A long short story (or novella to be generous) "The Man without a Country" by Edward Everett Hale is rightly an American classic. It explores the issues raised by patriotism as seen by an American writer in the mid-nineteenth century through a fictional tragedy. It also teaches us something about the history of American attitudes toward identity.

Philip Nolan, a fictional American army officer during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, played a minor role in a historical conspiracy case in which former Vicepresident Aaron Burr 14arguably the first true psychopath in American politics, tried to carve his own empire out the American frontier. Nolan's courtmartial probably did not need to have such a draconian result as it did because of his minor role, but after Nolan stood up and yelled "Damn the United States! I never want to hear her name again!" his judges decided to grant his wish: He was put on a navy ship and was to be kept at sea for the rest of his life, never to hear about or see his country again.

Nolan lived this way for over fifty years. At first he treated his sentence as a lark, a paid cruise around the world, but during all that time, a number of incidents painfully reminded him of his psychological as well as physical imprisonment, and broke him so that he had to rebuild himself in order to maintain his sanity. (Not a small kaffkaesque touch is how even in this paean to American identity there is the recognition that an American government bureaucracy can lose justice between the cracks: after several years, the government no longer remembers Nolan's sentence 14or pretends not to remember; so his punishment goes on because no one ever decides to end it; the govenrment takes the position that Nolan does not exist and yet his punishment is to continue to be carried out.)

Among the reminders of his statelessness is an encounter with a slave ship. Although the United States continued to practice slavery, it outlawed the importation of slaves. This meant that the U.S. Navy was charged with stopping slave ships in the Atlantic. (The British Navy had been doing the same thing for a while before the U.S.) Nolan, as the only man on board able to interpret, helped find out whether the slaves would be willing to be freed on a nearby island; when the slaves began to cry that they wanted to go home to their own countries, Nolan could barely keep himself together; he too wished he could go home; and he persuaded the captain to take the Africans back to Africa.

Evidently, Hale believed 14or perhaps he just expresses the zeitgeist 14in Manifest Destiny (MD), the idea that America should stretch from sea to shining sea and perhaps acquire even more territory than that. His fictional narrator chides the administration of James Madison for not wanting to claim islands in the Pacific, and another character insists that the United States should claim Bermuda. Hale shows how MD was, indeed, a seductive ideology.

Hale's exploration of the meaning of patriotism still stimulates thought about a perennial question, and does so in an entertaining way. ( )

I saw this on a list of"other" books to read this summer and found it on Gutenberg. I remembered the Cliff Robertson movie (TV, 1973), and I'm sure I read it back then, but it was nice to reread. Nice to read a short story after Game of Thrones. Nice to read good writing after Game of Thrones.

A thinker that really needed to be fleshed out. ( )

This was a short read, but honestly well worth relating to today. How many people are lost in the system to this day? How many people, when handed down what seemed a simple sentence, discovers that the sentence itself takes away more than it was supposed to take? There are repercussions for everything. This was a story that took place during the War of 1812. A number of things were misunderstood by the prisoner, by the courts, and by the general population of that era. After 50 years, these things were never corrected. Just like the things happening today. ( )

This is the deeply moving story of naval lieutenant Phillip Nolan, a young man who lived to regret a rash and passionately spoken oath. For when Nolan, who had fallen under the spell of the treasonous conspirator Aaron Burr, was court-martialed for his part in Burr's plot, he cursed the United States and avowed that he wished he might never hear of it again. His judges took him at his word, and for the next fifty years, until his death, he was never allowed to set foot on American soil, nor to see nor hear a single word of news about her and her affairs.

The author, Edward Everett Hale, paints a heart-rending portrait of a man who, having abjured his country, comes to regret his rash oath and longs for a home to call his own.

Everett Shinn's beautifully executed illustrations grace every page of this edition, with scenes from the book as well as simple motifs of ship and sea. ( )

Edward Everett Hale has earned a place in American fiction (for that is what this story is) with this woeful tale of a man who made a slip of tongue in front of the wrong person and was condemned to sail on a ship where no one could ever refer or allow him to any way sense the existence of the United States.
Should the one-world concept triumph (as I'm sure it will), this may diminish the epathetic effectiveness of the book. ( )