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It is the night before Christmas at Portsborough, New York. The
snow blankets the grounds, the shining lights placed with great
care, hang from the trees and the smell of chestnuts roasting
permeates the air. Although the city is ready for Christmas, the
people who are finding themselves in Trinity Church are not there
to celebrate the birth of their Savoir. No tonight, they find
themselves confessing sins they meant to keep hidden from the
world.
Edward Everett Hale is remembered by millions as the author of The
Man Without a Country. This popular and gifted nineteenth-century
writer was an outstanding and prolific contributor to the fields of
journalism, fiction, essay, and history. He wrote more than 150
books and pamphlets (one novel sold more than a million copies in
his lifetime) and was intimately associated with the publication of
many of the early American journals, among them the North American
Review, Atlantic Monthly, and Christian Examiner. He served as
editor of Old and New and was a frequent contributor to the
foremost newspapers and periodicals of his time. Yet the writings
of this "journalist with a touch of genius" were only incidental to
Hale's Christian ministry in New England and in Washington, D.C.,
where he was for five years Chaplain of the Senate. His literary
creed reflected that of his ministry, for Hale's interpretation of
the social gospel comprised an active concern with all phases of
human affairs. Confidant of poets and editors, friend to diplomats
and statesmen, Hale helped mold public opinions in economics,
sociology, history, and politics through three-quarters of what he
called "a most extraordinary century in history." In recounting
Hale's life and times, Holloway vividly portrays this fascinating
and often turbulent era.
Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads is recognized as one of the
early landmarks of American literary realism. But Garland's shift
in mid-career from the harsh verisimilitude of Prairie Folks and
Prairie Songs to a romanticizing of the Far West, and from ardent
espousal of the principles of "veritism" to violent denunciations
of naturalism, is a paradox which has long puzzled literary
historians. In tracing the evolution of Garland's work, the various
reactions of his stories under the influence of editorial comment
and of contemporary critical reaction, Jean Holloway suggests that
the Garland apostasy was an illusion produced by his very
intellectual immobility amidst the swirling currents of American
thought. His extensive correspondence with Gilder of the Century,
Alden of Harper's Monthly, McClure of McClure's, and Bok of the
Ladies' Home Journal is adduced in support of the thesis that the
writer's choices of subject and of treatment were psychologically
forced rather than conditioned primarily by literary theory. As a
subject for biography, however, Garland has an appeal far beyond
the scope of his literary influence. The friendships of this
gregarious peripatetic with the famous began with Howells, Twain,
Whitman, and Stephen Crane, stretched down the years to include
such younger men as Bret Harte and Carl Van Doren, and crossed the
seas to embrace such British literary lions as Barrie, Shaw, and
Kipling. Garland's fervent espousal of "causes"-the Single Tax
Movement, psychic experimentation, Indian rights-brought him into
close contact with other prominent men-Henry George, Theodore
Roosevelt, and William Jennings Bryan. These public figures form
the incidental characters in Garland's spate of autobiographical
works. Yet it is the central figure of his own story which has
become permanently identified with the "Middle Border," that region
"between the land of the hunter and the harvester" which Augustus
Thomas defined as "wherever Hamlin Garland is." In A Son of the
Middle Border Garland nostalgically recreated his boyhood on the
frontier and, regardless of the detractions of literary critics,
preserved for posterity an important segment of American social
history.
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