AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--2022--MAY--19th CENTURY AMERICAN AUTHORS

There’s a lot to be said about American literature in the 19th Century. I won’t undertake to present a full two-semester survey course, but maybe I can hit the highlights.

The 1800s are when the first real novels began to appear, when “American” became a term meant to distinguish the literature of the former colonies from the style and conventions of British masters of the mother tongue. Literacy was increasing, and the industrial revolution made it easier to find time for “recreational” reading. Science was advancing, and for better or worse, was becoming popularized. There was that mid-century upheaval when the future of the country hung in the balance and a peculiar institution was abolished. Naturalism, realism, romanticism, Transcendentalism, individualism, spiritualism, regionalism----all these "isms" or movements were promoted through the creative powers of 19th century writers and thinkers on the North American continent.



Poe, Twain, Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Stowe, Holmes, the Alcotts, Dreiser, Crane---big names we all know, and whose work we are probably at least casually acquainted with—wrought tales of adventure and fantasy, the first detective stories, novels that explored social issues and exposed uniquely American political shenanigans, all populated by non-conformist characters who spoke a wide variety of dialects, in settings filled with local color. There was poetry as big as all outdoors and as finite as a blade of grass. This was also when the first slave narratives began to be published; when fictional, historical and autobiographical works of African Americans, Native Americans and other minorities saw print for the first time;



when the rights and treatment of women began to be a common theme in fiction.



Authors like

George Copway,


Maria Ruiz de Burton,


John Rollin Ridge,

Abraham Cahan, William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, Ida Wells, and Edward Bellamy are lesser known now, but all fundamentally contributed to that Thing we call American Literature.

This month will be a free-for-all. Revisit one of your old favorite authors, sample someone you never heard of before, catch up on an American classic that has so far eluded you….march to the drummer you hear, but please share the beat with the rest of us.

How about James D. Dana and The Geological Story?

>2 m.belljackson: Of course, and Richard Henry Dana, Jr. as well!

Some great choices and I would have normally plumped for Cooper as he is much maligned and not popular enough to get his own month!
Likely to be Poe for me though as his stuff is short and I am overcommitted as always this month!

>4 PaulCranswick: Welcome, Paul. I'm afraid I feel about Cooper as our distinguished member RD feels about Dickens. But if you love him, please feel free to tell us all why!

>5 laytonwoman3rd: I have only read Last of the Mohicans as a boy, Linda, so I cannot really comment on his qualities but I do recall enjoying the story in my youth.

>6 PaulCranswick: Well, maybe you'd like to read what Mark Twain thought of Cooper. It will satisfy the challenge, might make you chuckle, and explains a lot about my contrary feelings!

>3 laytonwoman3rd: While Two Years Before The Mast was definitely intriguing, it was a long two years.

James Dwight Dana offers some soothing and often surprising words in The Geological Story:

"The elements of beauty are everywhere."

Every grain of sand "...is a fragment of a crystal."

"On commencing a rapid descent..."

(So far as I have read, he also states that glaciers "melt," not that they "retreat!")

I already have Two Years Before the Mast slated to read this month, so it is fortuitous timing on my part :)

I'm planning to read Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis.

>7 laytonwoman3rd:

"its English a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that."

Typical Twain! I would add to that though that not all of Mr. Twain's writings were wonderful or easily readable, though most of it was pretty good.

The classic that's eluded me is Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables, which I hope to read this month. I also have Bellamy's Looking Backward, which sounds interesting.

A couple of women to add to your list:

Kate Chopin: The Awakening and most (if not all) of her short stories were written pre-1900.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper is an unforgettable short story written before 1900, along with about half of her other works.

I will certainly reread some Charlotte Perkins Gillman, as The Yellow Wallpaper and other stories is to hand.

I'll probably dip in and put of this through the year. I'd like to read some f the 'new to me' authors too. And I have the recent biography of Frederick Douglass too.

I have a new-to-me author, Martha Finley, that I've been planning to try, perhaps I can do it this month with Elsie Dinsmore.

>12 kac522:, >13 kac522:, >14 Caroline_McElwee: I have not read that classic Hawthorne either! And I have The Yellow Wallpaper on hand. My list is by no means comprehensive....just a few representative names, and I'm thrilled to have people make additional suggestions.

The Library of America covers the 19th century very well, and I could probably read exclusively from them for a looooong time without running out of choices.

>11 PaulCranswick: Twain, like so many authors popular in their own time, wrote a fair amount of pot-boiling dreck. No doubt about his genius, though. In my family, he has always been considered very near the top of all lists. He was my brother's favorite author, and my husband did independent studies on him in college.

I'll be reading Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville. It's very short, unlike Moby-Dick, which is the only Melville I've ever read. That might give me time to pick up something else

>17 AnneDC: I love that one! Billy Budd is another short one, and interesting, too, in its own way.

>17 AnneDC: I could re-read Bartleby, but I prefer not to.

I think I might finally get The Country of the Pointed Firs read this month. I've also been meaning to re-read both Huck Finn and The Scarlet Letter but I'll prioritize the Jewett.

>20 katiekrug: Oh, I enjoyed that one quite a lot, being a Maine coast vacationer for a lot of years.

>19 laytonwoman3rd: LOL
>20 katiekrug: I've been meaning to read Jewett forever. I may have read a short story once upon a time, but don't remember it. I'll need to remedy that.

>22 kac522: ⭐

>1 laytonwoman3rd: Oh. Who are these people? Lemme guess. Ah...19th century American authors. Am I right? Sorry, but photos of people without identifications makes me buggy. I especially love photos of, say, four individuals with a caption naming two of them without saying which two.

Okay, Sorry.

I was thinking May was Gish Jen month, and I actually have one of her books. I will save it.

>24 weird_O: Okay, if you look very closely, the top picture has the names in tiny print in the ovals.

But for the African Americans (except Frederick Douglass, top center) and women, I'm clueless, too.

>24 weird_O: OK, here's what I can do for you.
As Kathy @kac22 noticed, the top photos are ID'd--from 12 o'clock we have Irving, Bryant, Lowell, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes and in the center, Longfellow.

The African Americans are Top L-R Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper; Middle L-R William Wells Brown, Sojourner Truth and I Dunno; Bottom Center is W. E. B. DuBois. I don't know who the women are. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

The women: Harriet Beecher Stowe is far right top; Harriet Jacobs appears again at bottom left, and the woman on the bottom right is Florence Bascom. The other two are so far unidentified. Again, help if you can.

>25 kac522: I did belatedly notice the names, Kathy. Thanks for pointing that out.

At this moment, I'm thinking about Washington Irving (the fellow at the top of the first image). I have three of his books. I did think about Richard Harding Davis, son of Rebecca Harding Davis, who attended Lehigh for three years. Still a possibility.

>1 laytonwoman3rd:, >24 weird_O:, >26 laytonwoman3rd: Top left woman:

>28 kac522: Right you are.

>1 laytonwoman3rd: Bottom right African-American woman is Mrs Jarena Lee:



Read about her here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarena_Lee

This is almost as fun as those LT scavenger hunt things.

>1 laytonwoman3rd: African American woman, bottom row, left is Elizabeth Keckly (Keckley), who was Mary Todd Lincoln's personal maid, and wrote a memoir about her time in the White House:



More information about her on The White House Historical Association webpage here:

https://www.whitehousehistory.org/from-slavery-to-the-white-house-the-extraordin...

>30 kac522:, >31 kac522: Fascinating! I may have to incorporate a little puzzle into the challenge from time to time! I had heard about Mary Lincoln's seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley, before, now that you refresh my memory.

Filling in some names in the African-American photo grid...

As Linda pointed out, the lady at top right is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. I didn't know who she was, but I found out at https://api.poets.org

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born on September 24, 1825, in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised by her aunt and uncle. A poet, novelist, and journalist, she was also a prominent abolitionist and temperance and women's suffrage activist. She traveled to multiple states to lecture and give speeches about these issues.

In May 1866, she delivered the speech, "We Are All Bound Up Together" at the National Women's Rights Convention in New York, sharing the stage with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. "You white women speak here of rights," she said. "I speak of wrongs."

With Margaret Murray Washington, the wife of Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, and other prominent African American women, she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its vice president in 1897.

She authored numerous books, including the poetry collections Forest Leaves (1845) and Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (Merrihew & Thompson, 1854), the novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Garrigues Brothers,1892)), and several short stories. Before marrying Fenton Harper, a widower, with whom she had a daughter, she worked at Union Seminary in Ohio, where she taught sewing.

She died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1911.

Paul Laurence Dunbar, middle row, right.

Last woman (middle picture): Sarah Orne Jewett--this is a different shot, but I believe the same person (same dress, setting):



And more about her here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Orne_Jewett

>21 laytonwoman3rd:, >20 katiekrug: One of my all-time favorite reads. Yay for reading one of my sapphic ancestresses, too!

It might be time to break out Joseph and His Friend at last, since I'm looking for gay stuff to blog for June.

>36 richardderus: You'll read the e-version, I assume? I understand the reprint has some legibility issues.

>35 kac522: That's her, I'm sure.

The free online SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE now features suffragist and scientific illustrator

Serena Katherine "Violet" Dandridge, 1878-1956.

>37 laytonwoman3rd: Oh, yes indeed! And I have two different ones in case one of them is flawed as well.

>30 kac522: >31 kac522: >35 kac522: Excellent work, Kathy!
------------------
In my surfing using Google Images, I found myself at a Wiki page chockablock with info on the color image in >1 laytonwoman3rd:. The source of the image is a book, A Century of American Literature (no Touchstone), published in 1901. The image is the frontispiece. The whole book has been digitized and can be found at https://archive.org/details/centuryofamerica00bird/mode/1up?view=theater

     

Many authors are listed and pictured, though as you would expect, POC aren't included. A plethora of excerpts are reproduced.

I love how I've turned everyone into detectives!

I think I'll start my 19th century excursion by reading a few of Lafcadio Hearn's New Orleans sketches. Now before everyone starts waving Greek and Japanese flags around, and disputing his status as an American author, I will concede that he only spent about a decade in this country, and never became a U. S. citizen. His work has been published in the Library of America, fundamentally, I think because he is credited with enlightening the U.S. about Japanese culture, and because of his remarkable journalism published in newspapers in Cincinnati and New Orleans between 1875 and 1886.

Lots of interesting possibilities on the AAC this month! Well, I had determined to read a female author, and the first 19th century American author of the female persuasion that came to mind was Emily Dickinson. I love reading poetry, and I've never read Dickinson, so that's my choice for this month. Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson.

>42 klobrien2: Oh, I say you're in for a treat. I love Emily Dickinson...she's so pithy, and a little subversive.

In AAC reading adventures, I'm delving into writers on the cusps of the 19th century. Washington Irving was born in 1783. The book I'm reading, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., was published in 1819. As the 19th century was drawing to a close, Richard Harding Davis, born in 1864, was enjoying great success as a war correspondent, journalist, and short story writer. His life and work carried into the 20th century. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1916.

RHD's writings are pretty much out of print, so I'm being goaded into exploring ebooks. Oh my. I may explore the used book marketplace for print editions. Project Gutenberg has more than 50 titles available for free download in four or five formats, but I miss the trappings of a professionally published print book. Old dogs, new tricks, yahda yahda.

Richard Harding Davis in 1890 

>44 weird_O: You can do it, Bill. Especially with shorter works.

I've just read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper for the first time. My daughter said "Why???" and asserted that everyone she's ever heard mention the story says they were required to read it in high school, and hated it. Well, I don't know what I would have made of it as a teenager, but I found it utterly brilliant now, as psychologically eerie as anything Poe has given us.

>45 laytonwoman3rd: I believe I first read The Yellow Wallpaper in college many, many moons ago. It was disturbing at the time, but I don't think I understood all the references.

I re-read it in 2020 with a Virago group discussion led by Liz (https://www.librarything.com/topic/323525). I think there was a good discussion, but it usually is with Liz. Had a more personal reaction, especially when I started thinking about how I felt post-partum after the birth of my second son. Certainly not this extreme, but I did initially feel a bit distant.

>45 laytonwoman3rd: It seems cruel to me to make The Yellow Wallpaper required reading for teens. I read it in my 30s and spent shuddering sleepless nights at the unbelievably awful way she was treated.

>45 laytonwoman3rd: Every one read it is school? Not in those good old days when required reads were all by white men.

>46 kac522:, >47 richardderus: I'm surprised I had never encountered it before the Virago group brought it to my attention, shortly after I joined LT. (That's been a long time, and the book has been on my shelf for over a decade.) I have often thought that there are standard "reads" in high school curricula that were never intended to be understood by that age group. I had certainly never heard of the "baby blues" even in college, so that element would have soared right past me.

>48 quondame: Well, my daughter herself did not read it in high school, I guess--I don't think she's read it at all YET. But I'm assuming she's referring to her own contemporaries when she says "everyone she's ever heard mention it".

Just finished The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896). Our unnamed narrator, a woman writer of a certain age, spends a summer in a small fishing village, Dunnet Landing, on the Maine coast. She introduces us to the wonderful and varied characters in the town, mostly through the eyes of her landlady Mrs Todd.

Having just completed a tense page-turner, this serene and lovely little collection of pieces was exactly the right book at the right time for me. It also reminded me in a way of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, where women seem to be the center of village life. So glad to have found this quiet American classic, full of simple truths and wisdom. My edition included 4 additional pieces that were all set in Dunnet Landing.

Just an update; I am still reading 19th century stuff, but for now they are secondary. I've elected, as noted in >44 weird_O:, to read a Washington Irving tome called The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. because "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" are in this collection. The former is excellent (I have read it), and Sleep Hollow awaits me. What sandwiches Rip is mostly sleep inducing. Well, you don't know until you taste it. Eh what?

The second writer I'm reading is Richard Harding Davis. I mentioned that Project Gutenberg has more than 50 RHD titles for free download. I've downloaded and read two of his short fiction pieces—In the Fog and The Scarlet Car. Now I'm awaiting delivery of a set of his works published in 1911 by Scribner's. End of the week, probably.

While I was there (at PG), I downloaded a book by RHD's mother, Rebecca Harding Davis, titled Life in the Iron Mills.

>51 weird_O: The Washington Irving sounds great--I'm going to hunt down a copy. I'll be interested to see how the Richard Harding Davis goes for you!

Karen O

>19 laytonwoman3rd: Haha! Only now that I've read Bartleby do I understand your comment.

In addition to Bartleby the Scrivener I read Civil Disobedience by Thoreau (trying to puzzle out how his ideas would play in contemporary times--would anyone interpret non-payment of taxes as a moral statement? Would anyone besides the IRS notice?) and am in the middle of Ida B. Wells' autobiography, Crusade for Justice. Although this wasn't published until 1970 it seems to fit. I'm also reading a little Emily Dickinson but it won't amount to a book (I have a book of collected poems that's more than 700 pages long.)

>53 AnneDC: "...I understand your comment."
My work here is done!

>48 quondame: I did not read it until I was an adult - I had never even heard of The Yellow Wallpaper until I read about it here on LT!

>55 alcottacre: Yes, this was where I heard about it too.

>56 quondame: To say that LT has broadened my reading horizons is something of an understatement.

Finished my read of The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, with an introduction by Billy Collins and commentary by Conrad Aiken. And >53 AnneDC:, this is a "selected" not a "collected" volume, so it's just over 300 pages.

I'd come across many of the poems before in my life, but didn't realize how many of them dealt with time/eternity! My favorites were the poems dealing with love and nature.

Here's a poem from the "Life" section, number XXI:

He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!

Another good read for American Authors Challenge! I'm looking forward to June -- John Dos Passos. I think I'll be reading Manhattan Transfer.

Karen O.

>57 alcottacre: I would have said that mine were always pretty broad, but now they are certainly more deeply broad and well broad-er-er. Though I'm still mostly F&SF, especially under stress.

>59 quondame: I tend to regress to cozy mysteries when I am under stress, so I completely understand that.

I found this quote in a book by Madeleine L'Engle that I thought might be of interest:

"One decade in the nineteenth century produced Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, Emerson's English Traits and Representative Men, Melville's Moby Dick, Thoreau's Walden, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass and - reminds the New York Times - 'none of these achiever more than a modest sale.' "

And yet they are still read today!

I finished Joseph and his Friend...the review's here but lt's just say I think of it as an historical document not a pleasure read.

>62 richardderus: One appreciates the sacrifice, RD.

>61 alcottacre: I'd love to see current comprehensive sales figures for Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass!

If you're ready to take on the modernism of the 20th century now, the June thread featuring John Dos Passos is up.

>63 laytonwoman3rd: Sacrifice, heh...no, just stubborn refusal to waste effort already expended.

I'm behind again. But I might just squeeze The Yellow Wallpaper in Mon/Tues.

I didn't get to Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables this month. I just finished A Tale of Two Cities, and I think I need a break from stories about revenge, guilt and "sins of the fathers." I do plan to get to it later this year.

On the other hand, Sarah Orne Jewett (>50 kac522:) was a delight and am so glad I read it.

>66 Caroline_McElwee: That single story is well worth reading, Caroline. I'm still working my way through the collection, many of which are really just short vignettes, hardly "stories" at all.

>65 richardderus: DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING, RD:
>67 kac522: Good for you for reading A Tale of Two Cities. I thought I'd revisit it a couple years ago (I read it in high school), and I simply could not get going. I usually like Dickens fairly well but in this one I thought his sentences were clunky and sometimes incomprehensible.

>68 laytonwoman3rd: Yes I love most of Dickens, but this never resonated with me. This time I listened to it on audiobook, read by my favorite narrator, Simon Vance. It seemed more approachable, but it was still way too dramatic and frankly, confusing. I'll just never get on with the French Revolution. However, even if it will never be a favorite Dickens, I have to admit that ATOTC has the best ending of any of his novels, and he does do a masterful job of combining the real events with his storyline.

I did read both Washington Irving and Richard Harding Davis, as noted in >44 weird_O: and >51 weird_O:. Here's a report (probably overlong, but there you are) on the complete book by Davis that I read.


The Notes of a War Correspondent by Richard Harding Davis Finished 5/15/22.

The Weird Book Report^TM  

Richard Harding Davis was a journeyman writer in the late 19th century and into the 20th; he produced journalism, short stories, novels, and plays. He worked as an editorial executive for several newspapers and magazines. Before he died of a heart attack in 1916, several of his stories were adapted to the silver (but silent) screen. Despite his versatility and productivity, he isn't remembered for any particular outstanding piece. But he is the iconic turn-of-the-century war correspondent, covering the Cuban-Spanish War in 1896, the Greek-Turkish War in 1897, the Spanish-American War (1898), second Boer War of 1899–1902, and the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905. The Notes of a War Correspondent includes a miscellany of reports from each of those five wars.

Of the battle of Velestinos during the Greek-Turkish war, Davis reported:

The Turks had made three attacks on Velestinos on three different days, and each time had been repulsed. A week later, on the 4th of May, they came back again, to the number of ten thousand, and brought four batteries with them, and the fighting continued for two more days. This was called the second battle of Velestinos…

He reported on the sounds of battle, of the unpredictability and treacherousness of war in the trenches, and the bravery and stoicism of the combatants:

Then there began a concert which came from just overhead—a concert of jarring sounds and little whispers. The “shrieking shrapnel,” of which one reads in the description of every battle, did not seem so much like a shriek as it did like the jarring sound of telegraph wires when some one strikes the pole from which they hang…After a few hours we learned by observation that when a shell sang overhead it had already struck somewhere else, which was comforting…The bullets were much more disturbing; they seemed to be less open in their warfare, and to steal up and sneak by, leaving no sign, and only to whisper as they passed. They moved under a cloak of invisibility, and made one feel as though he were the blind man in a game of blind-man’s-buff…
   If a man happened to be standing in the line of a bullet he was killed and passed into eternity, leaving a wife and children, perhaps, to mourn him. “Father died,” these children will say, “doing his duty.” As a matter of fact, father died because he happened to stand up at the wrong moment, or because he turned to ask the man on his right for a match, instead of leaning toward the left, and he projected his bulk of two hundred pounds where a bullet, fired by a man who did not know him and who had not aimed at him, happened to want the right of way. One of the two had to give it, and as the bullet would not, the soldier had his heart torn out…
   Toward mid-day you would see a man leave the trench with a comrade’s arm around him, and start on the long walk to the town where the hospital corps were waiting for him. These men did not wear their wounds with either pride or braggadocio, but regarded the wet sleeves and shapeless arms in a sort of wondering surprise. There was much more of surprise than of pain in their faces, and they seemed to be puzzling as to what they had done in the past to deserve such a punishment.

Davis covered two wars in Cuba, only two years apart. The Cubans fought to free themselves from Spanish rule in 1896. And American forces fought the Spaniards in Cuban (and elsewhere) in 1898. The latter was made famous by Teddy Roosevelt and the troops he commanded, known as the Rough Riders. According to Davis' report, the Battle for San Juan Hill began with a series of military blunders that had "brought seven thousand American soldiers into a chute of death from which there was no escape except by taking the enemy who held it by the throat and driving him out and beating him down…"

Colonel Roosevelt, on horseback, broke from the woods behind the line of the Ninth, and finding its men lying in his way, shouted: “If you don’t wish to go forward, let my men pass.” The junior officers of the Ninth, with their negroes, instantly sprang into line with the Rough Riders, and charged at the blue block-house on the right.
   I speak of Roosevelt first because…he was, without doubt, the most conspicuous figure in the charge…Roosevelt, mounted high on horseback, and charging the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone, made you feel that you would like to cheer…Someone asked one of the officers if he had any difficulty in making his men follow him. “No,” he answered, “I had some difficulty in keeping up with them.”

The entire book is like this. Is it an important read? Nah. But I was entertained by it, and I wouldn't hesitate to say, "Go ahead and read it.