seventy, did not find a publisher.

His one great subject was race, and although he was able to find humor as
well as tragedy in it, he appeared unwilling to consider any other. In his best
works, his immersion was so deep and his touch so sure that William Dean How-
ells compared him to Maupassant, Turgenev, and James. Howells, however, was
troubled by the bitterness that he perceived in The Marrow of Tradition, and other
critics, even when they admired his skill, were sometimes hostile toward his sub-
ject matter. When he turned away from fiction, it was at least partly because, as he
expressed it, “I am pretty fairly convinced that the color line runs everywhere so
far as the United States is concerned.”

Chesnutt’s books published during his lifetime are named above. Paul Marchand, F.M.C., 1998, is a
short novel left unpublished at his death. The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1974, was edited by
Sylvia L. Render. William L. Andrews edited Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1992. Richard H.
Brodhead edited The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1993. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz
III edited To Be an Au-thor: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889–1905, 1997. McElrath, Leitz, and Jesse
S. Crisler edited Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, 1999. Helen M. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell
Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line, 1952, is primarily biographical. See also J. Noel Heermance,
Charles W. Chesnutt: America’s First Great Black Novelist, 1974; Frances Richardson Keller, I Chose
Black: The Crusade of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1978; Syl-via L. Render, Charles W. Chesnutt, 1980; and
William L. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1980; Charles Duncan, The Absent
Man: The Narrative Quest of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1998; and Dean McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt
and the Fictions of Race, 2002.

Charles W. Chesnutt: Author Bio 41

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Charles W. Chesnutt The Passing of Grandison © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

CHARLES W. CHESNUTT

The Passing of Grandison1

I

When it is said that it was done to please a woman, there ought perhaps to be
enough said to explain anything; for what a man will not do to please a woman is
yet to be discovered. Nevertheless, it might be well to state a few preliminary facts
to make it clear why young Dick Owens tried to run one of his father’s negro men
off to Canada.

In the early fifties, when the growth of anti-slavery sentiment and the con-
stant drain of fugitive slaves into the North had so alarmed the slaveholders of the
border States as to lead to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, a young white
man from Ohio, moved by compassion for the sufferings of a certain bondman
who happened to have a “hard master,” essayed to help the slave to freedom. The
attempt was discovered and frustrated; the abductor was tried and convicted for
slave-stealing, and sentenced to a term of imprisonment in the penitentiary. His
death, after the expiration of only a small part of the sentence, from cholera con-
tracted while nursing stricken fellow prisoners, lent to the case a melancholy in-
terest that made it famous in anti-slavery annals.

Dick Owens had attended the trial. He was a youth of about twenty-two, in-
telligent, handsome, and amiable, but extremely indolent, in a graceful and gentle-
manly way; or, as old Judge Fenderson put it more than once, he was lazy as the
Devil,—a mere figure of speech, of course, and not one that did justice to the
Enemy of Mankind. When asked why he never did anything serious, Dick would
good-naturedly reply, with a well-modulated drawl, that he did n’t have to. His
father was rich; there was but one other child, an unmarried daughter, who be-
cause of poor health would probably never marry, and Dick was therefore heir
presumptive to a large estate. Wealth or social position he did not need to seek,
for he was born to both. Charity Lomax had shamed him into studying law, but
notwithstanding an hour or so a day spent at old Judge Fenderson’s office, he did
not make remarkable headway in his legal studies.

“What Dick needs,” said the judge, who was fond of tropes, as became a
scholar, and of horses, as was befitting a Kentuckian, “is the whip of necessity, or the
spur of ambition. If he had either, he would soon need the snaffle to hold him back.”

But all Dick required, in fact, to prompt him to the most remarkable thing he
accomplished before he was twenty-five, was a mere suggestion from Charity
Lomax. The story was never really known to but two persons until after the war,
when it came out because it was a good story and there was no particular reason
for its concealment.

Young Owens had attended the trial of this slave-stealer, or martyr,—either or
both,—and, when it was over, had gone to call on Charity Lomax, and, while they
sat on the veranda after sundown, had told her all about the trial. He was a good

1. The source of the present text is The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, 1899.

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talker, as his career in later years disclosed, and described the proceedings very
graphically.

“I confess,” he admitted, “that while my principles were against the prisoner,
my sympathies were on his side. It appeared that he was of good family, and that
he had an old father and mother, respectable people, dependent upon him for sup-
port and comfort in their declining years. He had been led into the matter by pity
for a negro whose master ought to have been run out of the county long ago for
abusing his slaves. If it had been merely a question of old Sam Briggs’s negro, no-
body would have cared anything about it. But father and the rest of them stood
on the principle of the thing, and told the judge so, and the fellow was sentenced
to three years in the penitentiary.”

Miss Lomax had listened with lively interest.
“I’ve always hated old Sam Briggs,” she said emphatically, “ever since the

time he broke a negro’s leg with a piece of cordwood. When I hear of a cruel deed
it makes the Quaker blood that came from my grandmother assert itself. Person-
ally I wish that all Sam Briggs’s negroes would run away. As for the young man, I
regard him as a hero. He dared something for humanity. I could love a man who
would take such chances for the sake of others.”

“Could you love me, Charity, if I did something heroic?”
“You never will, Dick. You’re too lazy for any use. You’ll never do anything

harder than playing cards or fox-hunting.”
“Oh, come now, sweetheart! I’ve been courting you for a year, and it’s the

hardest work imaginable. Are you never going to love me?” he pleaded.
His hand sought hers, but she drew it back beyond his reach.
“I’ll never love you, Dick Owens, until you have done something. When that

time comes, I’ll think about it.”
“But it takes so long to do anything worth mentioning, and I don’t want to

wait. One must read two years to become a lawyer, and work five more to make a
reputation. We shall both be gray by then.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she rejoined. “It does n’t require a lifetime for a man to
prove that he is a man. This one did something, or at least tried to.”

“Well, I’m willing to attempt as much as any other man. What do you want
me to do, sweetheart? Give me a test.”

“Oh, dear me!” said Charity, “I don’t care what you do, so you do something.
Really, come to think of it, why should I care whether you do anything or not?”

“I’m sure I don’t know why you should, Charity,” rejoined Dick humbly, “for
I’m aware that I’m not worthy of it.”

“Except that I do hate,” she added, relenting slightly, “to see a really clever
man so utterly lazy and good for nothing.”

“Thank you, my dear; a word of praise from you has sharpened my wits al-
ready. I have an idea! Will you love me if I run a negro off to Canada?”

“What nonsense!” said Charity scornfully. “You must be losing your wits.
Steal another man’s slave, indeed, while your father owns a hundred!”

“Oh, there’ll be no trouble about that,” responded Dick lightly; “I’ll run off
one of the old man’s; we’ve got too many anyway. It may not be quite as difficult
as the other man found it, but it will be just as unlawful, and will demonstrate
what I am capable of.”

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“Seeing’s believing,” replied Charity. “Of course, what you are talking about
now is merely absurd. I’m going away for three weeks, to visit my aunt in Tennessee.
If you’re able to tell me, when I return, that you’ve done something to prove your
quality, I’ll—well, you may come and tell me about it.”

II

Young Owens got up about nine o’clock next morning, and while making his toi-
let put some questions to his personal attendant, a rather bright looking young
mulatto of about his own age.

“Tom,” said Dick.
“Yas, Mars Dick,” responded the servant.
“I’m going on a trip North. Would you like to go with me?”
Now, if there was anything that Tom would have liked to make, it was a trip

North. It was something he had long contemplated in the abstract, but had never
been able to muster up sufficient courage to attempt in the concrete. He was pru-
dent enough, however, to dissemble his feelings.

“I would n’t min’ it, Mars Dick, ez long ez you’d take keer er me an’ fetch me
home all right.”

Tom’s eyes belied his words, however, and his young master felt well assured
that Tom needed only a good opportunity to make him run away. Having a com-
fortable home, and a dismal prospect in case of failure, Tom was not likely to take
any desperate chances; but young Owens was satisfied that in a free State but little
persuasion would be required to lead Tom astray. With a very logical and charac-
teristic desire to gain his end with the least necessary expenditure of effort, he de-
cided to take Tom with him, if his father did not object.

Colonel Owens had left the house when Dick went to breakfast, so Dick did
not see his father till luncheon.

“Father,” he remarked casually to the colonel, over the fried chicken, “I’m
feeling a trifle run down. I imagine my health would be improved somewhat by a
little travel and change of scene.”

“Why don’t you take a trip North?” suggested his father. The colonel added
to paternal affection a considerable respect for his son as the heir of a large estate.
He himself had been “raised” in comparative poverty, and had laid the founda-
tions of his fortune by hard work; and while he despised the ladder by which he
had climbed, he could not entirely forget it, and unconsciously manifested, in his
intercourse with his son, some of the poor man’s deference toward the wealthy
and well-born.

“I think I’ll adopt your suggestion, sir,” replied the son, “and run up to New
York; and after I’ve been there awhile I may go on to Boston for a week or so. I’ve
never been there, you know.”

“There are some matters you can talk over with my factor in New York,” re-
joined the colonel, “and while you are up there among the Yankees, I hope you’ll
keep your eyes and ears open to find out what the rascally abolitionists are saying
and doing. They’re becoming altogether too active for our comfort, and entirely
too many ungrateful niggers are running away. I hope the conviction of that fel-
low yesterday may discourage the rest of the breed. I’d just like to catch any one

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trying to run off one of my darkeys. He’d get short shrift; I don’t think any Court
would have a chance to try him.”

“They are a pestiferous lot,” assented Dick, “and dangerous to our institu-
tions. But say, father, if I go North I shall want to take Tom with me.”

Now, the colonel, while a very indulgent father, had pronounced views on the
subject of negroes, having studied them, as he often said, for a great many years,
and, as he asserted oftener still, understanding them perfectly. It is scarcely worth
while to say, either, that he valued more highly than if he had inherited them the
slaves he had toiled and schemed for.

“I don’t think it safe to take Tom up North,” he declared, with promptness
and decision. “He’s a good enough boy, but too smart to trust among those low-
down abolitionists. I strongly suspect him of having learned to read, though I can’t
imagine how. I saw him with a newspaper the other day, and while he pretended
to be looking at a woodcut, I’m almost sure he was reading the paper. I think it by
no means safe to take him.”

Dick did not insist, because he knew it was useless. The colonel would have
obliged his son in any other matter, but his negroes were the outward and visible
sign of his wealth and station, and therefore sacred to him.

“Whom do you think it safe to take?” asked Dick. “I suppose I’ll have to have
a body-servant.”

“What’s the matter with Grandison?” suggested the colonel. “He’s handy
enough, and I reckon we can trust him. He’s too fond of good eating, to risk los-
ing his regular meals; besides, he’s sweet on your mother’s maid, Betty, and I’ve
promised to let ’em get married before long. I’ll have Grandison up, and we’ll talk
to him. Here, you boy Jack,” called the colonel to a yellow youth in the next room
who was catching flies and pulling their wings off to pass the time, “go down to
the barn and tell Grandison to come here.”

“Grandison,” said the colonel, when the negro stood before him, hat in hand.
“Yas, marster.”
“Have n’t I always treated you right?”
“Yas, marster.”
“Have n’t you always got all you wanted to eat?”
“Yas, marster.”
“And as much whiskey and tobacco as was good for you, Grandison?”
“Y-a-s, marster.”
“I should just like to know, Grandison, whether you don’t think yourself a

great deal better off than those poor free negroes down by the plank road, with
no kind master to look after them and no mistress to give them medicine when
they’re sick and—and”—

“Well, I sh’d jes’ reckon I is better off, suh, dan dem low-down free niggers,
suh! Ef anybody ax ’em who dey b’long ter, dey has ter say nobody, er e’se lie er-
bout it. Anybody ax me who I b’longs ter, I ain’ got no ’casion ter be shame’ ter
tell ’em, no, suh, ’deed I ain’, suh!”

The colonel was beaming. This was true gratitude, and his feudal heart
thrilled at such appreciative homage. What cold-blooded, heartless monsters they
were who would break up this blissful relationship of kindly protection on the
one hand, of wise subordination and loyal dependence on the other! The colonel
always became indignant at the mere thought of such wickedness.

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“Grandison,” the colonel continued, “your young master Dick is going North
for a few weeks, and I am thinking of letting him take you along. I shall send you
on this trip, Grandison, in order that you may take care of your young master. He
will need some one to wait on him, and no one can ever do it so well as one of the
boys brought up with him on the old plantation. I am going to trust him in your
hands, and I’m sure you’ll do your duty faithfully, and bring him back home safe
and sound—to old Kentucky.”

Grandison grinned. “Oh yas, marster, I’ll take keer er young Mars Dick.”
“I want to warn you, though, Grandison,” continued the colonel impressively,

“against these cussed abolitionists, who try to entice servants from their comfort-
able homes and their indulgent masters, from the blue skies, the green fields, and
the warm sunlight of their southern home, and send them away off yonder to
Canada, a dreary country, where the woods are full of wildcats and wolves and
bears, where the snow lies up to the eaves of the houses for six months of the year,
and the cold is so severe that it freezes your breath and curdles your blood; and
where, when runaway niggers get sick and can’t work, they are turned out to starve
and die, unloved and uncared for. I reckon, Grandison, that you have too much
sense to permit yourself to be led astray by any such foolish and wicked people.”

“’Deed, suh, I would n’ low none er dem cussed, low-down abolitioners ter
come nigh me, suh. I’d—I’d—would I be ’lowed ter hit ’em, suh?”

“Certainly, Grandison,” replied the colonel, chuckling, “hit ’em as hard as
you can. I reckon they’d rather like it. Begad, I believe they would! It would serve
’em right to be hit by a nigger!”

“Er ef I did n’t hit ’em, suh,” continued Grandison reflectively, “I’d tell Mars
Dick, en he ’d fix ’em. He ’d smash de face off’n ’em, suh, I jes’ knows he would.”

“Oh yes, Grandison, your young master will protect you. You need fear no
harm while he is near.”

“Dey won’t try ter steal me, will dey, marster?” asked the negro, with sudden
alarm.

“I don’t know, Grandison,” replied the colonel, lighting a fresh cigar. “They’re
a desperate set of lunatics, and there’s no telling what they may resort to. But if
you stick close to your young master, and remember always that he is your best
friend, and understands your real needs, and has your true interests at heart, and
if you will be careful to avoid strangers who try to talk to you, you’ll stand a fair
chance of getting back to your home and your friends. And if you please your
master Dick, he’ll buy you a present, and a string of beads for Betty to wear when
you and she get married in the fall.”

“Thanky, marster, thanky, suh,” replied Grandison, oozing gratitude at every
pore; “you is a good marster, to be sho’, suh; yas, ’deed you is. You kin jes’ bet me
and Mars Dick gwine git ’long jes’ lack I wuz own boy ter Mars Dick. En it won’t be
my fault ef he don’ want me fer his boy all de time, w’en we come back home ag’in.”

“All right, Grandison, you may go now. You need n’t work any more to-day,
and here’s a piece of tobacco for you off my own plug.”

“Thanky, marster, thanky, marster! You is de bes’ marster any nigger ever had
in dis worl’.” And Grandison bowed and scraped and disappeared round the cor-
ner, his jaws closing around a large section of the colonel’s best tobacco.

“You may take Grandison,” said the colonel to his son. “I allow he’s
abolitionist-proof.”

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III

Richard Owens, Esq., and servant, from Kentucky, registered at the fashionable
New York hostelry for Southerners in those days, a hotel where an atmosphere
congenial to Southern institutions was sedulously maintained. But there were
negro waiters in the dining-room, and mulatto bell-boys, and Dick had no doubt
that Grandison, with the native gregariousness and garrulousness of his race,
would foregather and palaver with them sooner or later, and Dick hoped that they
would speedily inoculate him with the virus of freedom. For it was not Dick’s in-
tention to say anything to his servant about his plan to free him, for obvious rea-
sons. To mention one of them, if Grandison should go away, and by legal process
be recaptured, his young master’s part in the matter would doubtless become
known, which would be embarrassing to Dick, to say the least. If, on the other
hand, he should merely give Grandison sufficient latitude, he had no doubt he
would eventually lose him. For while not exactly skeptical about Grandison’s per-
fervid loyalty, Dick had been a somewhat keen observer of human nature, in his
own indolent way, and based his expectations upon the force of the example and
argument that his servant could scarcely fail to encounter. Grandison should have
a fair chance to become free by his own initiative; if it should become necessary to
adopt other measures to get rid of him, it would be time enough to act when the
necessity arose; and Dick Owens was not the youth to take needless trouble.

The young master renewed some acquaintances and made others, and spent a
week or two very pleasantly in the best society of the metropolis, easily accessible
to a wealthy, well-bred young Southerner, with proper introductions. Young
women smiled on him, and young men of convivial habits pressed their hospitali-
ties; but the memory of Charity’s sweet, strong face and clear blue eyes made him
proof against the blandishments of the one sex and the persuasions of the other.
Meanwhile he kept Grandison supplied with pocket-money, and left him mainly
to his own devices. Every night when Dick came in he hoped he might have to
wait upon himself, and every morning he looked forward with pleasure to the
prospect of making his toilet unaided. His hopes, however, were doomed to disap-
pointment, for every night when he came in Grandison was on hand with a boot-
jack, and a nightcap mixed for his young master as the colonel had taught him to
mix it, and every morning Grandison appeared with his master’s boots blacked
and his clothes brushed, and laid his linen out for the day.

“Grandison,” said Dick one morning, after finishing his toilet, “this is the
chance of your life to go around among your own people and see how they live.
Have you met any of them?”

“Yas, suh, I’s seen some of ’em. But I don’ keer nuffin fer ’em, suh. Dey ’re
diffe’nt f’m de niggers down ou’ way. Dey ’lows dey ’re free, but dey ain’ got sense
’nuff ter know dey ain’ half as well off as dey would be down Souf, whar dey ’d
be ’preciated.”

When two weeks had passed without any apparent effect of evil example upon
Grandison, Dick resolved to go on to Boston, where he thought the atmosphere
might prove more favorable to his ends. After he had been at the Revere House for
a day or two without losing Grandison, he decided upon slightly different tactics.

Having ascertained from a city directory the addresses of several well-known
abolitionists, he wrote them each a letter something like this:—

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DEAR FRIEND AND BROTHER:—
A wicked slaveholder from Kentucky, stopping at the Revere House, has dared to in-

sult the liberty-loving people of Boston by bringing his slave into their midst. Shall this be
tolerated? Or shall steps be taken in the name of liberty to rescue a fellow-man from
bondage? For obvious reasons I can only sign myself,

A FRIEND OF HUMANITY.

That his letter might have an opportunity to prove effective, Dick made it a
point to send Grandison away from the hotel on various errands. On one of these
occasions Dick watched him for quite a distance down the street. Grandison had
scarcely left the hotel when a long-haired, sharp-featured man came out behind
him, followed him, soon overtook him, and kept along beside him until they
turned the next corner. Dick’s hopes were roused by this spectacle, but sank corre-
spondingly when Grandison returned to the hotel. As Grandison said nothing
about the encounter, Dick hoped there might be some self-consciousness behind
this unexpected reticence, the results of which might develop later on.

But Grandison was on hand again when his master came back to the hotel at
night, and was in attendance again in the morning, with hot water, to assist at his
master’s toilet. Dick sent him on further errands from day to day, and upon one
occasion came squarely up to him—inadvertently of course—while Grandison
was engaged in conversation with a young white man in clerical garb. When Gran-
dison saw Dick approaching, he edged away from the preacher and hastened to-
ward his master, with a very evident expression of relief upon his countenance.

“Mars Dick,” he said, “dese yer abolitioners is jes’ pesterin’ de life out er me
tryin’ ter git me ter run away. I don’ pay no ’tention ter ’em, but dey riles me so
sometimes dat I’m feared I’ll hit some of ’em some er dese days, an’ dat mought
git me inter trouble. I ain’ said nuffin’ ter you ’bout it, Mars Dick, fer I did n’ wan-
ter ’sturb yo’ min’; but I don’ like it, suh; no, suh, I don’! Is we gwine back home
’fo’ long, Mars Dick?”

“We’ll be going back soon enough,” replied Dick somewhat shortly, while he
inwardly cursed the stupidity of a slave who could be free and would not, and
registered a secret vow that if he were unable to get rid of Grandison without as-
sassinating him, and were therefore compelled to take him back to Kentucky, he
would see that Grandison got a taste of an article of slavery that would make him
regret his wasted opportunities. Meanwhile he determined to tempt his servant yet
more strongly.

“Grandison,” he said next morning, “I’m going away for a day or two, but I
shall leave you here. I shall lock up a hundred dollars in this drawer and give you
the key. If you need any of it, use it and enjoy yourself,—spend it all if you like,—
for this is probably the last chance you’ll have for some time to be in a free State,
and you’d better enjoy your liberty while you may.”

When he came back a couple of days later and found the faithful Grandison
at his post, and the hundred dollars intact, Dick felt seriously annoyed. His vexa-
tion was increased by the fact that he could not express his feelings adequately.
He did not even scold Grandison; how could he, indeed, find fault with one who
so sensibly recognized his true place in the economy of civilization, and kept it
with such touching fidelity?

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“I can’t say a thing to him,” groaned Dick. “He deserves a leather medal,
made out of his own hide tanned. I reckon I’ll write to father and let him know
what a model servant he has given me.”

He wrote his father a letter which made the colonel swell with pride and plea-
sure. “I really think,” the colonel observed to one of his friends, “that Dick ought
to have the nigger interviewed by the Boston papers, so that they may see how
contented and happy our darkeys really are.”

Dick also wrote a long letter to Charity Lomax, in which he said, among many
other things, that if she knew how hard he was working, and under what difficul-
ties, to accomplish something serious for her sake, she would no longer keep him
in suspense, but overwhelm him with love and admiration.

Having thus exhausted without result the more obvious methods of getting rid
of Grandison, and diplomacy having also proved a failure, Dick was forced to con-
sider more radical measures. Of course he might run away himself, and abandon
Grandison, but this would be merely to leave him in the United States, where he
was still a slave, and where, with his notions of loyalty, he would speedily be re-
claimed. It was necessary, in order to accomplish the purpose of his trip to the
North, to leave Grandison permanently in Canada, where he would be legally free.

“I might extend my trip to Canada,” he reflected, “but that would be too pal-
pable. I have it! I’ll visit Niagara Falls on the way home, and lose him on the Canada
side. When he once realizes that he is actually free, I’ll warrant that he’ll stay.”

So the next day saw them westward bound, and in due course of time, by the
somewhat slow conveyances of the period, they found themselves at Niagara. Dick
walked and drove about the Falls for several days, taking Grandison along with
him on most occasions. One morning they stood on the Canadian side, watching
the wild whirl of the waters below them.

“Grandison,” said Dick, raising his voice above the roar of the cataract, “do
you know where you are now?”

“I’s wid you, Mars Dick; dat’s all I keers.”
“You are now in Canada, Grandison, where your people go when they run

away from their masters. If you wished, Grandison, you might walk away from
me this very minute, and I could not lay my hand upon you to take you back.”

Grandison looked around uneasily.
“Let’s go back ober de ribber, Mars Dick. I’s feared I’ll lose you ovuh heah,

an’ den I won’ hab no marster, an’ won’t nebber be able to git back home no mo’.”
Discouraged, but not yet hopeless, Dick said, a few minutes later,—
“Grandison, I’m going up the road a bit, to the inn over yonder. You stay here

until I return. I’ll not be gone a great while.”
Grandison’s eyes opened wide and he looked somewhat fearful.
“Is dey any er dem dadblasted abolitioners roun’ heah, Mars Dick?”
“I don’t imagine that there are,” replied his master, hoping there might be.

“But I’m not afraid of your running away, Grandison. I only wish I were,” he
added to himself.

Dick walked leisurely down the road to where the whitewashed inn, built of
stone, with true British solidity, loomed up through the trees by the roadside. Ar-
rived there he ordered a glass of ale and a sandwich, and took a seat at a table by
a window, from which he could see Grandison in the distance. For a while he
hoped that the seed he had sown might have fallen on fertile ground, and that

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Grandison, relieved from the restraining power of a master’s eye, and finding him-
self in a free country, might get up and walk away; but the hope was vain, for
Grandison remained faithfully at his post, awaiting his master’s return. He had
seated himself on a broad flat stone, and, turning his eyes away from the grand
and awe-inspiring spectacle that lay close at hand, was looking anxiously toward
the inn where his master sat cursing his ill-timed fidelity.

By and by a girl came into the room to serve his order, and Dick very natu-
rally glanced at her; and as she was young and pretty and remained in attendance,
it was some minutes before he looked for Grandison. When he did so his faithful
servant had disappeared.

To pay his reckoning and go away without the change was a matter quickly
accomplished. Retracing his footsteps toward the Falls, he saw, to his great dis-
gust, as he approached the spot where he had left Grandison, the familiar form of
his servant stretched out on the ground, his face to the sun, his mouth open, sleep-
ing the time away, oblivious alike to the grandeur of the scenery, the thunderous
roar of the cataract, or the insidious voice of sentiment.

“Grandison,” soliloquized his master, as he stood gazing down at his ebony
encumbrance, “I do not deserve to be an American citizen; I ought not to have the
advantages I possess over you; and I certainly am not worthy of Charity Lomax, if
I am not smart enough to get rid of you. I have an idea! You shall yet be free, and
I will be the instrument of your deliverance. Sleep on, faithful and affectionate
servitor, and dream of the blue grass and the bright skies of old Kentucky, for it is
only in your dreams that you will ever see them again!”

Dick retraced his footsteps towards the inn. The young woman chanced to
look out of the window and saw the handsome young gentleman she had waited
on a few minutes before, standing in the road a short distance away, apparently
engaged in earnest conversation with a colored man employed as hostler for the
inn. She thought she saw something pass from the white man to the other, but at
that moment her duties called her away from the window, and when she looked
out again the young gentleman had disappeared, and the hostler, with two other
young men of the neighborhood, one white and one colored, were walking rapidly
towards the Falls.

IV

Dick made the journey homeward alone, and as rapidly as the conveyances of the
day would permit. As he drew near home his conduct in going back without Gran-
dison took on a more serious aspect than it had borne at any previous time, and
although he had prepared the colonel by a letter sent several days ahead, there
was still the prospect of a bad quarter of an hour with him; not, indeed, that his
father would upbraid him, but he was likely to make searching inquiries. And
notwithstanding the vein of quiet recklessness that had carried Dick through his
preposterous scheme, he was a very poor liar, having rarely had occasion or incli-
nation to tell anything but the truth. Any reluctance to meet his father was more
than offset, however, by a stronger force drawing him homeward, for Charity
Lomax must long since have returned from her visit to her aunt in Tennessee.

Dick got off easier than he had expected. He told a straight story, and a truth-
ful one, so far as it went.

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The colonel raged at first, but rage soon subsided into anger, and anger mod-
erated into annoyance, and annoyance into a sort of garrulous sense of injury. The
colonel thought he had been hardly used; he had trusted this negro, and he had
broken faith. Yet, after all, he did not blame Grandison so much as he did the abo-
litionists, who were undoubtedly at the bottom of it.

As for Charity Lomax, Dick told her, privately of course, that he had run his
father’s man, Grandison, off to Canada, and left him there.

“Oh, Dick,” she had said with shuddering alarm, “what have you done? If
they knew it they’d send you to the penitentiary, like they did that Yankee.”

“But they don’t know it,” he had replied seriously; adding, with an injured
tone, “you don’t seem to appreciate my heroism like you did that of the Yankee;
perhaps it’s because I was n’t caught and sent to the penitentiary. I thought you
wanted me to do it.”

“Why, Dick Owens!” she exclaimed. “You know I never dreamed of any such
outrageous proceeding.

“But I presume I’ll have to marry you,” she concluded, after some insistence on
Dick’s part, “if only to take care of you. You are too reckless for anything; and a
man who goes chasing all over the North, being entertained by New York and Boston
society and having negroes to throw away, needs some one to look after him.”

“It’s a most remarkable thing,” replied Dick fervently, “that your views corre-
spond exactly with my profoundest convictions. It proves beyond question that
we were made for one another.”

They were married three weeks later. As each of them had just returned from
a journey, they spent their honeymoon at home.

A week after the wedding they were seated, one afternoon, on the piazza of
the colonel’s house, where Dick had taken his bride, when a negro from the yard
ran down the lane and threw open the big gate for the colonel’s buggy to enter.
The colonel was not alone. Beside him, ragged and travel-stained, bowed with
weariness, and upon his face a haggard look that told of hardship and privation,
sat the lost Grandison.

The colonel alighted at the steps.
“Take the lines, Tom,” he said to the man who had opened the gate, “and

drive round to the barn. Help Grandison down,—poor devil, he’s so stiff he can
hardly move!—and get a tub of water and wash him and rub him down, and feed
him, and give him a big drink of whiskey, and then let him come round and see
his young master and his new mistress.”

The colonel’s face wore an expression compounded of joy and indignation,—
joy at the restoration of a valuable piece of property; indignation for reasons he
proceeded to state.

“It’s astounding, the depths of depravity the human heart is capable of! I was
coming along the road three miles away, when I heard some one call me from the
roadside. I pulled up the mare, and who should come out of the woods but Gran-
dison. The poor nigger could hardly crawl along, with the help of a broken limb. I
was never more astonished in my life. You could have knocked me down with a
feather. He seemed pretty far gone,—he could hardly talk above a whisper,—and I
had to give him a mouthful of whiskey to brace him up so he could tell his story.
It’s just as I thought from the beginning, Dick; Grandison had no notion of run-

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ning away; he knew when he was well off, and where his friends were. All the per-
suasions of abolition liars and runaway niggers did not move him. But the desper-
ation of those fanatics knew no bounds; their guilty consciences gave them no
rest. They got the notion somehow that Grandison belonged to a nigger-catcher,
and had been brought North as a spy to help capture ungrateful runaway ser-
vants. They actually kidnaped him—just think of it!—and gagged him and bound
him and threw him rudely into a wagon, and carried him into the gloomy depths
of a Canadian forest, and locked him in a lonely hut, and fed him on bread and
water for three weeks. One of the scoundrels wanted to kill him, and persuaded
the others that it ought to be done; but they got to quarreling about how they
should do it, and before they had their minds made up Grandison escaped, and,
keeping his back steadily to the North Star, made his way, after suffering incredible
hardships, back to the old plantation, back to his master, his friends, and his home.
Why, it’s as good as one of Scott’s novels! Mr. Simms2 or some other one of our
Southern authors ought to write it up.”

“Don’t you think, sir,” suggested Dick, who had calmly smoked his cigar
throughout the colonel’s animated recital, “that that kidnaping yarn sounds a lit-
tle improbable? Is n’t there some more likely explanation?”

“Nonsense, Dick; it’s the gospel truth! Those infernal abolitionists are capa-
ble of anything—everything! Just think of their locking the poor, faithful nigger
up, beating him, kicking him, depriving him of his liberty, keeping him on bread
and water for three long, lonesome weeks, and he all the time pining for the old
plantation!”

There were almost tears in the colonel’s eyes at the picture of Grandison’s suf-
ferings that he conjured up. Dick still professed to be slightly skeptical, and met
Charity’s severely questioning eye with bland unconsciousness.

The colonel killed the fatted calf for Grandison, and for two or three weeks
the returned wanderer’s life was a slave’s dream of pleasure. His fame spread
throughout the county, and the colonel gave him a permanent place among the
house servants, where he could always have him conveniently at hand to relate his
adventures to admiring visitors.

About three weeks after Grandison’s return the colonel’s faith in sable hu-
manity was rudely shaken, and its foundations almost broken up. He came near
losing his belief in the fidelity of the negro to his master,—the servile virtue most
highly prized and most sedulously cultivated by the colonel and his kind. One
Monday morning Grandison was missing. And not only Grandison, but his wife,
Betty the maid; his mother, aunt Eunice; his father, uncle Ike; his brothers, Tom
and John, and his little sister Elsie, were likewise absent from the plantation; and
a hurried search and inquiry in the neighborhood resulted in no information as to
their whereabouts. So much valuable property could not be lost without an effort
to recover it, and the wholesale nature of the transaction carried consternation to
the hearts of those whose ledgers were chiefly bound in black. Extremely energetic
measures were taken by the colonel and his friends. The fugitives were traced, and
followed from point to point, on their northward run through Ohio. Several times
the hunters were close upon their heels, but the magnitude of the escaping party

2. William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870).

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begot unusual vigilance on the part of those who sympathized with the fugitives,
and strangely enough, the underground railroad seemed to have had its tracks
cleared and signals set for this particular train. Once, twice, the colonel thought
he had them, but they slipped through his fingers.

One last glimpse he caught of his vanishing property, as he stood, accompa-
nied by a United States marshal, on a wharf at a port on the south shore of Lake
Erie. On the stern of a small steamboat which was receding rapidly from the
wharf, with her nose pointing toward Canada, there stood a group of familiar
dark faces, and the look they cast backward was not one of longing for the flesh-
pots of Egypt. The colonel saw Grandison point him out to one of the crew of the
vessel, who waved his hand derisively toward the colonel. The latter shook his fist
impotently—and the incident was closed.

1899

Charles W. Chesnutt, The Passing of Grandison 53

55

Week Three: Prosperity and
Social Justice at the Turn of
the Century Part I

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature

Crosscurrents Prosperity and Social
Justice at the Turn of the
Century

© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

CROSSCURRENTS
Prosperity and Social Justice

at the Turn of the Century

By the end of the nineteenth century, the new American nation that had begunthe century clinging to a narrow strip of land along the Atlantic seaboard,
untested in its politics, shaky in its economy, and an infant in its arts, had spread
westward over a vast continent, established its military and political might in con-
flicts at home and abroad, built an astonishing prosperity from its natural re-
sources and its national talent for invention and industry, and developed a rich
and enduring literature.

That was the body, but where was the soul? Although the new Eden of Puri-
tan aspiration had promised and provided much, many of its later inhabitants
were beginning to ask, At what cost? The gap between rich and poor had widened
astonishingly, reaching proportions unequaled again in our history until, as the
twentieth century turned into the twenty-first, Americans found their collective
wealth distributed once again in vastly unequal sums between the richest and
poorest among them. In the 1890s, elaborate mansions, sprouting in cities and at
seashore and forest retreats, struck discordant notes beside the slums of urban im-
migrants and the hovels of hungry and dispirited farmers. A nascent labor move-
ment pitted industrial workers in violent battles against the hired guns of factory
owners, and the financial panic of 1893 produced a serious economic depression
with long-lasting effects. In 1898, the Spanish-American War resulted in the ac-
quisition of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam, signaling imperial ambitions
that many thought unsuited to a nation struggling to put its own house in good
order. Meanwhile, Indians, blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities had not fully
shared in and often suffered from the new expansiveness. These developments
cried out for explanation and justification.

In the selections that follow, Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel” of wealth remains
an influential concept, Stephen Crane’s and William Vaughn Moody’s qualms con-
cerning America’s unequal distribution of wealth and the fragility of the nation’s
moral well-being remain issues for later times, and Zitkala-Sa’s and W. E. B. Du
Bois’s concerns about the integration into American society of Indians and African-
Americans have not yet been fully resolved to the satisfaction of all our citizens.

ANDREW CARNEGIE
(1835–1919)

In his almost unparalleled ability to acquire wealth and power, Andrew Carnegie
seemed to embody Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches dream. Born in Scotland, he
began life in America as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, became a telegrapher, and
then a superintendent on the Pennsylvania Railroad. At thirty, he was rich enough

56 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Crosscurrents Prosperity and Social
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Century
© The McGraw−Hill
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to quit the railroad and turn to investments. After dominating the steel industry,
in 1901 he sold out to the United States Steel Corporation as one of the richest
men in the world. He was also one of the most philanthropic, giving away $350
million, building nearly three thousand libraries, and funding numerous institu-
tions, including Carnegie Hall in New York, the Carnegie Institution in Washing-
ton, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He was not without critics: His success came in part from his genius at de-
pressing wages, increasing production, and fighting unions. In the Homestead
strike of 1892, nine strikers and seven Pinkerton guards, hired by Carnegie’s part-
ner Henry Clay Frick, were killed, many others were injured, the union was bro-
ken, wages came down, and hours went up. Nevertheless, demonstrating that he
knew how to make money, he also acted on his conviction that he had a moral
obligation to spend it well. A man who dies rich, he suggested, dies disgraced.
“Wealth” was published in June 1889 in the North American Review.

From Wealth

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of
brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.
The conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized, within
the past few hundred years. In former days there was little difference between the
dwelling, dress, food, and environment of the chief and those of his retainers. The
Indians are to-day where civilized man then was. When visiting the Sioux, I was led
to the wigwam of the chief. It was just like the others in external appearance, and
even within the difference was trifling between it and those of the poorest of his
braves. The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the la-
borer with us to-day measures the change which has come with civilization.

This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly benefi-
cial. It is well, nay, essential for the progress of the race, that the houses of some
should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for
all the refinements of civilization, rather than that none should be so. Much better
this great irregularity than universal squalor. Without wealth there can be no Mae-
cenas.1 The “good old times” were not good old times. Neither master nor ser-
vant was as well situated then as to-day. A relapse to old conditions would be
disastrous to both—not the least so to him who serves—and would sweep away
civilization with it. But whether the change be for good or ill, it is upon us, be-
yond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a
waste of time to criticize the inevitable. * * *

The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the price it pays
for cheap comforts and luxuries, is also great; but the advantages of this law are
also greater still, for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material develop-
ment, which brings improved conditions in its train. But, whether the law be be-
nign or not, we must say of it, as we say of the change in the conditions of men to
which we have referred: It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have
been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best
for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We

1. Wealthy Roman statesman (70?–8 B.C.), patron of Horace and Virgil.

Prosperity and Social Justice at the Turn of the Century 57

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Crosscurrents Prosperity and Social
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accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate our-
selves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial
and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these,
as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race. Hav-
ing accepted these, it follows that there must be great scope for the exercise of
special ability in the merchant and in the manufacturer who has to conduct affairs
upon a great scale. That this talent for organization and management is rare
among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures for its possessor enor-
mous rewards, no matter where or under what laws or conditions. * * *

There remains, then, only one mode of using great fortunes; but in this we
have the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the recon-
ciliation of the rich and the poor—a reign of harmony—another ideal, differing, in-
deed, from that of the Communist in requiring only the further evolution of existing
conditions, not the total overthrow of our civilization. It is founded upon the pres-
ent most intense individualism, and the race is prepared to put it in practice by de-
grees whenever it pleases. Under its sway we shall have an ideal state, in which the
surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense, the property of the many,
because administered for the common good, and this wealth, passing through the
hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our
race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves. Even
the poorest can be made to see this, and to agree that great sums gathered by some
of their fellow-citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap
the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among them
through the course of many years in trifling amounts. * * *

Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation
will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the
millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted for a season with a great
part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the com-
munity far better than it could or would have done for itself. The best minds will
thus have reached a stage in the development of the race in which it is clearly seen
that there is no mode of disposing of surplus wealth creditable to thoughtful and
earnest men into whose hands it flows save by using it year by year for the general
good. This day already dawns. But a little while, and although, without incurring
the pity of their fellows, men may die sharers in great business enterprises from
which their capital cannot be or has not been withdrawn, and is left chiefly at
death for public uses, yet the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available
wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away “unwept, un-
honored, and unsung,” no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he can-
not take with him. Of such as these the public verdict will then be: “The man who
dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

Such, in my opinion, is the true Gospel concerning Wealth, obedience to
which is destined some day to solve the problem of the Rich and the Poor, and to
bring “Peace on earth, among men Good-Will.”

1889

58 American Literature Since the Civil War

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STEPHEN CRANE
(1871–1900)

In the year of the financial panic that followed the Homestead strike, Stephen
Crane published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, vivid in its depiction of slum condi-
tions in New York. Six years later, in War Is Kind, the poem that follows provided
succinct commentary on the concept of economic and social survival of the fittest
as championed by Andrew Carnegie and the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer.

The Trees in the Garden Rained Flowers

The trees in the garden rained flowers.
Children ran there joyously.
They gathered the flowers
Each to himself.
Now there were some 5
Who gathered great heaps—
Having opportunity and skill—
Until, behold, only chance blossoms
Remained for the feeble.
Then a little spindling tutor 10
Ran importantly to the father, crying:
“Pray, come hither!
See this unjust thing in your garden!”
But when the father had surveyed,
He admonished the tutor: 15
“Not so, small sage!
This thing is just.
For, look you,
Are not they who possess the flowers
Stronger, bolder, shrewder 20
Than they who have none?
Why should the strong—
The beautiful strong—
Why should they not have the flowers?”
Upon reflection, the tutor bowed to the ground, 25
“My lord,” he said,
“The stars are displaced
By this towering wisdom.”

1899

WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY
(1869–1910)

Born in Indiana, poor but brilliant, William Vaughn Moody made his way through
Harvard and became a prominent professor of English at the University of
Chicago. Younger than Whitman and Dickinson, he stood high among the poets
of his generation, including Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Stephen

Prosperity and Social Justice at the Turn of the Century 59

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Crosscurrents Prosperity and Social
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Crane, and Robert Frost, who broke away from the strictures of nineteenth-
century verse and helped prepare the way for the modernist ascendancy that fol-
lowed the First World War. In the arid poetic decade between 1900 and 1910,
after Crane’s death and while Masters, Robinson, and Frost struggled toward their
eventual fame, his was a lonely voice of the future.

Gloucester Moors1

A mile behind is Gloucester town
Where the fishing fleets put in,
A mile ahead the land dips down
And the woods and farms begin.
Here, where the moors stretch free 5
In the high blue afternoon,
Are the marching sun and talking sea,
And the racing winds that wheel and flee
On the flying heels of June.

Jill-o’er-the-ground is purple blue, 10
Blue is the quaker-maid,
The wild geranium holds its dew
Long in the boulder’s shade.
Wax-red hangs the cup
From the huckleberry boughs, 15
In barberry bells the grey moths sup
Or where the choke-cherry lifts high up
Sweet bowls for their carouse.

Over the shelf of the sandy cove
Beach-peas blossom late. 20
By copse and cliff the swallows rove
Each calling to his mate.
Seaward the sea-gulls go,
And the land-birds all are here;
That green-gold flash was a vireo, 25
And yonder flame where the marsh-flags grow
Was a scarlet tanager.

This earth is not the steadfast place
We landsmen build upon;
From deep to deep she varies pace, 30
And while she comes is gone.
Beneath my feet I feel
Her smooth bulk heave and dip;

1. According to Robert Morss Lovett, the poet’s friend, this poem had its inception during the summer
of 1900, when Moody spent a vacation on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. He was fresh, as he said, from
“the heart of the debtor’s country,” Chicago, where he had been teaching. This is the best known of the
poems reflecting his literary connection with social protest and the reform movement. It was published
in Scribner’s for December 1900, and collected in Poems (1901), which the present text follows.

60 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Crosscurrents Prosperity and Social
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With velvet plunge and soft upreel
She swings and steadies to her keel 35
Like a gallant, gallant ship.

These summer clouds she sets for sail,
The sun is her masthead light,
She tows the moon like a pinnace2 frail
Where her phosphor wake churns bright. 40
Now hid, now looming clear,
On the face of the dangerous blue
The star fleets tack and wheel and veer,
But on, but on does the old earth steer
As if her port she knew. 45

God, dear God! Does she know her port,
Though she goes so far about?
Or blind astray, does she make her sport
To brazen and chance it out?
I watched when her captains passed: 50
She were better captainless.
Men in the cabin, before the mast,
But some were reckless and some aghast,
And some sat gorged at mess.

By her battened hatch I leaned and caught 55
Sounds from the noisome hold,—
Cursing and sighing of souls distraught
And cries too sad to be told.
Then I strove to go down and see;
But they said, “Thou are not of us!” 60
I turned to those on the deck with me
And cried, “Give help!” But they said, “Let be:
Our ship sails faster thus.”

Jill-o’er-the-ground is purple blue,
Blue is the quaker-maid, 65
The alder-clump where the brook comes through
Breeds cresses in its shade.
To be out of the moiling street
With its swelter and its sin!
Who has given to me this sweet, 70
And given my brother dust to eat?
And when will his wage come in?

Scattering wide or blown in ranks,
Yellow and white and brown,
Boats and boats from the fishing banks 75

2. Small boat, accessory to a larger vessel, often towed behind.

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Crosscurrents Prosperity and Social
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Century
© The McGraw−Hill
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Come home to Gloucester town.
There is cash to purse and spend,
There are wives to be embraced,
Hearts to borrow and hearts to lend,
And hearts to take and keep to the end,— 80
O little sails, make haste!

But thou, vast outbound ship of souls,
What harbor town for thee?
What shapes, when thy arriving tolls,
Shall crowd the banks to see? 85
Shall all the happy shipmates then
Stand singing brotherly?
Or shall a haggard ruthless few
Warp3 her over and bring her to,
While the many broken souls of men 90
Fester down in the slaver’s pen,
And nothing to say or do?

On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines4

Streets of the roaring town,
Hush for him, hush, be still!
He comes, who was stricken down.
Doing the word of our will.
Hush! Let him have his state, 5
Give him his soldier’s crown.
The grists of trade can wait
Their grinding at the mill,

But he cannot wait for his honor, now the trumpet has been blown;
Wreathe pride now for his granite brow, lay love on his breast of stone. 10

Toll! Let the great bells toll
Till the clashing air is dim.
Did we wrong this parted soul?
We will make up it to him.
Toll! Let him never guess 15

3. To move a vessel by hauling on a line attached to a buoy or some other fixed object.
4. Cuba’s conflict with Spain (1896–1901) over independence was supported by American liberals who
believed in self-determination. However, the war in the Philippines reflected escalation of “manifest des-
tiny” into Pacific areas; the result of Admiral Dewey’s victory at Manila was American occupation of
the Philippines. American liberals also were concerned about the fate of the Filipino Emilio Aguinaldo,
who had succeeded in establishing a popular government two years before the fall of the flimsy Spanish
power in 1898 and who continued to maintain his government, as elected president, in spite of harass-
ment by American-supported guerrillas. Moody represented the outraged liberal opinion in two poems
still well known. In “An Ode in Time of Hesitation” (Atlantic Monthly, May 1900) satire was derived
from the image of the Saint-Gaudens statue in Boston of a Civil War colonel, Robert Gould Shaw. Shaw
had recruited the first Negro regiment for the Northern army, which he led until he was killed in action
at Ft. Wagner, S.C. (1863) and was buried in one grave with his comrades. The companion poem “On a
Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” (Atlantic Monthly, February 1901) reverses the image—the soldier was
fighting against freedom, not for it. President Aguinaldo had been captured and was in American cus-
tody only one month later. The text is that of The Poems and Plays, 1912.

62 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Crosscurrents Prosperity and Social
Justice at the Turn of the
Century
© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

What work we set him to.
Laurel, laurel, yes;
He did what we bade him do.

Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good;
Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country’s own
heart’s-blood. 20

A flag for the soldier’s bier
Who died that this land may live;
O, banners, banners here,
That he doubt not nor misgive!
That he heed not from the tomb 25
The evil days draw near
When the nation, robed in gloom,
With its faithless past shall strive.

Let him never dream that his bullet’s scream went wide of its island mark,
Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in
the dark. 30

ZITKALA-SA
(1876–1938)

Child of a white father and a Sioux mother, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin left the
Yankton Sioux Reservation in North Dakota for education in a Quaker boarding
school in Indiana, at Earlham College, and at the New England Conservatory of
Music. She taught briefly at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Her essays
on the plight of Indians caught between two ways of life were written under the
name of Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird). “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” the source
of the following selection, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for February 1900.

Retrospection

Leaving my mother, I returned to the school in the East. As months passed over
me, I slowly comprehended that the large army of white teachers in Indian schools
had a larger missionary creed than I had suspected.

It was one which included self-preservation quite as much as Indian educa-
tion. When I saw an opium-eater holding a position as teacher of Indians, I did
not understand what good was expected, until a Christian in power replied that
this pumpkin-colored creature had a feeble mother to support. An inebriate pale-
face sat stupid in a doctor’s chair, while Indian patients carried their ailments to
untimely graves, because his fair wife was dependent upon him for her daily food.

I find it hard to count that white man a teacher who tortured an ambitious
Indian youth by frequently reminding the brave changeling that he was nothing
but a “government pauper.”

Though I burned with indignation upon discovering on every side instances
no less shameful than those I have mentioned, there was no present help. Even the
few rare ones who have worked nobly for my race were powerless to choose work-

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men like themselves. To be sure, a man was sent from the Great Father to inspect
Indian schools, but what he saw was usually the students’ sample work made for
exhibition. I was nettled by this sly cunning of the workmen who hoodwinked the
Indian’s pale Father at Washington.

My illness, which prevented the conclusion of my college course, together
with my mother’s stories of the encroaching frontier settlers, left me in no mood
to strain my eyes in searching for latent good in my white co-workers.

At this stage of my own evolution, I was ready to curse men of small capacity
for being the dwarfs their God had made them. In the process of my education

I

had lost all consciousness of the nature world about me. Thus, when a hidden
rage took me to the small white-walled prison which I then called my room, I un-
knowingly turned away from my one salvation.

Alone in my room, I sat like the petrified Indian woman of whom my mother
used to tell me. I wished my heart’s burdens would turn me to unfeeling stone. But
alive, in my tomb, I was destitute!

For the white man’s papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For
these same papers I had forgotten the healing in trees and brooks. On account of
my mother’s simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also. I made no
friends among the race of people I loathed. Like a slender tree, I had been up-
rooted from my mother, nature, and God. I was shorn of my branches, which had
waved in sympathy and love for home and friends. The natural coat of bark which
had protected my oversensitive nature was scraped off to the very quick.

Now a cold bare pole I seemed to be, planted in a strange earth. Still, I seemed
to hope a day would come when my mute aching head, reared upward to the sky,
would flash a zig-zag lightning across the heavens. With this dream of vent for a
long-pent consciousness, I walked again amid the crowds.

At last, one weary day in the schoolroom, a new idea presented itself to me. It
was a new way of solving the problem of my inner self. I liked it. Thus I resigned
my position as teacher; and now I am in an Eastern city, following the long course
of study I have set for myself. Now, as I look back upon the recent past, I see it
from a distance, as a whole. I remember how, from morning till evening, many
specimens of civilized peoples visited the Indian school. The city folks with canes
and eyeglasses, the countrymen with sunburnt cheeks and clumsy feet, forgot their
relative social ranks in an ignorant curiosity. Both sorts of these Christian pale-
faces were alike astounded at seeing the children of savage warriors so docile and
industrious.

As answers to their shallow inquiries they received the students’ sample work
to look upon. Examining the neatly figured pages, and gazing upon the Indian
girls and boys bending over their books, the white visitors walked out of the
schoolhouse well satisfied: they were educating the children of the red man! They
were paying a liberal fee to the government employees in whose able hands lay the
small forest of Indian timber.

In this fashion many have passed idly through the Indian schools during the
last decade, afterward to boast of their charity to the North American Indian. But
few there are who have paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death
lies beneath this semblance of civilization.

1900

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Crosscurrents Prosperity and Social
Justice at the Turn of the
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W. E. B. DU BOIS
(1868–1963)

Born of mixed ancestry in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, W. E. B. Du Bois ex-
perienced few racial problems before his years as a student at Nashville’s Fisk Uni-
versity (1885–1888). “From a section,” he wrote, “. . . where the status of me and
my folk could be rationalized as the result of poverty and limited training, and
settled essentially by schooling and hard effort, I suddenly came to a region where
the world was split into white and black halves, and where the darker half was
held back by race prejudice and legal bonds.” After Fisk, he completed his studies
at Harvard (B.A. 1890, M.A. 1891, Ph.D. 1895) and taught at Wilberforce Col-
lege, the University of Pennsylvania, and Atlanta University. In 1905 he was
among the founders of the Niagara Movement, seeking to replace Booker T. Wash-
ington’s program of conciliation with active pressure for complete equality. In
1909 he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, and from 1910 to 1934 he edited the NAACP magazine Crisis.

The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the book that brought him his first national
attention, played a major role in the development of American racial conscious-
ness. In the third chapter, excerpted below, he briefly outlined his argument for a
strengthened commitment to the promise of the future.

From The Souls of Black Folk

Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

* * * Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment
and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme
unique. This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington’s
programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and
Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher
aims of life. Moreover, this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in
closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is therefore intensi-
fied; and Mr. Washington’s programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of
the Negro races. Again, in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war
time has given impetus to race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington with-
draws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other
periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro’s tendency to self-assertion has been
called forth; at this period a policy of submission is advocated. In the history of
nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that
manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who vol-
untarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing.

In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can survive only through
submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for
the present, three things,—

First, political power,
Second, insistence on civil rights,
Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their energies

on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the

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Crosscurrents Prosperity and Social
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South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen
years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of
the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

1. The disfranchisement of

the Negro.

2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of

the Negro.

These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s teach-
ings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier
accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine
millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived
of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance
for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct an-
swer to these questions, it is an emphatic No. And Mr. Washington thus faces the
triple paradox of his career:

1. He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and property-
owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for work-
ingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of
suffrage.

2. He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a silent
submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in
the long run.

3. He advocates common-school1 and industrial training, and depreciates in-
stitutions of higher learning; but neither the Negro common-schools, nor Tuskegee
itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers trained in Negro colleges,
or trained by their graduates. * * *

It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several in-
stances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro;
he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions, he
has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influ-
ence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings. Notwithstanding this,
it is equally true to assert that on the whole the distinct impression left by Mr.
Washington’s propaganda is, first, that the South is justified in its present attitude
toward the Negro because of the Negro’s degradation; secondly, that the prime
cause of the Negro’s failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past;
and, thirdly, that his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts. Each of
these propositions is a dangerous half-truth. The supplementary truths must never
be lost sight of: first, slavery and race-prejudice are potent if not sufficient causes
of the Negro’s position; second, industrial and common-school training were nec-
essarily slow in planting because they had to await the black teachers trained by
higher institutions,—it being extremely doubtful if any essentially different devel-
opment was possible, and certainly a Tuskegee was unthinkable before 1880; and,
third, while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily

1. Public elementary school.

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to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded,
but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser envi-
roning group, he cannot hope for great success.

In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington is espe-
cially to be criticised. His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and
South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand
aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs
to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to
righting these great wrongs.

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better
self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging.
The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it
with gold. We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by “pol-
icy” alone. If worse comes to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the
slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?

The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate,—
a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. So far
as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the
masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him, rejoicing in his honors
and glorying in the strength of this Joshua2 called of God and of man to lead the
headless host. But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or
South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emascu-
lating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition
of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must
unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we
must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly
to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain3 forget: “We hold
these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are en-
dowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

1903

Prosperity and Social Justice at the Turn of the Century 67

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

(1860–1935)

Convinced that middle-class women were enslaved by “masculinist” ideas and a
cult of domesticity, Charlotte Perkins Gilman crusaded her entire life for libera-
tion from housework and child care and for increased opportunities for meaning-
ful work for women. She defined work as “joy and growth and service, without
which one is a pauper and a parasite” and envisioned a series of reforms, includ-
ing an organized day care system, which would enable women to be more active
in the public sphere.

Though her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, was the grandson of the promi-
nent preacher Lyman Beecher and a nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry
Ward Beecher, Charlotte Anna Perkins grew up in isolation from those prominent
relatives, living in or near her birthplace of Hartford, Connecticut. Her father aban-
doned his family soon after her birth, and Charlotte was raised by her mother, Mary
Fritch Perkins, with her father’s influence limited to the lists for suggested reading
that he mailed to his daughter sporadically. Her haphazard education, including a
brief stint at the Rhode Island School of Design, was combined with a series of jobs:
governess, commercial artist, and teacher among them. She began writing at an early
age and published her first newspaper article in 1883. The following year she mar-
ried an artist named Charles Stetson and published a poem that began, “In duty
bound, a life hemmed in.” Within nine months, her daughter Katherine was born,
and Charlotte was plunged into a depression that continued for three years.

Desperate for help, she accepted her husband’s suggestion and put herself into
the care of S. Weir Mitchell, a prominent Philadelphia physician who had also
treated her cousin Georgiana Stowe and many others suffering from depression.
Dr. Mitchell’s treatment for women patients called for complete rest, lots of food,
and no intellectual stimulation. As she later described the experience in “Why I
Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” (The Forerunner, October 1913), “[I] came so near
the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over,” and after three months
she fled the doctor and her marriage to retain her sanity. Part of her self-prescribed
cure was to write the story of her ordeal. When “The Yellow Wallpaper” was pub-
lished in the New England Magazine in 1892, she sent a copy to Dr. Mitchell.
Though he never acknowledged receiving it, she was told later that he altered his
treatment of nervous disorders as a result of reading her work.

With her move to California (1888) and subsequent divorce (1894), she was
now ready to devote her life to what she saw as her destined work—writing. A
collection of poetry, In This Our World, was published in 1893; she also began
lecturing and writing on women’s rights and social reform. Women and Econom-
ics appeared in 1898, Concerning Children in 1900, and The Home in 1904.

Her second marriage, to George Houghton Gilman, a New York lawyer who
was her first cousin, was an egalitarian match between people who shared pro-
gressive social attitudes. The Gilmans lived happily in New York and Connecticut
while, with her husband’s enthusiastic support, she continued her writing under
the name Charlotte Perkins Gilman. From 1909 to 1916 she published and edited
the progressive monthly The Forerunner, and she continued to produce feminist
writings in fiction and nonfiction. Novels include What Diantha Did (1910), The

68 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Selections from American
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

Crux (1911), and the feminist utopia Herland (1915), all published in The Fore-
runner. Among her works on social reform are Human Work (1904), The Man-
Made World (1911), and His Religion and Hers (1923).

After George Gilman’s death in 1934, she went to live with her daughter in
Pasadena, California. There, ill with breast cancer and convinced her useful life
was over, Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide with chloroform she had
accumulated for the purpose. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Auto-
biography appeared in the year of her death.

In addition to those named above, Gilman’s works include the utopian novels Moving the Mountain,
1911, and With Her in Ourland, 1916. Denise D. Knight edited The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, two volumes, 1994. Mary A. Hill edited A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, 1897–1900, 1995.

Studies include Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–
1896, 1980; Polly W. Allen, Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Architectural Femi-
nism, 1988; Sheryl L. Meyering, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, 1989; Ann Lane,
To Herland and Beyond, 1990; and Carol Farley Kessler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress to-
ward Utopia, with Selected Writings, 1995.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Author Bio 69

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

The Yellow Wallpaper1

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral
halls for the summer.

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house and
reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense hor-

ror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and
seen and put down in figures.

John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of
course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one
reason I do not get well faster.

You see, he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and

relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous
depression—a slight hysterical tendency2—what is one to do?

My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the
same thing.

So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is—and tonico, and air and
exercise, and journeys, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again.

Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would

do me good.
But what is one to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal—

having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
I sometimes fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more so-

ciety and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about
my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.

So I will let it alone and talk about the house.
The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road,

quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you
read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate
little houses for the gardeners and people.

There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden—large and shady, full of
box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.

There were greenhouses, but they are all broken now.

1. The text is of the 1892 New England Magazine version.
2. In the nineteenth century, nervous disorders were thought to be connected to the uterus, so the word
applied—“hysteria”—was derived from the Greek hysterikos, “of the womb.”

70 American Literature Since the Civil War

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There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and co-
heirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for years.

That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don’t care—there is something
strange about the house—I can feel it.

I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a
draught, and shut the window.

I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I’m sure I never used to be so
sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to
control myself—before him, at least, and that makes me very tired.

I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the pi-
azza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hang-
ings! But John would not hear of it.

He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near
room for him if he took another.

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.
I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from

me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.
He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest

and all the air I could get. “Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear,”
said he, “and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all
the time.” So we took the nursery at the top of the house.

It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways,
and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymna-
sium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are
rings and things in the walls.

The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off—
the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can
reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a
worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing
every artistic sin.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to con-
stantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves
for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles,
destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.

The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow,
strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some
places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this
room long.

There comes John, and I must put this away—he hates to have me write a word.

* * * * * *

We have been here two weeks, and I haven’t felt like writing before, since that
first day.

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is
nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.

John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
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I am glad my case is not serious!
But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.
John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to

suffer, and that satisfies him.
Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in

any way!
I mean to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am

a comparative burden already!
Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able—to dress

and entertain, and order things.
It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!
And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.
I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this

wallpaper!
At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was let-

ting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than
to give way to such fancies.

He said that after the wallpaper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead,
and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.

“You know the place is doing you good,” he said, “and really, dear, I don’t
care to renovate the house just for a three months’ rental.”

“Then do let us go downstairs,” I said. “There are such pretty rooms there.”
Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he

would go down cellar, if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.
But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.
It is as airy and comfortable a room as anyone need wish, and, of course, I

would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim.
I’m really getting quite fond of this big room, all but that horrid paper.
Out of one window I can see the garden—those mysterious deep-shaded ar-

bors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.
Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belong-

ing to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the
house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors,
but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with
my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is
sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and
good sense to check the tendency. So I try.

I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would re-
lieve the press of ideas and rest me.

But I find I get pretty tired when I try.
It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my

work. When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down
for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillowcase as to
let me have those stimulating people about now.

I wish I could get well faster.
But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a

vicious influence it had!

72 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Selections from American
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
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There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two
bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up
and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd unblinking eyes are every-
where. There is one place where two breadths didn’t match, and the eyes go all up
and down the line, one a little higher than the other.

I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know
how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more enter-
tainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children
could find in a toy-store.

I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big old bureau used to have,
and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.

I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always
hop into that chair and be safe.

The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for we
had to bring it all from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom
they had to take the nursery things out, and no wonder! I never saw such ravages
as the children have made here.

The wallpaper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than
a brother—they must have had perseverance as well as hatred.

Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug
out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room,
looks as if it had been through the wars.

But I don’t mind it a bit—only the paper.
There comes John’s sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I

must not let her find me writing.
She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profes-

sion. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!
But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.
There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one

that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of great elms and
velvet meadows.

This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly
irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.

But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a
strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about behind that
silly and conspicuous front design.

There’s sister on the stairs!

* * * * * *

Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are all gone, and I am tired out.
John thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we just had Mother
and Nellie and the children down for a week.

Of course I didn’t do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.
But it tired me all the same.
John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell3 in the fall.

3. Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), physician, poet, novelist. Among his medical works is Fat and
Blood (1877), describing his rest cure. He also wrote several historical romances and volumes of poetry.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper 73

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once,
and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!

Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.
I don’t feel as if it was worthwhile to turn my hand over for anything, and

I’m getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.
I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.
Of course I don’t when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.
And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by seri-

ous cases, and Jennie is good and lets me alone when I want her to.
So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under

the roses, and lie down up here a good deal.
I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because

of the wallpaper.
It dwells in my mind so!
I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—and fol-

low that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I
start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been
touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless
pattern to some sort of conclusion.

I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not
arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or
anything else that I ever heard of.

It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.
Looked at in one way, each breadth stands alone; the bloated curves and flour-

ishes—a kind of “debased Romanesque”4 with delirium tremens—go waddling
up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines
run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing sea-weeds
in full chase.

The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust my-
self trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.

They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze,5 and that adds wonderfully
to the confusion.

There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the
crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radia-
tion after all—the interminable grotesque seems to form around a common center
and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.

It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap, I guess.

* * * * * *

I don’t know why I should write this.
I don’t want to.
I don’t feel able.
And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think

in some way—it is such a relief!
But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

4. The description of the wallpaper refers to several styles and theories of design.
5. Border.

74 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Selections from American
Literature
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.
John says I mustn’t lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of

tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.
Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have

a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he
would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.

But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did
not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.

It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous
weakness, I suppose.

And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and
laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.

He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take
care of myself for his sake, and keep well.

He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and
self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.

There’s one comfort—the baby is well and happy, and does not have to oc-
cupy this nursery with the horrid wallpaper.

If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape!
Why, I wouldn’t have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a
room for worlds.

I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I
can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.

Of course I never mention it to them any more—I am too wise—but I keep
watch for it all the same.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pat-

tern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me
away from here!

* * * * * *

It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and be-
cause he loves me so.

But I tried it last night.
It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.
I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one

window or another.
John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the

moonlight on that undulating wallpaper till I felt creepy.
The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to

get out.
I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move, and when I

came back John was awake.
“What is it, little girl?” he said. “Don’t go walking about like that—you’ll

get cold.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper 75

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Selections from American
Literature
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

I thought it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gain-
ing here, and that I wished he would take me away.

“Why, darling!” said he. “Our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can’t see
how to leave before.

“The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now.
Of course if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you really are better,
dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gain-
ing flesh and color, your appetite is better, I feel really much easier about you.”

“I don’t weigh a bit more,” said I, “nor as much; and my appetite may be better
in the evening when you are here but it is worse in the morning when you are away!”

“Bless her little heart!” said he with a big hug. “She shall be as sick as she
pleases! But now let’s improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about
it in the morning!”

“And you won’t go away?” I asked gloomily.
“Why, how can I, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a

nice little trip of a few days while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really, dear,
you are better!”

“Better in body perhaps—” I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and
looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.

“My darling,” said he, “I beg of you, for my sake and for our child’s sake, as
well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your
mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It
is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?”

So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long.
He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn’t, and lay there for hours trying to de-
cide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or
separately.

* * * * * *

On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of
law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.

The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough,
but the pattern is torturing.

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in follow-
ing, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks
you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.

The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you
can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding
and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is something like it.

That is, sometimes!
There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to

notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.
When the sun shoots in through the east window—I always watch for that

first long, straight ray—it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it.
That is why I watch it always.
By moonlight—the moon shines in all night when there is a moon—I wouldn’t

know it was the same paper.

76 American Literature Since the Civil War

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of
all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman
behind it is as plain as can be.

I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that
dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.

By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so
still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour.

I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can.
Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal.
It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see, I don’t sleep.
And that cultivates deceit, for I don’t tell them I’m awake—O no!
The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.
He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.
It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis, that perhaps it is

the paper!
I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the

room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I’ve caught him several times
looking at the paper! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with her hand on it once.

She didn’t know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very
quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she was doing with
the paper—she turned around as if she had been caught stealing, and looked quite
angry—asked me why I should frighten her so!

Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found
yellow smooches on all my clothes and John’s, and she wished we would be more
careful!

Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I
am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!

* * * * * *

Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have some-
thing more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am
more quiet than I was.

John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and
said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wallpaper.

I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was because of
the wallpaper—he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.

I don’t want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and
I think that will be enough.

* * * * * *

I’m feeling so much better!
I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but

I sleep a good deal during the daytime.
In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.
There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over

it. I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried conscientiously.
It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow

things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old, foul, bad yellow things.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper 77

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

But there is something else about that paper—the smell! I noticed it the mo-
ment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now
we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not,
the smell is here.

It creeps all over the house.
I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall,

lying in wait for me on the stairs.
It gets into my hair.
Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is

that smell!
Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find

what it smelled like.
It is not bad—at first—and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring

odor I ever met.
In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging

over me.
It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house—to

reach the smell.
But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color

of the paper! A yellow smell.
There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A

streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except
the bed, a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over.

I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round
and round and round—round and round and round—it makes me dizzy!

* * * * * *

I really have discovered something at last.
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.
The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only

one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.
Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she

just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb

through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them up-

side down, and makes their eyes white!
If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad.

* * * * * *

I think that woman gets out in the daytime!
And I’ll tell you why—privately—I’ve seen her!
I can see her out of every one of my windows!
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do

not creep by daylight.

78 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Selections from American
Literature
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those
dark grape arbors, creeping all around the garden.

I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a car-
riage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.

I don’t blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by
daylight!

I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can’t do it at night, for I
know John would suspect something at once.

And John is so queer now that I don’t want to irritate him. I wish he would
take another room! Besides, I don’t want anybody to get that woman out at night
but myself.

I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.
But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.
And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn! I

have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a
cloud shadow in a wind.

* * * * * *

If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try
it, little by little.

I have found out another funny thing, but I shan’t tell it this time! It does not
do to trust people too much.

There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is be-
ginning to notice. I don’t like the look in his eyes.

And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had
a very good report to give.

She said I slept a good deal in the daytime.
John knows I don’t sleep very well at night, for all I’m so quiet!
He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving

and kind.
As if I couldn’t see through him!
Still, I don’t wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.
It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are affected by it.

* * * * * *

Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. John is to stay in town over
night, and won’t be out until this evening.

Jennie wanted to sleep with me—the sly thing; but I told her I should un-
doubtedly rest better for a night all alone.

That was clever, for really I wasn’t alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and
that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.

I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had
peeled off yards of that paper.

A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.
And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I

declared I would finish it today!
We go away tomorrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to

leave things as they were before.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper 79

Perkins−Perkins:
Selections from American
Literature
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out
of pure spite at the vicious thing.

She laughed and said she wouldn’t mind doing it herself, but I must not get tired.
How she betrayed herself that time!
But I am here, and no person touches this paper but Me—not alive!
She tried to get me out of the room—it was too patent! But I said it was so

quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep
all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner—I would call when I woke.

So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone, and
there is nothing left but that great bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress
we found on it.

We shall sleep downstairs tonight, and take the boat home tomorrow.
I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again.
How those children did tear about here!
This bedstead is fairly gnawed!
But I must get to work.
I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path.
I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want to have anybody come in, till John comes.
I want to astonish him.
I’ve got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get

out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!
But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!
This bed will not move!
I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a

little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth.
Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks

horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes
and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!

I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the win-
dow would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.

Besides I wouldn’t do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like
that is improper and might be misconstrued.

I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those
creeping women, and they creep so fast.

I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?
But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope—you don’t get me

out in the road there!
I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and

that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!
I don’t want to go outside. I won’t, even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead

of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that

long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.
Why there’s John at the door!
It is no use, young man, you can’t open it!
How he does call and pound!

80 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Selections from American
Literature
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

Now he’s crying to Jennie for an axe.
It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!
“John dear!” said I in the gentlest voice. “The key is down by the front steps,

under a plantain leaf!”
That silenced him for a few moments.
Then he said—very quietly indeed, “Open the door, my darling?”
“I can’t,” said I. “The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!”
And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so

often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped
short by the door.

“What is the matter?” he cried. “For God’s sake, what are you doing?”
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off

most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path

by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!
1892

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper 81

Perkins−Perkins:
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Literature

Edith Wharton Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2000

Edith Wharton
(1862–1934)

R
Among American women writers born in the nineteenth century, Edith Wharton stands with
Emily Dickinson as an author whose work has long held an assured place in literary history. In
the 1920s Wharton was one of the most acclaimed of American writers of fiction, having earned
a Pulitzer Prize as well as having produced more than one best-seller. Her fiction’s subject matter
spans the two eras she lived in, both the late Victorian and the modern periods; her style is dis-
tinctly modern.

Edith Newbold Jones was born in 1862 into the most privileged class of old New York society,
to George and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, both of whom could trace their lineage back for three
centuries. She inhabited the world of the very rich, spending winters in New York and summers
in Newport, Rhode Island, and growing up with every expectation of taking her place as a promi-
nent social figure in her turn. She had the typical upper-class young woman’s private education,
consisting of languages, liberal arts, and etiquette, and she had a formal social debut in 1879. Despite
her conventional upbringing, however, she was a voracious reader and she experimented with writ-
ing poetry. She traveled in Europe often during her youth, thus preparing for her later sojourns there.
In 1885 she married Edward Wharton, of an equally prestigious family, and she took up the duties
of a high-society wife in their homes in New York; Newport; Lenox, Massachusetts; and France.

Edith and Edward (“Teddy’’) Wharton appear to have had little in common; he had no inter-
est in her literary talents or aspirations. Nevertheless, Edith began writing short stories, which
she placed in prominent periodicals; she also produced The Decoration of Houses (1897), written
collaboratively with Ogden Codman, Jr., an architect from Boston. The book argues against Victorian
principles of interior decoration and promotes openness, airiness, and light as the new standard
of taste. In 1894, despite her literary productivity, Edith had a breakdown and sought treatment
from S. Weir Mitchell, the originator of the so-called rest cure.

After recovering from her depression, Wharton wrote steadily and tirelessly, completing an
average of one book every year until her death. Her best-remembered novels are The House of Mirth
(1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and The Age of Innocence (1920). The first tells the story of Lily Bart,
a woman born and bred to be an upper-class wife whose circumstances make her marriage—and
therefore her survival—impossible; the second presents a stark tragedy of love, frustration, and
ironic sacrifice set in a New England village; the third chronicles the manners and mores of old
New York society from an almost anthropological perspective, contrasting the range of available
life choices in the period with those of the next generation of wealthy New Yorkers. An astute critic

Wharton’s other works include Verses, Anonymous (1878); The Greater Inclination (1899); The Touchstone (1900); Crucial Instances (1901); The
Valley of Decision (1902); Sanctuary (1903); Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904); The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904); Italian
Backgrounds (1905); Madame de Treymes (1907); The Fruit of the Tree (1907); The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories (1908); A
Motor-Flight through France (1908); Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse (1909); Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910); The Reef (1912); The Custom
of the Country (1913); Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (1915); Xingu and Other Stories (1916); Summer (1917); The Marne (1918);
French Ways and Their Meaning (1919); In Morocco (1920); The Glimpses of the Moon (1922); A Son at the Front (1923); Old New York (1924);
The Mother’s Recompense (1925); Here and Beyond (1926); Twelve Poems (1926); Twilight Sleep (1927); The Children (1928); Hudson River
Bracketed (1929); Certain People (1930); The Gods Arrive (1932); Human Nature (1933); The World Over (1936); Ghosts (1937); and The
Buccaneers (1938).

The main biographies of Wharton include Louis Auchincloss’s Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time (1971), R. W. B. Lewis’s Edith Wharton: A
Biography (1975), and Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s A Feast of Words (1977). Selected studies of her fiction include Blake Nevius, Edith Wharton: A Study
of Her Fiction (1953); Gary Lindberg, Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners (1975); Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America
(1980); Carol Wershoven, The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton (1982); Judith Fryer, Felicitous Space (1986); Susan Goodman, Edith
Wharton’s Women: Friends & Rivals (1990); David Holbrook, Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man (1991); and Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s
Letters from the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing (1991).

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of conspicuous consumption, class snobbery, and prescribed gender roles, Wharton creates complex
psychological portraits of the persons who inhabit her fictionalized social world.

Wharton is reported to have had a passionate affair with a fellow writer in 1910; her mar-
riage ended in divorce in 1913. By that time she was living primarily in France, one of many
American expatriate writers who were to settle there during the modern period. She had a close
professional relationship with Henry James, who admired her writing, as well as with other writ-
ers and thinkers of the time. Like other modernists, she was self-conscious about the construction
of stories and novels, which she discusses in The Writing of Fiction (1925). During World War I, she
devoted her energies to charitable efforts, finding work, food, and shelter for refugees. When the
war ended, she remained in France, where she died of a stroke at the age of seventy-five, after com-
pleting her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934).

Our two selections, “The Muse’s Tragedy’’ (1899) and “The Other Two’’ (1904), demon-
strate one of Wharton’s characteristic techniques in writing about women: she presents the central
female character from the point of view of a man. “The Muse’s Tragedy’’ introduces a woman
who had been the inspiration for a fictional Victorian poet’s masterpieces; she is portrayed first from
the perspective of a young male admirer and then in a revelatory letter written by herself. In its
unusual angle on women in literature, the story asks more questions than it answers. “The Other
Two’’ leaves ambiguous the question of whether Alice Waythorn is culpable, as her husband ulti-
mately finds her to be, for her evident ability to adapt herself to the various men she has married.

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EDITH WHARTON

Roman Fever1

I

From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-
cared-for middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and,
leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread
glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but
benevolent approval.

As they leaned there a girlish voice echoed up gaily from the stairs leading to
the court below. “Well, come along, then,” it cried, not to them but to an invisible
companion, “and let’s leave the young things to their knitting”; and a voice as
fresh laughed back: “Oh, look here, Babs, not actually knitting—” “Well, I mean
figuratively,” rejoined the first. “After all, we haven’t left our poor parents much
else to do . . .” and at that point the turn of the stairs engulfed the dialogue.

The two ladies looked at each other again, this time with a tinge of smiling em-
barrassment, and the smaller and paler one shook her head and coloured slightly.

“Barbara!” she murmured, sending an unheard rebuke after the mocking
voice in the stairway.

The other lady, who was fuller, and higher in colour, with a small determined
nose supported by vigorous black eyebrows, gave a good-humoured laugh. “That’s
what our daughters think of us!”

Her companion replied by a deprecating gesture. “Not of us individually. We
must remember that. It’s just the collective modern idea of Mothers. And you see—”
Half guiltily she drew from her handsomely mounted black hand-bag a twist of
crimson silk run through by two fine knitting needles. “One never knows,” she
murmured. “The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill;
and sometimes I get tired just looking—even at this.” Her gesture was now ad-
dressed to the stupendous scene at their feet.

The dark lady laughed again, and they both relapsed upon the view, contem-
plating it in silence, with a sort of diffused serenity which might have been bor-
rowed from the spring effulgence of the Roman skies. The luncheon-hour was
long past, and the two had their end of the vast terrace to themselves. At this op-
posite extremity a few groups, detained by a lingering look at the outspread city,
were gathering up guide-books and fumbling for tips. The last of them scattered,
and the two ladies were alone on the air-washed height.

Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group,
and the Estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency, from Roman Fever and Other Stories
by Edith Wharton. Copyright © 1934 by Liberty Magazine; copyright renewed © 1962 by William R.
Tyler.

1. “Roman Fever” exemplifies the author’s narrative style; her genius for integrating plot, character,
and situation; and, finally, her ability to infuse a story with action, even when dialogue is its formal ve-
hicle. This story is in the genre of The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. The story was first
published in Liberty Magazine in 1934. The World Over, 1936, is the source of the present text.

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“Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t just stay here,” said Mrs. Slade, the lady
of the high colour and energetic brows. Two derelict basket-chairs stood near, and
she pushed them into the angle of the parapet, and settled herself in one, her gaze
upon the Palatine. “After all, it’s still the most beautiful view in the world.”

“It always will be, to me,” assented her friend Mrs. Ansley, with so slight a
stress on the “me” that Mrs. Slade, though she noticed it, wondered if it were not
merely accidental, like the random underlinings of old-fashioned letter-writers.

“Grace Ansley was always old-fashioned,” she thought; and added aloud,
with a retrospective smile: “It’s a view we’ve both been familiar with for a good
many years. When we first met here we were younger than our girls are now. You
remember?”

“Oh, yes, I remember,” murmured Mrs. Ansley, with the same undefinable
stress.—“There’s that head-waiter wondering,” she interpolated. She was evi-
dently far less sure than her companion of herself and of her rights in the world.

“I’ll cure him of wondering,” said Mrs. Slade, stretching her hand toward a
bag as discreetly opulent-looking as Mrs. Ansley’s. Signing to the head-waiter, she
explained that she and her friend were old lovers of Rome, and would like to
spend the end of the afternoon looking down on the view—that is, if it did not
disturb the service? The head-waiter, bowing over her gratuity, assured her that
the ladies were most welcome, and would be still more so if they would conde-
scend to remain for dinner. A full moon night, they would remember. . . .

Mrs. Slade’s black brows drew together, as though references to the moon were
out-of-place and even unwelcome. But she smiled away her frown as the head-
waiter retreated. “Well, why not? We might do worse. There’s no knowing, I sup-
pose, when the girls will be back. Do you even know back from where? I don’t!”

Mrs. Ansley again coloured slightly. “I think those young Italian aviators we
met at the Embassy invited them to fly to Tarquinia for tea. I suppose they’ll want
to wait and fly back by moonlight.”

“Moonlight—moonlight! What a part it still plays. Do you suppose they’re as
sentimental as we were?”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t in the least know what they are,”
said Mrs. Ansley. “And perhaps we didn’t know much more about each other.”

“No; perhaps we didn’t.”
Her friend gave her a shy glance. “I never should have supposed you were

sentimental, Alida.”
“Well, perhaps I wasn’t.” Mrs. Slade drew her lips together in retrospect; and

for a few moments the two ladies, who had been intimate since childhood, re-
flected how little they knew each other. Each one, of course, had a label ready to
attach to the other’s name; Mrs. Delphin Slade, for instance, would have told her-
self, or any one who asked her, that Mrs. Horace Ansley, twenty-five years ago,
had been exquisitely lovely—no, you wouldn’t believe it, would you? . . . though,
of course, still charming, distinguished . . . Well, as a girl, she had been exquisite;
far more beautiful than her daughter Barbara, though certainly Babs, according to
the new standards at any rate, was more effective—had more edge, as they say.
Funny where she got it, with those two nullities as parents. Yes; Horace Ansley
was—well, just the duplicate of his wife. Museum specimens of old New York.
Good-looking, irreproachable, exemplary. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley had lived
opposite each other—actually as well as figuratively—for years. When the drawing-

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room curtains in No. 20 East 73rd Street were renewed, No. 23, across the way,
was always aware of it. And of all the movings, buyings, travels, anniversaries, ill-
nesses—the tame chronicle of an estimable pair. Little of it escaped Mrs. Slade.
But she had grown bored with it by the time her husband made his big coup in
Wall Street, and when they bought in upper Park Avenue had already begun to
think: “I’d rather live opposite a speakeasy for a change; at least one might see it
raided.” The idea of seeing Grace raided was so amusing that (before the move)
she launched it at a woman’s lunch. It made a hit, and went the rounds—she some-
times wondered if it had crossed the street, and reached Mrs. Ansley. She hoped
not, but didn’t much mind. Those were the days when respectability was at a dis-
count, and it did the irreproachable no harm to laugh at them a little.

A few years later, and not many months apart, both ladies lost their husbands.
There was an appropriate exchange of wreaths and condolences, and a brief re-
newal of intimacy in the half-shadow of their mourning; and now, after another
interval, they had run across each other in Rome, at the same hotel, each of them
the modest appendage of a salient daughter. The similarity of their lot had again
drawn them together, lending itself to mild jokes, and the mutual confession that,
if in old days it must have been tiring to “keep up” with daughters, it was now, at
times, a little dull not to.

No doubt, Mrs. Slade reflected, she felt her unemployment more than poor
Grace ever would. It was a big drop from being the wife of Delphin Slade to being
his widow. She had always regarded herself (with a certain conjugal pride) as his
equal in social gifts, as contributing her full share to the making of the exceptional
couple they were: but the difference after his death was irremediable. As the wife
of the famous corporation lawyer, always with an international case or two on
hand, every day brought its exciting and unexpected obligation: the impromptu
entertaining of eminent colleagues from abroad, the hurried dashes on legal busi-
ness to London, Paris or Rome, where the entertaining was so handsomely recip-
rocated; the amusement of hearing in her wake: “What, that handsome woman
with the good clothes and eyes is Mrs. Slade—the Slade’s wife? Really? Generally
the wives of celebrities are such frumps.”

Yes; being the Slade’s widow was a dullish business after that. In living up to
such a husband all her faculties had been engaged; now she had only her daughter
to live up to, for the son who seemed to have inherited his father’s gifts had died
suddenly in boyhood. She had fought through that agony because her husband
was there, to be helped and to help; now, after the father’s death, the thought of
the boy had become unbearable. There was nothing left but to mother her daugh-
ter; and dear Jenny was such a perfect daughter that she needed no excessive moth-
ering. “Now with Babs Ansley I don’t know that I should be so quiet,” Mrs. Slade
sometimes half-enviously reflected; but Jenny, who was younger than her brilliant
friend, was that rare accident, an extremely pretty girl who somehow made youth
and prettiness seem as safe as their absence. It was all perplexing—and to Mrs.
Slade a little boring. She wished that Jenny would fall in love—with the wrong
man, even; that she might have to be watched, outmaneuvered, rescued. And in-
stead, it was Jenny who watched her mother, kept her out of draughts, made sure
that she had taken her tonic . . .

Mrs. Ansley was much less articulate than her friend, and her mental portrait
of Mrs. Slade was slighter, and drawn with fainter touches. “Alida Slade’s awfully

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brilliant; but not as brilliant as she thinks,” would have summed it up; though she
would have added, for the enlightenment of strangers, that Mrs. Slade had been
an extremely dashing girl; much more so than her daughter, who was pretty, of
course, and clever in a way, but had none of her mother’s—well, “vividness,” some
one had once called it. Mrs. Ansley would take up current words like this, and
cite them in quotation marks, as unheard-of audacities. No; Jenny was not like
her mother. Sometimes Mrs. Ansley thought Alida Slade was disappointed; on the
whole she had had a sad life. Full of failures and mistakes; Mrs. Ansley had al-
ways been rather sorry for her . . .

So these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her
little telescope.

II

For a long time they continued to sit side by side without speaking. It seemed as
though, to both, there was a relief in laying down their somewhat futile activities
in the presence of the vast Memento Mori which faced them. Mrs. Slade sat quite
still, her eyes fixed on the golden slope of the Palace of the Cæsars, and after a
while Mrs. Ansley ceased to fidget with her bag, and she too sank into meditation.
Like many intimate friends, the two ladies had never before had occasion to be
silent together, and Mrs. Ansley was slightly embarrassed by what seemed, after
so many years, a new stage in their intimacy, and one with which she did not yet
know how to deal.

Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangour of bells which periodically
covers Rome with a roof of silver. Mrs. Slade glanced at her wrist-watch. “Five
o’clock already,” she said, as though surprised.

Mrs. Ansley suggested interrogatively: “There’s bridge at the Embassy at five.”
For a long time Mrs. Slade did not answer. She appeared to be lost in contempla-
tion, and Mrs. Ansley thought the remark had escaped her. But after a while she
said, as if speaking out of a dream: “Bridge, did you say? Not unless you want
to . . . But I don’t think I will, you know.”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Ansley hastened to assure her. “I don’t care to at all. It’s so
lovely here; and so full of old memories, as you say.” She settled herself in her chair,
and almost furtively drew forth her knitting. Mrs. Slade took sideway note of this
activity, but her own beautifully cared-for hands remained motionless on her knee.

“I was just thinking,” she said slowly, “what different things Rome stands for
to each generation of travellers. To our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our moth-
ers, sentimental dangers—how we used to be guarded!—to our daughters, no
more dangers than the middle of Main Street. They don’t know it—but how much
they’re missing!”

The long golden light was beginning to pale, and Mrs. Ansley lifted her knit-
ting a little closer to her eyes. “Yes; how we were guarded!”

“I always used to think,” Mrs. Slade continued, “that our mothers had a
much more difficult job than our grandmothers. When Roman fever stalked the
streets it must have been comparatively easy to gather in the girls at the danger
hour; but when you and I were young, with such beauty calling us, and the spice
of disobedience thrown in, and no worse risk than catching cold during the cool
hour after sunset, the mothers used to be put to it to keep us in—didn’t they?”

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She turned again toward Mrs. Ansley, but the latter had reached a delicate
point in her knitting. “One, two, three—slip two; yes, they must have been,” she
assented, without looking up.

Mrs. Slade’s eyes rested on her with a deepened attention. “She can knit—in
the face of this! How like her . . .”

Mrs. Slade leaned back, brooding, her eyes ranging from the ruins which faced
her to the long green hollow of the Forum, the fading glow of the church fronts
beyond it, and the outlying immensity of the Colosseum. Suddenly she thought:
“It’s all very well to say that our girls have done away with sentiment and moon-
light. But if Babs Ansley isn’t out to catch that young aviator—the one who’s a
Marchese—then I don’t know anything. And Jenny has no chance beside her. I
know that too. I wonder if that’s why Grace Ansley likes the two girls to go every-
where together? My poor Jenny as a foil—!” Mrs. Slade gave a hardly audible
laugh, and at the sound Mrs. Ansley dropped her knitting.

“Yes—?”
“I—oh, nothing. I was only thinking how your Babs carries everything before

her. That Campolieri boy is one of the best matches in Rome. Don’t look so inno-
cent, my dear—you know he is. And I was . . . wondering how two such exem-
plary characters as you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so
dynamic.” Mrs. Slade laughed again, with a touch of asperity.

Mrs. Ansley’s hands lay inert across her needles. She looked straight out at
the great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendour at her feet. But her small
profile was almost expressionless. At length she said: “I think you overrate Babs,
my dear.”

Mrs. Slade’s tone grew easier. “No; I don’t. I appreciate her. And perhaps envy
you. Oh, my girl’s perfect; if I were a chronic invalid I’d—well, I think I’d rather
be in Jenny’s hands. There must be times . . . but there! I always wanted a bril-
liant daughter . . . and never quite understood why I got an angel instead.”

Mrs. Ansley echoed her laugh in a faint murmur. “Babs is an angel too.”
“Of course—of course! But she’s got rainbow wings. Well, they’re wandering

by the sea with their young men; and here we sit . . . and it all brings back the
past a little too acutely.”

Mrs. Ansley had resumed her knitting. One might almost have imagined (if
one had known her less well, Mrs. Slade reflected) that, for her also, too many
memories rose from the lengthening shadows of those august ruins. But no; she
was simply absorbed in her work. What was there for her to worry about? She
knew that Babs would almost certainly come back engaged to the extremely eligi-
ble Campolieri. “And she’ll sell the New York house, and settle down near them
in Rome, and never be in their way . . . she’s much too tactful. But she’ll have an
excellent cook, and just the right people in for bridge and cocktails . . . and a
perfectly peaceful old age among her grandchildren.”

Mrs. Slade broke off this prophetic flight with a recoil of self-disgust. There
was no one of whom she had less right to think unkindly than of Grace Ansley.
Would she never cure herself of envying her? Perhaps she had begun too long ago.

She stood up and leaned against the parapet, filling her troubled eyes with the
tranquillizing magic of the hour. But instead of tranquillizing her the sight seemed
to increase her exasperation. Her gaze turned toward the Colosseum. Already its
golden flank was drowned in purple shadow, and above it the sky curved crystal

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clear, without light or colour. It was the moment when afternoon and evening
hang balanced in mid-heaven.

Mrs. Slade turned back and laid her hand on her friend’s arm. The gesture
was so abrupt that Mrs. Ansley looked up, startled.

“The sun’s set. You’re not afraid, my dear?”
“Afraid—?”
“Of Roman fever or pneumonia? I remember how ill you were that winter.

As a girl you had a very delicate throat, hadn’t you?”
“Oh, we’re all right up here. Down below, in the Forum, it does get deathly

cold, all of a sudden . . . but not here.”
“Ah, of course you know because you had to be so careful.” Mrs. Slade turned

back to the parapet. She thought: “I must make one more effort not to hate her.”
Aloud she said: “Whenever I look at the Forum from up here, I remember that
story about a great-aunt of yours, wasn’t she? A dreadfully wicked great-aunt?”

“Oh, yes; Great-aunt Harriet. The one who was supposed to have sent her
young sister out to the Forum after sunset to gather a night-blooming flower for her
album. All our great-aunts and grandmothers used to have albums of dried flowers.”

Mrs. Slade nodded. “But she really sent her because they were in love with
the same man—”

“Well, that was the family tradition. They said Aunt Harriet confessed it years
afterward. At any rate, the poor little sister caught the fever and died. Mother
used to frighten us with the story when we were children.”

“And you frightened me with it, that winter when you and I were here as girls.
The winter I was engaged to Delphin.”

Mrs. Ansley gave a faint laugh. “Oh, did I? Really frightened you? I don’t be-
lieve you’re easily frightened.”

“Not often; but I was then. I was easily frightened because I was too happy. I
wonder if you know what that means?”

“I—yes . . .” Mrs. Ansley faltered.
“Well, I suppose that was why the story of your wicked aunt made such an

impression on me. And I thought: ‘There’s no more Roman fever, but the Forum is
deathly cold after sunset—especially after a hot day. And the Colosseum’s even
colder and damper’.”

“The Colosseum—?”
“Yes. It wasn’t easy to get in, after the gates were locked for the night. Far

from easy. Still, in those days it could be managed; it was managed, often. Lovers
met there who couldn’t meet elsewhere. You knew that?”

“I—I daresay. I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember? You don’t remember going to visit some ruins or other

one evening, just after dark, and catching a bad chill? You were supposed to have
gone to see the moon rise. People always said that expedition was what caused
your illness.”

There was a moment’s silence; then Mrs. Ansley rejoined: “Did they? It was
all so long ago.”

“Yes. And you got well again—so it didn’t matter. But I suppose it struck your
friends—the reason given for your illness, I mean—because everybody knew you
were so prudent on account of your throat, and your mother took such care of
you . . . You had been out late sightseeing, hadn’t you, that night?”

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“Perhaps I had. The most prudent girls aren’t always prudent. What made
you think of it now?”

Mrs. Slade seemed to have no answer ready. But after a moment she broke
out: “Because I simply can’t bear it any longer—!”

Mrs. Ansley lifted her head quickly. Her eyes were wide and very pale. “Can’t
bear what?”

“Why—your not knowing that I’ve always known why you went.”
“Why I went—?”
“Yes. You think I’m bluffing, don’t you? Well, you went to meet the man I

was engaged to—and I can repeat every word of the letter that took you there.”
While Mrs. Slade spoke Mrs. Ansley had risen unsteadily to her feet. Her bag,

her knitting and gloves, slid in a panic-stricken heap to the ground. She looked at
Mrs. Slade as though she were looking at a ghost.

“No, no—don’t,” she faltered out.
“Why not? Listen, if you don’t believe me. ‘My one darling, things can’t go

on like this. I must see you alone. Come to the Colosseum immediately after dark
tomorrow. There will be somebody to let you in. No one whom you need fear will
suspect’—but perhaps you’ve forgotten what the letter said?”

Mrs. Ansley met the challenge with an unexpected composure. Steadying herself
against the chair she looked at her friend, and replied: “No, I know it by heart too.”

“And the signature? ‘Only your D.S.’ Was that it? I’m right, am I? That was
the letter that took you out that evening after dark?”

Mrs. Ansley was still looking at her. It seemed to Mrs. Slade that a slow strug-
gle was going on behind the voluntarily controlled mask of her small quiet face. “I
shouldn’t have thought she had herself so well in hand,” Mrs. Slade reflected, al-
most resentfully. But at this moment Mrs. Ansley spoke. “I don’t know how you
knew. I burnt that letter at once.”

“Yes; you would, naturally—you’re so prudent!” The sneer was open now.
“And if you burnt the letter you’re wondering how on earth I know what was in
it. That’s it, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Slade waited, but Mrs. Ansley did not speak.
“Well, my dear, I know what was in that letter because I wrote it!”
“You wrote it?”
“Yes.”
The two women stood for a minute staring at each other in the last golden

light. Then Mrs. Ansley dropped back into her chair. “Oh,” she murmured, and
covered her face with her hands.

Mrs. Slade waited nervously for another word or movement. None came, and
at length she broke out: “I horrify you.”

Mrs. Ansley’s hands dropped to her knee. The face they uncovered was
streaked with tears. “I wasn’t thinking of you. I was thinking—it was the only let-
ter I ever had from him!”

“And I wrote it. Yes; I wrote it! But I was the girl he was engaged to. Did you
happen to remember that?”

Mrs. Ansley’s head dropped again. “I’m not trying to excuse myself . . . I
remembered . . .”

“And still you went?”
“Still I went.”

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Mrs. Slade stood looking down on the small bowed figure at her side. The
flame of her wrath had already sunk, and she wondered why she had ever thought
there would be any satisfaction in inflicting so purposeless a wound on her friend.
But she had to justify herself.

“You do understand? I found out—and I hated you, hated you. I knew you
were in love with Delphin—and I was afraid; afraid of you, of your quiet ways,
your sweetness . . . your . . . well, I wanted you out of the way, that’s all. Just for
a few weeks; just till I was sure of him. So in a blind fury I wrote that letter . . . I
don’t know why I’m telling you now.”

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Ansley slowly, “it’s because you’ve always gone on
hating me.”

“Perhaps. Or because I wanted to get the whole thing off my mind.” She
paused. “I’m glad you destroyed the letter. Of course I never thought you’d die.”

Mrs. Ansley relapsed into silence, and Mrs. Slade, leaning above her, was con-
scious of a strange sense of isolation, of being cut off from the warm current of
human communion. “You think me a monster!”

“I don’t know . . . It was the only letter I had, and you say he didn’t write it?”
“Ah, how you care for him still!”
“I cared for that memory,” said Mrs. Ansley.
Mrs. Slade continued to look down on her. She seemed physically reduced by

the blow—as if, when she got up, the wind might scatter her like a puff of dust.
Mrs. Slade’s jealousy suddenly leapt up again at the sight. All these years the
woman had been living on that letter. How she must have loved him, to treasure
the mere memory of its ashes! The letter of the man her friend was engaged to.
Wasn’t it she who was the monster?

“You tried your best to get him away from me, didn’t you? But you failed;
and I kept him. That’s all.”

“Yes. That’s all.”
“I wish now I hadn’t told you. I’d no idea you’d feel about it as you do; I

thought you’d be ashamed. It all happened so long ago, as you say; and you must
do me the justice to remember that I had no reason to think you’d ever taken it se-
riously. How could I, when you were married to Horace Ansley two months after-
ward? As soon as you could get out of bed your mother rushed you off to Florence
and married you. People were rather surprised—they wondered at its being done
so quickly; but I thought I knew. I had an idea you did it out of pique—to be able
to say you’d got ahead of Delphin and me. Girls have such silly reasons for doing
the most serious things. And your marrying so soon convinced me that you’d never
really cared.”

“Yes, I suppose it would,” Mrs. Ansley assented.
The clear heaven overhead was emptied of all its gold. Dusk spread over it,

abruptly darkening the Seven Hills. Here and there lights began to twinkle through
the foliage at their feet. Steps were coming and going on the deserted terrace—
waiters looking out of the doorway at the head of the stairs, then reappearing
with trays and napkins and flasks of wine. Tables were moved, chairs straight-
ened. A feeble string of electric lights flickered out. Some vases of faded flowers
were carried away, and brought back replenished. A stout lady in a dust-coat sud-
denly appeared, asking in broken Italian if any one had seen the elastic band which

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held together her tattered Baedeker. She poked with her stick under the table at
which she had lunched, the waiters assisting.

The corner where Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley sat was still shadowy and de-
serted. For a long time neither of them spoke. At length Mrs. Slade began again:
“I suppose I did it as a sort of joke—”

“A joke?”
“Well, girls are ferocious sometimes, you know. Girls in love especially. And I

remember laughing to myself all that evening at the idea that you were waiting
around there in the dark, dodging out of sight, listening for every sound, trying to
get in—. Of course I was upset when I heard you were so ill afterward.”

Mrs. Ansley had not moved for a long time. But now she turned slowly to her
companion. “But I didn’t wait. He’d arranged everything. He was there. We were
let in at once,” she said.

Mrs. Slade sprang up from her leaning position. “Delphin there? They let you
in?—Ah, now you’re lying!” she burst out with violence.

Mrs. Ansley’s voice grew clearer, and full of surprise. “But of course he was
there. Naturally he came—”

“Came? How did he know he’d find you there? You must be raving!”
Mrs. Ansley hesitated, as though reflecting. “But I answered the letter. I told

him I’d be there. So he came.”
Mrs. Slade flung her hands up to her face. “Oh, God—you answered! I never

thought of your answering . . .”
“It’s odd you never thought of it, if you wrote the letter.”
“Yes. I was blind with rage.”
Mrs. Ansley rose, and drew her fur scarf about her. “It is cold here. We’d bet-

ter go . . . I’m sorry for you,” she said, as she clasped the fur about her throat.
The unexpected words sent a pang through Mrs. Slade. “Yes; we’d better go.”

She gathered up her bag and cloak. “I don’t know why you should be sorry for
me,” she muttered.

Mrs. Ansley stood looking away from her toward the dusky secret mass of
the Colosseum. “Well—because I didn’t have to wait that night.”

Mrs. Slade gave an unquiet laugh. “Yes; I was beaten there. But I oughtn’t to
begrudge it to you, I suppose. At the end of all these years. After all, I had every-
thing; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter
that he didn’t write.”

Mrs. Ansley was silent again. At length she turned toward the door of the ter-
race. She took a step, and turned back, facing her companion.

“I had Barbara,” she said, and began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the
stairway.

1934, 1936

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Social and Cultural
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Literary Renaissance

Twentieth-century spiritual unrest and skepticism were deeply rooted in
nineteenth-century thought, transmitted from the old to the new era in the United
States, by such writers as William James, George Santayana, Henry Adams,
Theodore Dreiser, William Vaughn Moody, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Simi-
larly, the spirit of economic and social revolt can be traced from the later works of
Mark Twain and William Dean Howells through the writings of Upton Sinclair
and Jack London to those of Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, and Sinclair
Lewis. After 1900, realism and naturalism, as well as new experiments in literary
form, continued to draw inspiration from such nineteenth-century masters as Dos-
toevsky, Turgenev, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, and the French symbolist poets; from
such English Victorians as Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and
George Moore; from the playwrights Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and George
Bernard Shaw; from the French novelist André Gide; and from the Irish poets and
playwrights William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge. Romantic idealism
survived in genteel nostalgia and in some genres of popular literature; Poe and
Melville began to rival Irving and Longfellow in esteem; Whitman, largely ne-
glected by Americans during his lifetime, came to exert one of the most powerful
influences on the verse of the twentieth century; Emily Dickinson, posthumously
published in 1890, became a poetic force after 1914; and Henry James, an exotic
to his American contemporaries, entered the mainstream of twentieth-century lit-
erature. Meanwhile, women authors such as Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and
Gertrude Stein influenced many later writers from the beginnings of their formida-
ble careers. The stage was set for the next act of American literature.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE
By 1915, fifty years after the end of the Civil War, a new age of literary expression
had begun. In the 1920s, the volume of American literary activity, the large num-
ber of new authors; the high level of their powers; the originality, daring, and gen-
eral success of new forms of expression; and the absorbed response of a reading
public larger and more critical than ever before produced a new national litera-
ture that rivaled in brilliance the regional flowering of New England a century
earlier. The basis for this twentieth-century renaissance was established during the
second decade of the century; the First World War barely interrupted the tide of
innovation, although it provided fresh themes and focused even more sharply the
spiritual problems and disillusionments of this critical generation of writers.

Early in the decade, Ezra Pound, newly arrived in London, met Yeats and his
circle, found a like sensibility in the English critic T. E. Hulme, and gathered
around him a youthful group of British and American poets, including H. D.,

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Richard Aldington, and Amy Lowell. He christened this coterie “Les Imagistes,”
and they inaugurated a new poetry movement, published aesthetic manifestos,
and collected their poems in imagist anthologies. Pound also became foreign edi-
tor of Harriet Monroe’s new and important Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, founded
in Chicago in 1912. During this period, Edwin Arlington Robinson consolidated
his fame in The Man against the Sky (1916) and Merlin (1917), the first of his
Arthurian poems. Robert Frost published his first two books in 1913 and 1914;
the second was the great North of Boston. Three poets suddenly provided star-
tling voices and images for the American Midwest: Vachel Lindsay, whose chant-
ing, declamatory verse won him meteoric success in three volumes between 1913
and 1917; Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology (1915) enjoyed an
almost unprecedented immediate success; and Carl Sandburg, whose Chicago
Poems (1916) inaugurated his long and productive career as an American bard. In
the West, Robinson Jeffers found his congenial subject, but not yet his mature
voice, in California (1916). In the East, Edna St. Vincent Millay published her first
collection of poems in 1917, the year of her college graduation. T. S. Eliot, mid-
westerner turned easterner turned Londoner, appeared at once in his mature char-
acter in two volumes published by 1920.

The novel’s growth was more congruent with its past. In 1911 Dreiser published
Jennie Gerhardt, his first novel since 1900. In rapid succession the appearance of
The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The “Genius” (1915) established
him as the great naturalist of his generation and gave encouragement to the nascent
naturalism of younger authors. In 1911 Edith Wharton produced in Ethan Frome
a small naturalistic masterpiece of immediate influence. Ellen Glasgow in the same
year published The Miller of Old Church, a novel in the “Old Dominion” series
that grew in depth and interest with such later works as Barren Ground (1925)
and Vein of Iron (1935). In 1913 Willa Cather found her mature subject in the Ne-
braska plains and immigrants of O Pioneers!, which she followed in 1918 with My
Antonia; in The Song of the Lark (1915), she combined those materials with her
discovery of the desert civilization of the Southwest, on which she later based
her masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Novels important for
the outrage they caused among conventional moralists, because they dealt
with subjects foreshadowing the greater sexual freedoms of the 1920s, include
David Graham Phillips’s posthumous Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) and
James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen (1919). Two masterworks, Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1920), capped a decade
in which a new realistic vision, tempered in the emotional fires of naturalism, con-
firmed a dark and questioning view of the new century and prepared the ground
for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.

The new poetry and fiction formed part of a general intellectual expansion that
included the vigorous criticism of Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, James G.
Huneker, Joel E. Spingarn, and Van Wyck Brooks. Popular satirist H. L. Mencken
began his crusade before 1910 and reached the height of his effectiveness after
1924 as editor of The American Mercury; he waged unceasing war on the mass
mind, directed his eloquent wrath against the defenders of official “decency” and
self-appointed guardians of other people’s morals, and championed such “im-
moral” authors as Dreiser, Cabell, and Anderson.

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By 1920 patterns were set for the literature that followed. Newer authors
would be characterized, like the generation before them, by aesthetic originality
and rebellion, by the determination to scatter conventional taboos against the ex-
pression of physical and psychological actuality, by a hunger for spiritual enlight-
enment sought in symbolic or primitivistic expression, and by a renewed sense of
responsibility for fellow human beings, expressed in direct attacks on the contem-
porary social order. In its more revolutionary aspects, this was a renaissance that
targeted the fundamental institutions and cultural assumptions of society; its lead-
ers affirmed the dignity and value of the individual in the face of the dehumaniz-
ing forces of the new century. Most authors in the generations younger than
Dreiser did not continue his uncompromising naturalism, yet literature continued
its concern for individuals trapped by blind laws of heredity and environment or
buffeted by uncomprehended chance. Characteristic elements of naturalism are
joined with the realists’ objectivity in Hemingway and his successors; naturalism
mingles with primitivism in the novels of Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Richard
Wright and with primitivistic and Freudian elements in Robinson Jeffers, Eugene
O’Neill, and Erskine Caldwell; it is reflected in the inescapable connection be-
tween environment and fate in the Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–1935) of James T.
Farrell and in the Marxist view of history that energizes John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.
(1930–1936). Indeed, the First World War and its aftermath of political unrest,
economic boom, and then worldwide depression only strengthened the growing
belief that history is a mechanism responding to the obdurate dynamics of force
and mass.

POETRY BETWEEN THE WARS
Noteworthy in the literary revival after World War I were the opulence, power,
and popularity of poetry and drama. The imagist and free verse movements begun
before the war, the popularity won for verse by Lindsay, Masters, and Sandburg,
and the continued mastery of Frost were manifestations within the United States
of a period of international ferment. In this climate, T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land
(1922) was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modernism that was to set
the model for much of the most accomplished poetry of the next half century. But
this rich period supported many other kinds of poetry as well.

In general, American poetry from the beginning of World War I until the end
of World War II became increasingly subtle in its symbolism, more reliant on allu-
sions to earlier literary works or to suggestions of mythological meaning, and more
inclined toward intellectual depth and brilliance. Pound and the imagists found in-
spiration in the French symbolists, the classics, the troubadour poets, the Italian
Renaissance, and ancient Chinese and Japanese forms. Eliot also emphasized the
inspiration of philosophy, religious thought, Eastern mysticism, and anthropologi-
cal lore, renewing literary attention to the Elizabethan poets and dramatists and
the English metaphysical poets of the Jacobean period. Intense metaphysical im-
ages heightened the intellectual tension and symbolic range of poetry, making it
more difficult but also more capable of representing by abstraction the emotional
significance of ideas. Not all poets followed Pound and Eliot into the more extreme
recesses of their theories and practices, but few remained uninfluenced by a pro-
gram offering such riches. The poets grouped in this book as “Poets of Idea and
Order,” idiosyncratic in many ways, shared an active search for unifying principles

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of vision and versification to give shape to the apparent fragmentation and inco-
herence of the world they inhabited. Williams’s “no ideas but in things” and
Stevens’s “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” both pointed to eternal
verities inherent in the phenomenal world, and both writers sought poetic lines re-
flective of immediate and eternal order in ways that unfettered free verse could not
attain. Both waited for recognition until the era of Eliot and Pound was drawing to
a close. Marianne Moore’s syllable counting gave strict regulation to lines freed of
the repeated accentual patterns in traditional verse in English. The Nashville “Fugi-
tives” John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate forged an impressive amalgam that hon-
ored the lessons of modernism while asserting the values of an agrarian society and
the strengths of traditional versification. Hart Crane rejected the cold detachment
and classical allusions of Eliot to build The Bridge from blocks of personal remem-
brance and familiar American stories and legends.

Meanwhile, Frost remained the great outsider to the practices of modernism,
Jeffers won a large audience for his bleakly naturalistic California narratives, Elinor
Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay found popular audiences and critical acclaim
with lyric gems wedding traditional forms to the wry and cynical observations of
liberated women, and African American writers responded to this new climate of
openness with the spurt of energy known as the Harlem Renaissance.

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History Literature

German submarine sinks the 1915 Ezra Pound begins
Lusitania Cantos

Provincetown Players established Edgar Lee Masters
“Petit, the Poet”; “Elsa Wertman”

Robert Frost
“The Road Not Taken”

President Wilson reelected 1916 Carl Sandburg
president “Fog”; “Monotone”; “Gone”

U.S. enters World War I 1917 Susan Glaspell
Russian Revolution breaks out “A Jury of Her Peers”

On November 11, an armistice 1918 Theodore Dreiser
ends World War I “The Second Choice”

The Theater Guild established

Race riot erupts in Chicago 1919 Sherwood Anderson
Winesburg, Ohio

Wallace Stevens
“Anecdote of the Jar”;
“Ploughing on Sunday”

Prohibition begins after the 1920 Edwin Arlington Robinson
Eighteenth Amendment is ratified “Firelight”; “The Mill”;
by every state but Connecticut “Mr. Flood’s Party”
and Rhode Island Robert Frost

The Nineteenth Amendment “Fire and Ice”
gives women the right to vote Ezra Pound

“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

Congress establishes a quota 1921 Elinor Wylie
system by which annual “Wild Peaches”; “Sanctuary”;
immigration could be regulated “Prophecy”
and decreased Marianne Moore

“Poetry”
Langston Hughes

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”

1922 T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land

Eugene O’Neill
The Hairy Ape

Claude McKay
“America”

Teapot Dome scandal 1923 Ellen Glasgow
“Jordan’s End”

Robert Frost
“Stopping by Woods
on a Snowy Evening”

Edna St. Vincent Millay
“What Lips My Lips
Have Kissed”

Wallace Stevens
“Bantams in Pine-Woods”

William Carlos Williams
“The Red Wheelbarrow”

E. E. Cummings
“Buffalo Bill’s”

Jean Toomer
Cane

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History Literature

Calvin Coolidge elected president 1924 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
in a landslide “Heliodora”

The Scopes trial 1925 T. S. Eliot
“The Hollow Men”

Amy Lowell
“Meeting-House Hill”

Robinson Jeffers
“Roan Stallion”

Countee Cullen
“Heritage”

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

Ernest Hemingway
“Big Two-Hearted River”

1926 Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises

Archibald MacLeish
“Ars Poetica”

First talking movie, The Jazz 1927 John Crowe Ransom
Singer “The Equilibrists”

Charles Lindbergh flies the first

successful solo transatlantic flight

Stock market crashes 1929 William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury

Thomas Wolfe
“An Angel on the Porch”

Katherine Anne Porter
“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”

1930 Allen Tate
“Ode to the Confederate Dead”

Hart Crane
The Bridge

John Dos Passos
The 42nd Parallel

Scottsboro defendants arrested 1931 Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat
Nor Drink”

F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Babylon Revisited”

William Faulkner
“That Evening Sun”

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Edwin Arlington Robinson Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

(1869–1935)

Among the most gifted of his country’s poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson is also no-
table for the scale and versatility of his work. Yet it is not easy to recall a poem, large
or small, that does not illustrate his painstaking zeal for perfection even in the last de-
tail of structure or phrasing. His perfectionism is not mere fussiness but an intrinsic
discipline of form and meaning. Robinson is truly philosophical, profound in thought
and expression, and given to probing the subtlest areas of human psychology.

Robinson was descended through his mother from Anne Bradstreet, New En-
gland’s first colonial poet. He was born at Head Tide, Maine, on December 22,
1869. His father, aged fifty, had just then retired from business, and the family at
once moved twelve miles down the Kennebec, to Gardiner, the “Tilbury Town” of
his poems.

Robinson had more than the usual handicaps to overcome. Late-born into his
family, he was made conscious, as he grew up, of the example of his materially
successful brothers in a community where such success was taken for granted.
After graduation from high school he spent four difficult years in apparent idle-
ness while reading extensively and laboring steadily at his verse, which editors as
steadily declined to publish.

At the age of twenty-two he entered Harvard University, and he remained for
two years as a special student, principally of philosophy, literature, and languages.
The death of his father in 1893 caused his withdrawal and inaugurated a period of
mental depression. A chronic abscess of his ear for several years kept him in pain,
and he feared he would lose his mind. The family inheritance was greatly reduced
by the panic of 1893. Both his brothers, who had begun so brilliantly, proved un-
stable and then died within a few years, while his mother went into a long and har-
rowing illness. Just before his mother’s death, the serious love affair of his youth
was terminated in sorrow. Thereafter he shyly avoided such entanglements; in any
case, not until he was fifty could he have married on his income as a poet.

His mother’s death relieved him of family responsibility. In 1896 he settled in
New York, and, unable to find a publisher, he had The Torrent and the Night Be-
fore printed at his own expense. The February 1897 Bookman observed that his
verse had the “true fire,” but that “the world is not beautiful to him, but a prison
house.” Robinson’s letter of reply, in the March number, contained a now-famous
appraisal of his view of life. “The world is not a ‘prison house,’” he said, “but a
kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to
spell ‘God’ with the wrong blocks.” The next year he included most of these poems
in his second volume, The Children of the Night (1897), again defraying the costs
of publication. These volumes ushered into the world such “bewildered infants,”
now famous, as Aaron Stark, with “eyes like little dollars,” and Richard Cory, for
whom a bullet was medicine, and Luke Havergal, caught in the web of fate.

After a year in New York he accepted an appointment at Harvard as office sec-
retary to the president but proved wholly unfit for such routine. Back in New York,
while not gregarious, he was far from being such a recluse as is often imagined.
According to Fullerton Waldo, he loved the bustling life of the streets as “Charles
Lamb loved the tidal fullness along the Strand.” For years he lived in Greenwich Vil-
lage, in the then-bohemian area near Washington Square. There he had as intimates

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such writers and staunch friends as Josephine Preston Peabody and William Vaughn
Moody, whom he had known at Harvard, and E. C. Stedman, Percy Mackaye, Her-
mann Hagedorn, Ridgely Torrence, and Daniel Gregory Mason, the composer, who
taught music at Columbia. When Captain Craig finally secured a publisher in 1902,
the poet was for a time spared the knowledge that it had been subsidized, secretly, by
Gardiner friends. The revelation of this, together with the small sale of the volume, in-
creased his desperation during 1903–1904, when he worked as a subway-construction
inspector. Creative work under these circumstances was nearly impossible.

In March 1905, he received his first check in ten years for writing accepted by
a magazine, and within a week there arrived a letter from the president of the
United States. Kermit Roosevelt, whose master at Groton was a Gardiner friend
of the poet’s, had sent his father a copy of The Children of the Night, which the
president had much admired. Now, learning of the poet’s plight, he had him ap-
pointed to a clerkship in the United States Custom House at New York. The salary
was small, but Robinson had once again the time and energy for poetry. By the
end of Roosevelt’s term he had prepared the volume The Town Down the River
(1910), and the president’s influence had secured its publication by Scribner’s.

Although it is reported that for years this notable poet depended in part on
the unobtrusive benefactions of his admirers, he was never again forced to waste
his limited strength to obtain mere subsistence. A studio was provided for him in
New York. After 1911 he spent many summers at the MacDowell Colony at Pe-
terborough, New Hampshire, a retreat for artists, established in memory of Ed-
ward MacDowell. There, through succeeding summers, he completed the longer
works of his second period.

In the Arthurian poems, each the size of a separate volume, Robinson devel-
oped a highly individualized blank verse, lofty in character yet modern in its
speech rhythms, equally adaptable for sustained narrative, dialogue, and dramatic
effects, and for the poet’s characteristic discussion of ideas. His wit is nowhere
seen to better advantage than in his long narratives. It is not dependent on what is
comic in the ordinary sense, but springs from the recognition of essential incon-
gruities at the core of reality and rewards only those who can follow the poet’s
fundamental thinking. The Arthurian poems are faithful to the sources—Malory
and such Continental chroniclers as Wolfram—but the characters have been rein-
terpreted in modern terms. The world of Arthur, in chaos as a result of the greed
and faithlessness of its leadership, corresponded, it seemed to Robinson, to the
condition of things at the time of the First World War. Merlin appeared in 1917,
Lancelot in 1920, and Tristram in 1927.

The poet’s financial rewards increased very slowly, but his first collection, Col-
lected Poems (1921), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and so was The Man Who
Died Twice (1924), a major narrative of fantastic design but great power and moral
significance, on the theme of regeneration. Tristram also won the Pulitzer Prize, and
as a selection of the Literary Guild, a book club, it gave the poet his first large sale.
During the remaining nine years of his life, Robinson’s financial worries were ended.

In his last years Robinson created several long narratives of modern life, be-
ginning with Cavender’s House (1929). These are psychological studies of charac-
ter, all dealing, in various lights, with the nature of human guilt or fidelity, with
the destructiveness of the desire for power or for possession. The Glory of the

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Nightingales (1930) and Matthias at the Door (1931) are the climax of Robin-
son’s criticism of modern life and subtly incorporate the constant symbols of light,
darkness, regeneration, and responsibility that prevail in his poetry from the be-
ginning and reach their highest tragic synthesis in Tristram. Talifer (1933) is a so-
cial comedy of subtlety and brilliant wit, in a vein of meaningful worldliness. King
Jasper (1935), although it shows traces of the fatigue of a dying man, is a cleverly
managed allegory and is interesting as revealing the final phase of the poet’s devel-
oping concept of patrician responsibility in democratic leadership.

The standard edition is Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1921; enlarged editions ap-
peared periodically through 1937. Collections of letters are Selected Letters, compiled by Ridgely Tor-
rence, 1940; Untriangulated Stars: Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson to Harry de Forest Smith,
1890–1905, edited by Denham Sutcliffe, 1947; and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Letters to Edith
Brower, edited by Richard Cary, 1968. Standard biographies were published by Hermann Hagedorn,
1938; and Emery Neff, 1948.

Memoirs and critical studies are Lloyd Morris, The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1923;
Mark Van Doren, Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1927; L. M. Beebe, Edwin Arlington Robinson and the
Arthurian Legend, 1927; Charles Cestre, An Introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1930; R. W.
Brown, Next Door to a Poet, 1937; E. Kaplan, Philosophy in the Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson,
1940; Yvor Winters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1946; Edwin G. Fussell, Edwin Arlington Robinson,
1954; Louis Untermeyer, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Reappraisal, 1963; Chard P. Smith, Where the
Light Falls: A Portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1965; Hoyt C. Franchere, Edwin Arlington Robin-
son, 1968; and Louis Coxe, Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Life of Poetry, 1969. Richard Cary edited
Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1969. Nancy Carol Joyner edited Edwin Arlington Robin-
son: A Reference Guide, 1978.

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Edwin Arlington Robinson Richard Cory © The McGraw−Hill
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EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed, 5
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace: 10
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, 15
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

1897

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EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

Miniver Cheevy

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old 5
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;

The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors; 10

He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,1

And Priam’s2 neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;

He mourned Romance, now on the town, 15
And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,3

Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly

Could he have been one. 20

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;

He missed the medieval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought, 25
But sore annoyed was he without it;

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking; 30

Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

1910

1. Thebes: ancient Greek city, prominent in Greek history and legend. Camelot: legendary site of King
Arthur’s court in the Arthurian romances.
2. King of Troy and the father of the heroes Paris and Hector.
3. Renaissance merchant-princes, rulers of Florence for nearly two centuries, noted equally for their
cruelties and for their benefactions to learning and art.

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ROBERT FROST

(1874–1963)

Among the great American poets since Whitman, Robert Frost is the most univer-
sal in his appeal. His art is an act of clarification, an act which, without simplify-
ing the truth, renders it in some degree accessible to everyone. Frost found his
poetry in the familiar objects and character of New England, but people who have
never seen New Hampshire or Vermont, reading his poems in California or Vir-
ginia, experience their revelation.

It is therefore not surprising that this poet of New England was first recog-
nized in old England and that his boyhood was passed in California. His father, a
journalist of southern extraction, left New Hampshire during the Civil War, and his
professional engagements led him to California. There the poet was born on
March 26, 1874, and was named Robert Lee in memory of the Old Dominion. He
was eleven when his father died and when his mother returned to her people in
Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Amherst, New Hampshire.

Life with relatives proved difficult, so his mother went to teach school in
Salem, New Hampshire. Frost later attended Lawrence High School. On gradua-
tion in 1892 he was one of two valedictorians; the other was Elinor White, whom
he married three years later. Reluctant to accept his grandfather’s support at Dart-
mouth College, Frost did not finish the first semester. Instead he tried himself out
on a country paper, then turned to teaching school. He sent out his verses in quan-
tity after 1890, but only a negligible few were accepted before 1913. Like Robin-
son, he was much ahead of his time.

Faced with disappointment as a poet, his family growing, the young Frost ac-
cepted his grandfather’s assistance and studied at Harvard for two years (1897–
1899), but he concluded that formal study was not the way for him. His good
foundation in the classics is apparent in his extraordinary word sense, in the dis-
ciplined forms of his poetry, and in his pagan delight in nature. His reading of sci-
ence and philosophy has been influential throughout his poetry. But he had a
deep-rooted fear: “They would have made me into a professor, or into a profes-
sional,” he once said.

In 1900, with his grandfather’s help, he procured a farm at Derry, New Hamp-
shire, supporting his family, including four children, by a combination of farming
and teaching. From 1900 to 1911 he taught English at Pinkerton Academy, Derry.
In 1911–1912 he conducted a course in psychology at the State Normal School in
Plymouth. Still he received from American editors the same heartbreaking refusals.

Elinor Frost, a steady source of inspiration, encouraged his instinct for a des-
perate remedy. They sold the farm in 1912 and on the small proceeds went to En-
gland, where the first stirrings of a new poetry movement had been noted. Wishing,
as he says, to live “beneath a thatched roof,” they moved to a small farmstead in
the country. There Wilfred W. Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie were neighbors,
and others of the so-called Georgians, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke, came
as guests. Soon A Boy’s Will (1913) was hailed in England as a work of genuine

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merit. It was followed in 1914 by North of Boston, one of the great volumes of the
twentieth century. Both books were republished in the United States within the
year. At this point, according to a friend, Frost said to his wife, “My book has gone
home; we must go too.” In 1915 they were settled again on a New Hampshire
farm, near Franconia, which suggested the title of Mountain Interval (1916).

In 1916 he read “The Ax-Helve” as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard Uni-
versity. Frost had magnificent qualities as a public reader; his reading tours during
many years made him and his poetry household property and stimulated a popu-
lar interest in poetry. Also in 1916, Frost became “poet in residence” at Amherst
College, where he returned for a time each winter for four years. At various times
he served as lecturer or fellow at Wesleyan, Michigan, Dartmouth, Yale, and Har-
vard. In 1920 he participated in the founding of the Bread Loaf School of English
(Middlebury College, Vermont), and he lectured there many summers. He lived
nearby on his own land at Ripton.

Frost’s later publications appeared at rather long intervals, yet almost every
poem, large or small, is unforgettable. His Selected Poems (1923, revised 1928)
was followed by New Hampshire (1923), which won the Pulitzer Prize. This is
one of his longest poems, but one of his most witty and wise, an anecdotal discus-
sion of the values of life and character, flavored with New England examples. In
1928 he published West-Running Brook, its title poem a complex masterpiece.
Collected Poems first appeared in 1930 and won him his second Pulitzer Prize.
A Further Range (1936) also was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His later volumes of
lyrics are A Witness Tree (1942) and Steeple Bush (1947). A Masque of Reason
(1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947) are dramatic dialogues—discussions of re-
ligious insights and contemporary society.

Few major poets have shown such remarkable consistency as Robert Frost—
and he captures the reader as much by the grandeur of his poetic persona (despite
the sometimes difficult personal relations of the actual poet) as by impeccable
rightness of form and phrase. “Art strips life to form,” he said, and the substance
and the words of his poems coexist in one identity. In language, he sought to catch
what he called the “tones of speech,” but even more successfully than Wordsworth
he pruned the “language really used by men” to achieve a propriety that sponta-
neous speech cannot attain.

For all his descriptive realism, Frost was temperamentally a poet of medita-
tive sobriety. The truths he sought were innate in the heart of humanity and in
common objects. But people forget, and poetry, he said, “makes you remember
what you didn’t know you knew.” A poem is not didactic but provides an imme-
diate experience which “begins in delight, and ends in wisdom”; and it provides
at least “a momentary stay against confusion.” Of man alone or man in society
Frost demands a responsible individualism controlled by an inner mandate, and

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thus his views remind us of the transcendentalism of earlier New Englanders. Like
Thoreau and Emerson, Frost was willing to become a rebel in this cause, and like
them, but so unlike the skeptical poets of his age, he had, he said, only “a lover’s
quarrel with the world.”

The most complete Frost is the Library of America edition of Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays,
1995. An earlier standard edition is The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem,
1969. Selected Prose of Robert Frost was edited by Hyde Cox and E. C. Lathem, 1966.

The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer were edited by Untermeyer in 1963. Lawrance R.
Thompson edited Selected Letters, 1964; and Arnold Grade edited Family Letters of Robert and Elinor
Frost, 1972. A volume of reminiscences is Louis Mertins, Robert Frost: Life and Talks-Walking, 1965.
E. C. Lathem edited Interviews with Robert Frost, 1966, and A Concordance to the Poetry of Robert
Frost, 1971. Frost: A Time to Talk: Conversations and Indiscretions, 1972, was compiled by Robert
Frances. Elaine Barry edited Robert Frost on Writing, 1973. E. C. Lathem and Lawrance Thompson
edited early articles in Robert Frost: Farm-Poultryman, 1981. William R. Evans edited letters in Robert
Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship, 1981.

Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915, 1966; Robert Frost: The Years of
Triumph, 1915–1938, 1970; and Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963, 1977 (this last volume
with R. H. Winnick) constitute a definitive life by Frost’s designated biographer. Much kinder to Frost,
however, is William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, 1984. Edward Connery Lathem,
Robert Frost: A Biography, 1981, is a one-volume abridgment of Thompson’s three volumes. See also
Elizabeth S. Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence, 1960; Jean Gould, Robert Frost * * *,
1964; Louis Mertins, Robert Frost * * *, 1965; John Evangelist Walsh, Into My Own: The English
Years of Robert Frost, 1912–1915, 1988; and Jeffrey Meyers, Robert Frost: A Biography, 1996.

Early biographical and critical studies are G. B. Munson, Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and
Good Sense, 1927; Sidney Cox, Robert Frost: Original “Ordinary Man,” 1929; Caroline Ford, The
Less Traveled Road: A Study of Robert Frost, 1935; Lawrance R. Thompson, Fire and Ice: The Art and
Thought of Robert Frost, 1942; Sidney Cox, Swinger of Birches, 1957; Reginald L. Cook, The Dimen-
sions of Robert Frost, 1958.

Recent criticism includes Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost * * *, 1963; J. F. Lynan, The
Pastoral Art of Robert Frost, 1964; Radcliffe Squires, The Major Themes of Robert Frost, 1963; Philip
L. Gerber, Robert Frost, 1966; Reginald L. Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice, 1975; Richard Poirier,
Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, 1977; John C. Kemp, Robert Frost and New England: The Poet as
Regionalist, 1979; James L. Potter, The Robert Frost Handbook, 1980; John Evangelist Walsh, Into My
Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1988; George Monteiro, Robert Frost and the New England
Renaissance, 1988; and Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott, Homage to Robert Frost,
1996.

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Robert Frost Mending Wall © The McGraw−Hill
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ROBERT FROST

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing: 5
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 10
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go. 15
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 20
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across 25
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it 30
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 35
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 40

142 American Literature Since the Civil War

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He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” 45

1914

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Robert Frost The Ax−Helve © The McGraw−Hill
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ROBERT FROST

The Ax-Helve

I’ve known ere now an interfering branch
Of alder catch my lifted ax behind me.
But that was in the woods, to hold my hand
From striking at another alder’s roots,
And that was, as I say, an alder branch. 5
This was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day
Behind me on the snow in my own yard
Where I was working at the chopping-block,
And cutting nothing not cut down already.
He caught my ax expertly on the rise, 10
When all my strength put forth was in his favor,
Held it a moment where it was, to calm me,
Then took it from me—and I let him take it.
I didn’t know him well enough to know
What it was all about. There might be something 15
He had in mind to say to a bad neighbor
He might prefer to say to him disarmed.
But all he had to tell me in French-English
Was what he thought of—not me, but my ax,
Me only as I took my ax to heart. 20
It was the bad ax-helve some one had sold me—
“Made on machine,” he said, plowing the grain
With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran
Across the handle’s long drawn serpentine,
Like the two strokes across a dollar sign. 25
“You give her one good crack, she’s snap raght off.
Den where’s your hax-ead flying t’rough de hair?”
Admitted; and yet, what was that to him?

“Come on my house and I put you one in
What’s las’ awhile—good hick’ry what’s grow crooked, 30
De second growt’ I cut myself—tough, tough!”

Something to sell? That wasn’t how it sounded.

“Den when you say you come? It’s cost you nothing.
To-naght?”

As well tonight as any night.

Beyond an over-warmth of kitchen stove 35
My welcome differed from no other welcome.
Baptiste knew best why I was where I was.
So long as he would leave enough unsaid,

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I shouldn’t mind his being overjoyed
(If overjoyed he was) at having got me 40
Where I must judge if what he knew about an ax
That not everybody else knew was to count
For nothing in the measure of a neighbor.
Hard if, though cast away for life with Yankees,
A Frenchman couldn’t get his human rating! 45

Mrs. Baptiste came in and rocked a chair
That had as many motions as the world:
One back and forward, in and out of shadow,
That got her nowhere; one more gradual,
Sideways, that would have run her on the stove 50
In time, had she not realized her danger
And caught herself up bodily, chair and all,
And set herself back where she started from.
“She ain’t spick too much Henglish—dat’s too bad.”
I was afraid, in brightening first on me, 55
Then on Baptiste, as if she understood
What passed between us, she was only feigning.
Baptiste was anxious for her; but no more
Than for himself, so placed he couldn’t hope
To keep his bargain of the morning with me 60
In time to keep me from suspecting him
Of really never having meant to keep it.

Needlessly soon he had his ax-helves out,
A quiverful to choose from, since he wished me
To have the best he had, or had to spare— 65
Not for me to ask which, when what he took
Had beauties he had to point me out at length
To insure their not being wasted on me.
He liked to have it slender as a whipstock,
Free from the least knot, equal to the strain 70
Of bending like a sword across the knee.
He showed me that the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without. And there its strength lay 75
For the hard work. He chafed its long white body
From end to end with his rough hand shut round it.
He tried it at the eyehole in the ax-head.
“Hahn, hahn,” he mused, “don’t need much taking down.”
Baptiste knew how to make a short job long 80
For love of it, and yet not waste time either.

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Do you know, what we talked about was knowledge?
Baptiste on his defense about the children
He kept from school, or did his best to keep—
Whatever school and children and our doubts 85
Of laid-on education had to do
With the curves of his ax-helves and his having
Used these unscrupulously to bring me
To see for once the inside of his house.
Was I desired in friendship, partly as some one 90
To leave it to, whether the right to hold
Such doubts of education should depend
Upon the education of those who held them?

But now he brushed the shavings from his knee
And stood the ax there on its horse’s hoof, 95
Erect, but not without its waves, as when
The snake stood up for evil in the Garden,—
Top-heavy with a heaviness his short,
Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down
And in a little—a French touch in that. 100
Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased:
“See how she’s cock her head!”

1917,

1923

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CARL SANDBURG

(1878–1967)

Carl Sandburg’s parents were Swedish immigrants, living at Galesburg, Illinois,
when the boy was born on January 6, 1878. The father was then working in a
railroad construction crew. They were a healthy and affectionate family, though
very poor. At thirteen, Sandburg was obliged to leave school and go to work. For
a time he found employment in Galesburg; then he became a migratory laborer,
roaming from job to job in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. He was at various
times a milkman, a harvest hand, a hotel dishwasher, a barbershop porter, a stage-
hand, a brickmaker, and a sign painter. For a while he was a salesman of stereo-
scopes and the popular stereoscopic views of the day—a profitable employment
and a good education for a poet of the people. In 1898, at the age of twenty, he
settled again in Galesburg to follow the trade of house painter, but the Spanish-
American War excited his interest and he enlisted in the army. During active ser-
vice in Puerto Rico he functioned as correspondent for the Galesburg Evening
Mail, his first newspaper connection.

In eight months he was back in Galesburg, determined to secure a higher edu-
cation. He had been reading hard with this in view, and he was provisionally ad-
mitted at Lombard College, although he might have preferred Knox, across town,
where Lincoln had met Douglas in one of the famous debates of 1858. Young
Sandburg had a good scholastic record, made a serious beginning with his writ-
ing, and became a local celebrity at basketball, but he did not graduate. A few
weeks before the end of his senior year, in 1902, with all his record clear, he sim-
ply disappeared from the scene. For several years he lived as a roving newspaper
reporter. In 1907 he secured an editorial position on a small Chicago paper, and
there he made a connection which led him to Wisconsin as political organizer for
the Social Democrats, a reform party, in 1908. That year he married Lilian Steichen,
sister of the famous artist-photographer Edward Steichen (of whom the poet pub-
lished a pleasing biography in 1929). The young writer, aged thirty, now sought to
establish the more settled pattern that befits a well-married man. In 1910 he se-
cured appointment as secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee, serving for two years.
But he was not interested in a political career. He was a writer, already the master
of his trade as a journalist, although his few poems, published here and there in
newspapers, did not suggest that he had found a subject or a satisfactory poetic
form. He served for a year on the editorial staff of the liberal Milwaukee Leader.
The next year, in 1913, he went to Chicago on an editorial engagement, and soon
he became illustrious among the writers who were fostering a new literature in
that city.

The first of Sandburg’s poems in his characteristic and now-familiar style was
“Chicago,” which appeared, in 1914, in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. The Chicago
Poems of 1916 was followed by Cornhuskers in 1918. That year Sandburg spent
some months in Sweden as correspondent for a Chicago newspaper syndicate and
returned as editorial writer on the Chicago Daily News, a paper of national promi-
nence. He remained with that paper for fifteen years as editorialist, feature writer,
and columnist, retiring in 1933 under pressure of his private literary interests.

By 1920, when the “renaissance” of American literature was gaining momen-
tum, Sandburg had reached the maturity of his power as a poet. He had twice
been recognized by national awards, and his next volume, Smoke and Steel (1920),

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confirmed his position as the poet of the common people confronted with the com-
plexities of the new industrial civilization. He began to give frequent public read-
ings of his own poems and soon emerged as the foremost minstrel of his time by
adding to his programs the performance of American folk songs which he had
long been collecting in his journeys about the country. He popularized the folk
ballad before the radio became an important medium for his successors. His col-
lection The American Songbag (1927; revised and enlarged, 1950), the first popu-
lar compilation of the sort, was enriched by his instinct for the genuine and his
scholarly knowledge of this field. These qualities passed into his own poems, from
Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922) to The People, Yes (1936). The latter is a very
knowing arrangement of American folk speech, folkways, and customs, inter-
preted in language that sensitively combines the flavor of the original with Sand-
burg’s poetic perceptions.

Two other aspects of his career are noteworthy. His books for children began
with Rootabaga Stories (1922), to be followed in 1923 by Rootabaga Pigeons and
in 1930 by Potato Face and Early Moon. The prose stories in these collections are
at a high level, but the poems especially take their place in the distinguished litera-
ture of childhood. More important is his Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
(1926), a classic of biography both for its style and for the literary tact which en-
abled him to remain faithful to the historical record of Lincoln without losing the
American significance of the legendary Lincoln. During the next thirteen years, much
of his spare time was devoted to the historical study that prepared him to complete
his task in 1939, in the four volumes of Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, which
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He concentrated his knowledge of the subject in the
one-volume Abraham Lincoln of 1954, an authoritative and powerful study.

Sandburg also published several books of a topical nature. He was author or
coauthor of three volumes of Lincoln studies. During the Second World War, he
published his commentary on events of the time in Storm over the Land (1942)
and Home Front Memo (1943). His one novel, Remembrance Rock (1950), is a
fictional survey of American history from the colonial period. His considerable in-
fluence on the national culture was recognized by the award of many honorary
degrees and the accolades of learned and literary academies.

His Complete Poems, published in 1950, gave perspective to an accomplish-
ment of great spiritual value to his generation. When he first became known, he was
hailed as an interesting and vigorous curiosity, a journalist of poetry, the form of his
verse being regarded as at most an external device. Now he can be seen as a truly
gifted poet who gave shape and permanence to the phrases, rhythms, and symbols
of the American popular idiom while embodying the common idealism of the peo-
ple in forms often of notable subtlety. He fulfilled Whitman’s prescription for the
poet—“That his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

There is no complete collection of Sandburg’s work. The standard text of the poems is The Complete
Poems of Carl Sandburg, 1950 (revised and expanded, 1970). The earlier volumes have been named in the
text above. Always the Young Strangers, 1952, is autobiographical. The Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg,
edited by Rebecca West in 1926, contains a good selection to that date and a valuable critical introduction
by the editor. Herbert Mitgang edited The Letters of Carl Sandburg, 1968. Margaret Sandburg edited The
Poet and the Dream Girl: The Love Letters of Lilian Steichen and Carl Sandburg, 1987.

Full biographies are Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography, 1991; and North Callahan, Carl
Sandburg: His Life and Works, 1987. Other biographical and critical works include Karl Detzer, Carl
Sandburg: A Study in Personality and Background, 1941; Richard Crowder, Carl Sandburg, 1963;
Hazell Durnell, The America of Carl Sandburg, 1965; North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: Lincoln of Our
Literature, 1969; and Gay Wilson Allen, Carl Sandburg, 1972.

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Carl Sandburg A Fence © The McGraw−Hill
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CARL SANDBURG

A Fence

Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the workmen are beginning
the fence.

The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life out of
any man who falls on them.

As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble and all vagabonds and
hungry men and all wandering children looking for a place to play.

Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death
and the Rain and To-morrow.

1913

1916

“A Fence” from Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg, copyright 1916 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and
renewed 1944 by Carl Sandburg, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

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Carl Sandburg Gone © The McGraw−Hill
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CARL SANDBURG

Gone

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.
Far off

Everybody loved her.
So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold

On a dream she wants. 5
Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.
Nobody knows why she packed her trunk . . . a few old things
And is gone,

Gone with her little chin
Thrust ahead of her 10
And her soft hair blowing careless
From under a wide hat,

Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover.

Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?
Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts? 15

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer.
Nobody knows where she’s gone.

1916

“Gone” from Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg, copyright 1916 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and re-
newed 1944 by Carl Sandburg, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

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Part Introduction A Literature of Social and
Cultural Challenge

© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

A Literature of Social
and Cultural Challenge

DRAMA BETWEEN THE WARS
Between the two world wars American drama became for the first time a widely
recognized instrument of national expression. During the first two decades of the
century, although theater flourished, it relied principally on long-established dra-
matic conventions. Slowly, however, it responded to the new literary climate with
infusions from the experimental and critical drama of such European writers as
Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, George Bernard Shaw,
John Galsworthy, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Quickened by visits of companies
from experimental “art” theaters abroad, popular interest grew to support a vital
little-theater movement that included Eugene O’Neill as the leading experimental-
ist of the Provincetown group in 1916. He soon moved to New York and by 1925
had achieved the dominant stature he retained during the following decade. Con-
stantly experimenting with form, he emphasized a content of psychological analy-
sis and symbolic representation of character. Later Maxwell Anderson attained a
position second to that of O’Neill. His many dramas include social comedies,
problem plays, tragedies in classical form, and experiments in poetic drama. The
little theaters developed regional writers, while Broadway brought to prominence
scores of brilliant new authors and actors and sent an abundance of new plays
touring the country. Social and domestic comedy and the problem play attained
special brilliance in the hands of Rachel Crothers, Philip Barry, George Kelly,
George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Thornton Wilder, Sidney Howard, S. N.
Behrman, Robert Sherwood, and Lillian Hellman. Social protest marked espe-
cially the work of Clifford Odets but was also strong in plays by Elmer Rice, Sid-
ney Kingsley, O’Neill, Anderson, Hellman, Barry, Kaufman, and others.

PRIMITIVISM
Primitivistic influences on modernism, apparent in art and music as well as in lit-
erature, were fed by a burgeoning interest in African art; by a new attention to
African American jazz, gospel songs, and blues; and by celebrations of the art, ar-
chitecture, oral literature, and material folk culture of the American Indian. Inter-
est in the primitive was nurtured as well by an exploding interest in Freudian
psychology and Jungian psychology, with their suggestions of hidden motives and
universal archetypes; the primitive seemed to offer an especially fruitful field for
literary exploration of these concepts. Assuming that basic truths of human be-
havior are best observed where conditions are least inhibited by refinements and
sophistication, authors interested in character analysis rushed to strip away the
veneer of society in search of primitive support for naturalistic or deterministic in-
terpretations of life, as O’Neill did, for example, in The Emperor Jones (1921),

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The Hairy Ape (1922), and other plays. Freudian techniques authorized the use of
materials that had been taboo, a use dramatically illustrated by James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922), which reveals the aberrant images in the streams of consciousness
of the central characters. O’Neill, Robinson Jeffers, and William Faulkner were
the three most successful of many American authors of the period who explored
the subconscious as a means of characterization and drew on concepts of primi-
tivism to shape their works. Violence, the age declared, is also primitive, and so is
the untrammeled expression of sex, as these appeared in earlier works by Norris
and London and in succeeding works of Ernest Hemingway, Jeffers, Faulkner, Er-
skine Caldwell, and John Steinbeck.

It is not necessary for primitivism to be dark or depressing, though it is often
turned so by the ache of nostalgia. The combination of the primitive with the pic-
turesque provides much of the charm of balladry and other folk arts, and the pe-
riod between the world wars was immensely fruitful for collectors of white and
black American folk songs and tales and of Indian legends and lore. Much was
deposited on paper and recordings in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,
D.C., a significant amount was printed in scholarly collections, and a great deal of
black traditional music was distributed on “race records” sold in stores catering
to African Americans in the twenties and thirties. In its less primitive manifesta-
tions, this interest supported the Harlem Renaissance, which itself drew strongly
from black tradition, as in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) and Zora Neale Hurston’s
Mules and Men (1935). Interest in black life supported the Gershwin opera Porgy
and Bess (1935), based on Du Bose Heyward’s novel Porgy (1925).

American Indians profited from this interest as well, writing works that include
Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche’s translations and studies of Omaha and
Osage tribal lore, Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half Blood (1927), John Joseph
Mathews’s Sundown (1934), D’Arcy McNickle’s Surrounded (1936), and Lynn
Riggs’s play The Cherokee Night (1936). Riggs was also the author of the folk
drama Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), the source for the hit musical Oklahoma!

THE ROARING TWENTIES AND THE LOST GENERATION
To the authors of the 1920s, the stupendous totality and horror of a world war
was an inescapable demonstration of the mechanistic theory of history and human
life. The human personality was dwarfed as much by the dehumanizing magni-
tude of modern events as by the obdurate tendency of natural laws to deny hu-
manity a special destiny. Individual identity has been diminishing more intensely
ever since.

The authors who faced the world of the twenties had cause for disillusion-
ment. After the armistice of November 11, 1918, it became apparent in the bick-
ering over the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations that the “war to end
war” was unlikely to achieve that goal. Wilson’s Fourteen Points in 1918 sincerely
represented his idealism, yet the European statesmen who accepted his prelimi-
nary conditions for a peace conference had already made secret agreements to
promote French and British imperialism and to perpetuate the explosive dangers
in European life. American isolationism and selfish provinciality contributed to
the failure of diplomatic initiatives abroad, and, although historians remain di-
vided on the effects of the postwar muddle, the important fact for literary history
is the vast disillusionment of American liberals and writers, which coincided with

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the national extravagance, corruption, and social decadence of the so-called Jazz
Age, during the 1920s. “You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein is famously
reported to have said to the young Hemingway.

Some of the most important literary manifestations of this temper recorded
the revolt of youth. The Roaring Twenties and the age of the “flapper” in America
are memorialized in the early novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the wit and daring
of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry, while Hemingway used the Stein quotation as
an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises (1926), his masterful depiction of an uprooted
and directionless expatriate society in Europe. Inheriting the spiritual perturba-
tions of an earlier generation, and supported by the journalistic fulminations of
H. L. Mencken and others, youth was repelled by the reactionary sham and
hypocrisy on every hand and by the “Red scares,” witch-hunting, and Prohibition
fostered by 100 percent patriots and the new “puritans.”

The general disenchantment of serious writers after World War I was in-
creased by the shocking prevalence of corruption and irresponsibility in both gov-
ernment and private enterprise. In the years that followed 1918, the collapse of
European economies left the United States as an economic bulwark to the world,
but soaring prices, production, and profits fed discontent among labor. The scan-
dals of the Harding administration (1920–1923) recalled the Gilded Age at the
same time that organized crime, thriving on widespread violations of the unpopu-
lar Prohibition laws and the venality of public officials, produced an era of vio-
lence, terror, and moral delinquency. The conservative policies of President
Coolidge (1923–1929) failed to stem the tide of expansion and inflation, until the
stock market crash greeted the Hoover administration. Yet the “lost generation”
was not lost to literature, for the decade of 1919 to 1929 produced a dispropor-
tionate share of the best American literature of the twentieth century. New au-
thors responded to the social and moral confusions in a variety of ways. Those
who thronged to the literary colonies of London, Paris, or Rome absorbed invigo-
rating European influences into their writing and promoted them at home. The
war itself was a vital subject: among older writers, Edith Wharton and Willa
Cather both treated it in novels that were overshadowed by the work of the
younger generation. Personal experience animated John Dos Passos’s One Man’s
Initiation (1917) and Three Soldiers (1921), E. E. Cummings’s Enormous Room
(1922), and Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), and A
Farewell to Arms (1929)—all mixing in different proportions the war’s spiritual,
physical, and emotional consequences. T. S. Eliot was already well known when
The Waste Land (1922) established his greatness and became widely understood
as a dramatic statement of postwar spiritual and moral collapse. Faulkner’s first
novel, Soldier’s Pay (1926), proved a false start but set him on the way to his true
subject, his Mississippi homeland, which he explored in Sartoris and The Sound
and the Fury (both 1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930). For other novelists, a flawed
postwar America proved a fruitful subject. In Main Street (1920) and Babbit
(1922), Sinclair Lewis earned fame as a satirist of bourgeois success and the dull-
ness of small-town culture, while in 1925 Theodore Dreiser, in An American
Tragedy, Dos Passos, in Manhattan Transfer, and Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby,
explored in different ways the sorry ends of a materialistic culture.

The psychological probing of personality, continued by such earlier authors
as Sherwood Anderson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Cather, was augmented

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especially by the heavy Freudianism of the brilliant O’Neill. Between 1919 and
1928 he developed his powerful vein of spiritual symbolism in the plays Anna
Christie, Beyond the Horizon, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Desire under
the Elms, and Strange Interlude. Freudian visions were inescapable also in the
poems of Robinson Jeffers, beginning with Tamar (1924) and Roan Stallion
(1925), and in the mature novels of Faulkner, beginning with The Sound and the
Fury (1929). In the same year, another southerner, Thomas Wolfe, produced in
Look Homeward, Angel the first of a sprawling succession of novels that reflected
the search of a spiritually homeless generation for a sense of unity within a world
that had become too vast, complex, and impersonal.

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
An important part of the general literary and cultural renaissance of the twentieth
century, the sudden blossoming of African American literature known as the
Harlem Renaissance became visible in books such as Claude McKay’s Harlem
Shadows (1922), published in the same year as Eliot’s Waste Land; Jean Toomer’s
Cane (1923), in the same year as Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium; and Countee
Cullen’s Color (1925), in the same year as Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Heming-
way’s In Our Time. Published in 1925 also, Alain Locke’s anthology The New
Negro provided a focal point for the movement, another perspective on the world
of the time to place beside Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s. Other prominent African
American writers who emerged in the 1920s include Jessie Fauset and Langston
Hughes. Arna Bontemps and Zora Neale Hurston, whose books came slightly
later, are also associated with the movement. The Harlem Renaissance proved im-
mensely important for American literature in general, sharing in the hard times
faced by all literature during the Great Depression of the 1930s and reviving in
the relative prosperity of the war years of 1941–1945. After the war, the legacy of
significant achievement gave inspiration to new generations of writers in the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century. Like other cultural flowerings, the Harlem Re-
naissance did not spring from forlorn and barren soil. Rather, the cultural climate
of the post–World War I years provided fertile ground to nurture seeds planted
earlier in the century by African American writers and thinkers such as W. E. B.
Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson and by the rich cultural and personal histo-
ries that had been recorded in print as early as the eighteenth century.

DEPRESSION AND TOTALITARIAN MENACE
Hard-won literary, moral, and spiritual assumptions of the 1920s crashed with
the stock market in 1929. During the Great Depression that followed, the rise of
fascism was manifested in the success of Mussolini and Hitler, while various forms
of socialism continued to flex the muscles of an international movement encour-
aged by the 1917 Russian Revolution. In the United States, economic distress and
ideological unrest prompted a general reappraisal of American values, especially
as they contrasted with the increasing pressures of these polar opposites. During
this period of turmoil, many writers discovered the depths of their loyalty to tra-
ditional American idealism. Archibald MacLeish abandoned his expatriate past;
returned to America, where he published New Found Land (1930) and Conquis-
tador (1932); and gave himself for a decade to the support of liberal initiatives, in-
cluding President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Carl Sandburg, earlier a campaigner for

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reform with the Social Democrats, now confirmed his more celebratory leanings,
writing lovingly The People, Yes (1936) and turning to the completion of his mam-
moth study of Lincoln. Many writers who continued on paths already begun
found their lives and work disrupted in the new circumstances. Most of Fitzger-
ald’s best writing was behind him as he turned to Hollywood for income. Faulkner
also wrote for films, but when his bank account was fat enough, he returned to
Mississippi to write novels. For other established writers, leftist sympathies
emerged as a more important part of mainstream literature, as in Dos Passos’s
great trilogy U.S.A., or signaled a new engagement in political controversies, as in
Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

This was the only period in the United States marked by a formidable pres-
ence of proletarian literature and art. Money lost its glamour except in the es-
capist worlds of movies and popular fiction, while serious writers recorded the
plight of the poor, observed the isolation of the rich, and sermonized. Between
rightist and leftist extremes, most writers chose the left in a time rife with propa-
ganda for the utopian promise of Marxism. Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs
(1929) and Michael Gold’s Jews without Money (1930) served as early models for
later proletarian novels of immigrant poverty, while the decade ended with Stein-
beck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), a reminder of the unprecedented sufferings of
masses of formerly independent farm families with deep roots in the American
soil, and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), a powerful evocation of black frus-
tration and anger. The fate of two novels seems especially emblematic of the time’s
uncertainties: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1936), a portrait of Lower East Side
poverty, remained largely unread until lifted into critical celebrity in the 1960s as
a central work of Jewish American literature; and Meridel Le Sueur’s Girl, com-
pleted in 1939 and now prized as a feminist portrayal of the hardships of women,
remained unpublished until 1978.

Marxist theory, disseminated by the Daily Worker, the New Masses, and other
journals, tinged the nation’s literature but otherwise remained largely academic.
Its influence was soon defeated by the hard facts of Marxist history under Joseph
Stalin, which rewrote the Soviet socialist ideal as a totalitarian dictatorship distin-
guished by the brutality of its purges of all forms of dissent. Elsewhere, totalitar-
ian dictatorships suppressed the individual with the ruthless barbarity of moral
anarchy: Mussolini grasped power in Italy in 1922; Hitler usurped the German
chancellorship for fascism in 1933 and declared the Rome-Berlin axis in 1936; he
annexed the Sudetenland, invaded Poland, and silenced Austria in 1938–1939; he
led the chorus proclaiming the “master race” while other forms of totalitarianism
and militarism rose to power in Spain and Japan. Despite Hemingway’s title, the
tolling of these bells was not heard by everyone in America as the world headed
inexorably toward the Second World War.

American involvement in the war was gradual before Pearl Harbor, total af-
terward. Men and women in the armed services, like James Jones and Norman
Mailer, or in defense work, like Harriet Arnow, found in these years material for
major works published after the end of hostilities. Hemingway, John Hersey, Stein-
beck, Caldwell, and other established writers served their country as war corre-
spondents; and two women, Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer, and Martha
Gellhorn, a journalist and novelist, brought to their depictions of frontline com-
bat formidable skills already sharply honed in the Depression years. Writers on

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the home front scripted patriotic movies and brought to Broadway a series of top-
ical plays, including Robert Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night (1940), Lillian
Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (1941), Steinbeck’s Moon Is Down (1942), and
Maxwell Anderson’s Candle in the Wind (1941), The Eve of Saint Mark (1942),
and Storm Operation (1944). Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947), on war profi-
teering, appeared not long after. In the darkest early days of the war, T. S. Eliot’s
Little Gidding (1942), written from his experience as a block warden during Lon-
don air raids, provided a capstone to his eminent career. As the destruction built
toward its end, Saul Bellow, a great-writer-yet-to-be, published his first novel,
Dangling Man (1944), the story of a man awaiting his draft notice. Bellow’s pro-
tagonist asks, “How should a good man live, what might he do?”—a “how” not
very different in its existential thrust from the “why” posed in Little Gidding. As
an age passed away, another waited to be born.

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History Literature
1922 T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land
Eugene O’Neill
The Hairy Ape
Claude McKay
“America”

James Weldon Johnson
The Book of Negro Poetry

Teapot Dome scandal 1923 Ellen Glasgow
“Jordan’s End”

Robert Frost
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening”

Edna St. Vincent Millay
“What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”

Wallace Stevens
“Bantams in Pine-Woods”
William Carlos Williams
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
E. E. Cummings
“Buffalo Bill’s”
Jean Toomer
Cane
Calvin Coolidge elected president 1924 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
in a landslide “Heliodora”
The Scopes trial 1925 T. S. Eliot
“The Hollow Men”
Amy Lowell
“Meeting-House Hill”
Robinson Jeffers
“Roan Stallion”
Countee Cullen
“Heritage”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway
“Big Two-Hearted River”
1926 Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises
Archibald MacLeish
“Ars Poetica”

First talking movie, The Jazz Singer 1927 John Crowe Ransom
Charles Lindbergh flies the first “The Equilibrists”

successful solo transatlantic flight
Stock market crashes 1929 William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury
Thomas Wolfe
“An Angel on the Porch”
Katherine Anne Porter
“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”
1930 Allen Tate
“Ode to the Confederate Dead”
Hart Crane
The Bridge
John Dos Passos
The 42nd Parallel

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History Literature
Scottsboro defendants arrested 1931 Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat
Nor Drink”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Babylon Revisited”
William Faulkner
“That Evening Sun”

Franklin D. Roosevelt elected 1932 Willa Cather
president in a landslide victory “Neighbour Rosicky”
over Hoover

Prohibition repealed by the 1933
Twenty-first Amendment

First “New Deal” legislation

1934 William Carlos Williams
“This Is Just to Say”

Roosevelt initiates second “New 1935
Deal” legislation

Social Security Act passed

The Golden Gate Bridge opens 1937 John Dos Passos
U.S.A.

Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God

New Deal ends 1938 John Steinbeck
“The Chrysanthemums”

Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact 1939
shocks the world

World War II begins

Germany launches a blitzkrieg 1940 Ernest Hemingway
against the Low Countries and France For Whom the Bell Tolls

Richard Wright
Native Son

Woody Guthrie
“This Land Is Your Land”

On December 7, Japan attacks 1941 Eudora Welty
Pearl Harbor; within days of “A Memory”
Pearl Harbor, the United States
is also at war with Germany
and Italy

Battle of Midway 1942 William Faulkner
Soviets defend Stalingrad Go Down, Moses
The internment of Japanese

Americans

Allied forces invade Sicily 1943

D-Day: Allies invade Normandy 1944
Battle of the Bulge

On April 12, Roosevelt dies 1945 Caroline Gordon
U.S. drops atomic bombs on “The Ice House”

Hiroshima and Nagasaki Richard Wright
United Nations founded Black Boy
Ho Chi Minh unifies Vietnam Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie
Czeslaw Milosz

“In Warsaw”

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Edna St. Vincent Millay Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2003

Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892–1950)

R
Encouraged by her mother and two sisters, Millay grew up with the idea of herself as a writer;
she had her first poem printed in St. Nicholas, a national children’s magazine, when she was twelve.
In 1912 she became celebrated because the Lyric Year gave its annual award to an established author,
while a number of prominent critics enthusiastically preferred her “Renascence,” a reflective poem
of spiritual penetration and lyric beauty.

Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, and grew up in nearby Camden. A family friend supplied
the tuition for her to attend first Barnard College and then Vassar College; she graduated in 1917
and the same year published her first collection of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems.

After graduation she moved to Greenwich Village; beautiful, talented, and independent,
she seemed the very personification of the woman of the Jazz Age. With irreverence she attacked
conventional notions of female behavior in poems that spoke of traveling “back and forth all night
on the ferry” or cynically pretended to forget “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed.” A Few Figs from
Thistles (1920), her second collection, was followed by the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Harp-Weaver
and Other Poems (1923). Associated with the Provincetown Players, Millay wrote several plays;
among them were Aria da Capo (1920) and The King’s Henchman (1927), which was set to music
by Deems Taylor and produced by the Metropolitan Opera Company.

After her 1923 marriage to Eugen Boissevain, she settled at Steepletop, her farm in Austerlitz,
New York, where she wrote some of her finest work. Later collections include The Buck in the Snow
and Other Poems (1928), Fatal Interview (1931), Wine from These Grapes (1934), and Conversation
at Midnight (1937).

Appalled by the storm clouds of fascism forming over Europe, Millay joined Archibald MacLeish,
Stephen Vincent Benét, and many others who called upon writers to oppose the growing tyranny.
Although it is not her best work, the writing of this period—including Huntsman, What Quarry?
(1939), Make Bright the Arrows (1940), and The Murder of Lidice (1942)—is sincere and often politically
effective.

During the last decade of her life, Millay published less in magazines, and no new collections
were printed. The Collected Poems, edited by her sister and literary executor Norma Millay, appeared
posthumously.

A major portion of her best work may be found in Collected Sonnets, 1941, and Collected Lyrics, 1943. A posthumous “collection of new poems,”
edited by Norma Millay, was entitled Mine the Harvest, 1954. Selected Poems, edited by Colin Falck, appeared in 1991. The Letters of Edna St.
Vincent Millay, edited by Allan Ross Macdougall, appeared in 1952.

Biographical and critical studies are Elizabeth Atkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Times, 1936; Vincent Sheean, The Indigo Bunting: A Memoir
of Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1951; Toby Shafter, Edna St. Vincent Millay: America’s Best-loved Poet, 1957; Miriam Gurko, Restless Spirit: The Life of
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1962; Norman A. Brittin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1967 (revised, 1982); and Jean Gould, The Poet and Her Book: A
Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1969.

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Edna St. Vincent Millay [What Lips My Lips Have
Kissed, and Where, and
Why]

© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

[What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why]1

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply, 5
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, 10
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

1923

© 1923, 1951 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. From Collected Poems. Harper-
Collins. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor.

1. This Millay sonnet here is among the many published in such volumes as The Harp-Weaver (1923),
Fatal Interview (1931), and Mine the Harvest (1954). The text is from Collected Poems, 1956.

160 American Literature Since the Civil War

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Edna St. Vincent Millay [Those Hours When Happy
Hours Were My Estate]

© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2007
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

[Those Hours When Happy Hours Were My Estate]

Those hours when happy hours were my estate,—
Entailed, as proper, for the next in line,
Yet mine the harvest, and the title mine—
Those acres, fertile, and the furrow straight,
From which the lark would rise—all of my late 5
Enchantments, still, in brilliant colours, shine,
But striped with black, the tulip, lawn and vine,
Like gardens looked at through an iron gate.
Yet not as one who never sojourned there
I view the lovely segments of a past 10
I lived with all my senses, well aware
That this was perfect, and it would not last:
I smell the flower, though vacuum-still the air;
I feel its texture, tough the gate is fast.

1954

© 1954, 1982 by Norma Millay Ellis. From Collected Poems. HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, [Those Hours When Happy Hours Were My Estate] 161