Thoreau's Life by Richard J. Schneider
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was born and lived nearly all his life in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town about twenty miles west of Boston. He received his education at the public school in Concord and at the private Concord Academy. Proving to be a better scholar than his more fun-loving and popular elder brother John, he was sent to Harvard. He did well there and, despite having to drop out for several months for financial and health reasons, was graduated in the top half of his class in 1837.
Thoreau's graduation came at an inauspicious time. In 1837, America was experiencing an economic depression and jobs were not plentiful. Furthermore, Thoreau found himself temperamentally unsuited for three of the four usual professions open to Harvard graduates: the ministry, the law, and medicine. The fourth, teaching, was one he felt comfortable with, since both of his elder siblings, Helen and John, were already teachers. He was hired as the teacher of the Concord public school, but resigned after only two weeks because of a dispute with his superintendent over how to discipline the children. For a while he and John considered seeking their fortunes in California, but at last he fell back onto working in his father's pencil factory.
Thoreau's family participated in the "quiet desperation" of commerce and industry through the pencil factory owned and managed by his father. Thoreau family pencils, produced behind the family house on Main Street, were generally recognized as America's best pencils, largely because of Henry's research into German pencil-making techniques.
In 1838, he decided to start his own school in Concord, eventually asking John to help him. The two brothers worked well together and vacationed together during holidays. In September 1839, they spent a memorable week together on a boating trip up the Concord and Merrimack rivers to Mount Washington in New Hampshire. About the same time both brothers became romantically interested in Ellen Sewall, a frequent visitor to Concord from Cape Cod. In the fall of the next year, both brothers -- first John and then Henry -- proposed marriage to her. But because of her father's objections to the Thoreaus' liberal religious views, Ellen rejected both proposals.
When John endured a lengthy illness in 1841, the school became too much for Henry to handle alone, so he closed it. He returned to work in the pencil factory but was soon invited to work as a live-in handyman in the home of his mentor, neighbor, and friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson was by then already one of the most famous American philosophers and men of letters. Since Thoreau's graduation from Harvard, he had become a protégé of his famous neighbor and an informal student of Emerson's Transcendental ideas. Transcendentalism was an American version of Romantic Idealism, a dualistic Neoplatonic view of the world divided into the material and the spiritual. For Emerson, "Mind is the only reality, of which all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena." For the Transcendentalist, the secret of successful living was to hold oneself above material concerns as much as possible and focus on the spiritual. Thoreau must have imbibed Transcendentalism through almost every pore during his two years living with Emerson, though he would modify it to suit his own temperament by granting nature more reality than Emerson did.
During his stay with Emerson, Thoreau developed ambitions of becoming a writer and got help from Emerson in getting some poems and essays published in the Transcendental journal, The Dial. But life in his parents' home held problems for the budding writer. Work in the pencil factory was tedious and tiring, and, since his mother took in boarders, there was little quiet or privacy in the house. Remembering a summer visit to the retreat cabin of college friend Charles Stearns Wheeler, Thoreau developed a plan to build such a house for himself where he could find privacy to write.
In 1845, he received permission from Emerson to use a piece of land that Emerson owned on the shore of Walden Pond. He bought building supplies and a chicken coop (for the boards), and built himself a small house there, moving in on the Fourth of July. He had two main purposes in moving to the pond: to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as a tribute to his late brother John; and to conduct an economic experiment to see if it were possible to live by working one day and devoting the other six to more Transcendental concerns, thus reversing the Yankee habit of working six days and resting one. His nature study and the writing of Walden would develop later during his stay at the pond. He began writing Walden in 1846 as a lecture in response to the questions of townspeople who were curious about what he was doing out at the pond, but his notes soon grew into his second book.
Thoreau stayed in the house at Walden Pond for two years, from July 1845 to September 1847. Walden condenses the experiences of those two years into one year for artistic unity. During these two years he also spent one night in jail, an incident which occurred in the summer of 1846 and which became the subject of his essay "Resistance to Civil Government" (later known as "Civil Disobedience”). That same year he also took a trip to Maine to see and climb Mount Katahdin, a place with a much wilder nature than he could find around Concord.
In the years after leaving Walden Pond, Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854). A Week sold poorly, leading Thoreau to hold off publication of Walden, so that he could revise it extensively to avoid the problems, such as looseness of structure and a preaching tone unalleviated by humor, that had put readers off in the first book. Walden was a modest success: it brought Thoreau good reviews, satisfactory sales, and a small following of fans.
Thoreau returned to the Emerson home and lived there for two years, while Emerson was on a lecture tour in Europe. For much of his remaining years, he rented a room in his parents' home. He made his living by working in the pencil factory, by doing surveying, by lecturing occasionally, and by publishing essays in newspapers and journals. His income, however, was always very modest, and his main concerns were his daily afternoon walks in the Concord woods, the keeping of a private journal of his nature observations and ideas, and the writing and revision of essays for publication.
Thoreau was an ardent and outspoken abolitionist, serving as a conductor on the underground railroad to help escaped slaves make their way to Canada. He wrote strongly-worded attacks on the Fugitive Slave Law ("Slavery in Massachusetts") and on the execution of John Brown.
His trips to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod provided material for travel essays published first in journals; these were eventually collected into posthumous books. Other excursions took him to Canada and, near the end of his life, to Minnesota.
In May 1862, Thoreau died of the tuberculosis with which he had been periodically plagued since his college years. He left behind large unfinished projects, including a comprehensive record of natural phenomena around Concord, extensive notes on American Indians, and many volumes of his daily journal jottings. At his funeral, his friend Emerson said, “The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. … His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”
Thoreau Chronology
1817
Born July 12 in Concord, Massachusetts.
1837
Graduated from Harvard College. Began journal.
1838
First lecture at Concord Lyceum. First excursion to Maine.
1840
First literary publications, "Aulus Persius Flaccus" and "Sympathy" appear in The Dial.
1845
Moved to his house at Walden Pond on July 4th.
1846
Arrested and spent one night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax.
1847
Left Walden Pond on September 6th. Moved in with the Emerson family for one year.
1848
"Ktaadn" serialized.
1849
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and "Resistance to Civil Government" published. First excursion to Cape Cod.
1852
First four chapters of Cape Cod serialized.
1854
Walden; or, Life in the Woods published."Slavery in Massachusetts" delivered and published.
1858
"Chesuncook" serialized.
1860
"A Plea for Captain John Brown" and "The Last Days of John Brown" published.
1862
Died May 6th. "Walking," "Autumnal Tints," and "Wild Apples" appear in Atlantic Monthly.
Selected Thoughts of Henry Thoreau:
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand ... Simplify, simplify.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Stephen Crane (1871-1900)
American author, whose second book, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE (1895), brought him international fame. Crane's first novel, MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS, was a milestone in the development of literary naturalism. At its appearance in 1893 Crane was just twenty-one. His manuscript was turned down by the publishers, who considered its realism too "ugly". Crane had to print the book at his own expense, borrowing the money from his brother. In its inscription Crane warned that "it is inevitable that you be greatly shocked by this book but continue, please, with all possible courage to the end." The srory of the descent of a slum girl in turn-of-the-century New York into prostitution was first published under a pseudonym. Maggie was generally ignored by readers but it won the admiration of other realist writers.
"In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels. Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure corners. A thousand odors of cooking food came forth to the street. The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels." (from Maggie)
Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, as the 14th child of a Methodist minister Jonathan Townley Crane and his wife Mary Helen Peck Crane. Crane started to write stories at the age of eight; at 16 he was writing articles for the New York Tribune. Both of his parents did some writing and two of his brothers became newspapermen. His mother was active in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and published fiction. His first article, on the explorer Henry M. Stanley, appeared in 1890 in Villette. Crane studied at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. After his mother's death in 1890- his father had died earlier-Crane moved to New York. He worked as a free-lance writer and journalist for the Bachellor-Johnson newspaper syndicate. While supporting himself by his writings, he lived among the poor in the Bowery slums to research his first novel, Maggie. Crane's faithfulness to accuracy of details led him once to dress up as a tramp and spend the night in a flophouse. This produced the sketch 'Experiment in Misery' in 1894. Crane's work also inspired other writers, such as Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1944), to examine the Lower East Side.
Crane's unromanticized war novel The Red Badge of Courage depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. It has been called the first modern war novel. In England readers believed that the book was written by a veteran soldier-the text was so believable. Crane dismissed this theory by saying that he got his ideas from the football field. The story is set during the American Civil War. Henry Fleming enrolls as a soldier in the Union army. He has dreamed of battles and glory all his life, but his expectations are shattered in his encounter with the enemy when he witnesses the chaos on the battle field and starts to fear that the regiment was leaving him behind. He flees from the battle. "Since he had turned his back upon the fight his fears had been wondrously magnified. Death about to thrust him between the shoulder blades was far more dreadful than death about to smite him between the eyes. When he thought of it later, he conceived the impression that it is better to view the appalling than to be merely within hearing. The noises of the battle were like stones; he believed himself liable to be crushed."
Henry wanders into a thick wood, and meets a group of wounded men. He tries to help a tall soldier, who dies, and leaves a tattered soldier on a field. He returns to the lines and a deserter hits him with a gun. Henry gets a head wound. Marked by the "red badge" in the evening he falls asleep with his comrades. Next day he feels sore and stiff from his experiences, but in his hatred starts to shoot blindly at the enemy. "Some of the men muttered and looked, awe struck, at the youth. It was plain that as he had gone on loading and firing and cursing without the proper intermission, they had found time to regard him. And they now looked upon him as a war devil." In the heat of the battle, he picks up the regiment's flag with his friend when it falls from the color sergeant's hands. An officer, who has called him and the other soldiers "mule drivers" calls them again "a lot of mud diggers". Henry wants to die in the battle to prove the officer is wrong. He tries to seize the enemy flag, but his friend is faster and wrenches it free from the hands of the dying color bearer. He is filled with guilt when he remembers the tattered soldier whom he had deserted. "Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks -- an existence of soft and eternal peace." Following the conventions of a bildungsroman, Henry has matured after the final battle and he understands better his strengths and weaknesses.
Crane's collection of poems, THE BLACK RIDER, which appeared also in 1895, has much in common with Emily Dickinson's simple, stripped style. Crane's rising fame brought him better reporting assignments and he sought experiences as a war correspondent in combat areas. Crane travelled to Greece, Cuba, Texas and Mexico, reporting mostly on war events. His short story, 'The Open Boat,' is based on a true experience, when his ship, a coal-burning tug heavy with ammunition and machetes, sank on the journey to Cuba in 1896. With a small party of other passengers, Crane spent several days drifting in a dinghy off the coast of Florida before being rescued. This experience impaired his health permanently. In the story, originally published in Scribner's Magazine in June 1897, Crane focused on four men, who eventually decide to swim for shore.
--When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.--Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot at he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: 'Yes, but I love myself.' (from 'The Open Boat')
In Greece Crane wrote about the Greco-Turkish War, settling in 1898 in Sussex, England, where he lived with the author Cora Taylor, who was the proprietress of the Hotel de Dream, a well-known Jacksonville sporting house. In England Crane became friends with Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and Henry James. 'The Blue Hotel' (1898), Crane's much anthologized short story, was first published serially in Collier's Weekly. Swede, a nervous New Yorker, fascinated by tales of the Wild West, enters Pat Scully's hotel in Fort Romper, Nebraska; the hotel is a haven of rest in a blizzard. Swede meets Mr. Blanc from the East, and a reserved cowboy. He drinks heavily and beats Scully's son, Johnnie, after accusing him of cheating at cards. When the Swede attacks another hotel customer, he is stabbed and killed. Several months later Mr. Blanc, feeling responsible for the death, confesses that Johnnie indeed cheated. In a letter from 1898 Conrad wrote to Crane: "You have the terseness, the clear eye the easy imagination. You have all - and I have only the accursed faculty of dreaming. My ideas fade -Yours come out sharp cut as cameos - they come all living out of Your brain and bring images - and bring light." Like Emile Zola (1840-1902) in France, Crane used realism - or naturalism - as a method of exposing social ills, as in GEORGE'S MOTHER (1896), which explored life in the Bowery. Crane himself did not much like Zola. In 1899 ACTIVE SERVICE appeared, which was based on the Greco-Turkish War.
In 1899 Crane returned to Cuba, to cover the Spanish-American War. Due to poor health he was obliged to return to England. There he rented with Cora a cold and wet 14th-century Sussex estate, called Brede Place. Crane died on June 5, 1900 at Badenweiler in Germany of tuberculosis, that was worsened by malarial fever he had caught in Cuba. He was 28-his career has lasted only eight years. Crane's posthumous publications include the sketches and stories from his life as a correspondent in WOUNDS IN THE RAIN (1900) and WHILOMVILLE STORIES (1900), depicting a childhood in a small state. After Crane's death his work was neglected for many years until such writers as Amy Lowell and Willa Cather brought it again to public attention. Although Crane introduced realism into American literature, his use of symbolism also gave his work a romantic quality.
For further reading: Stehpen Crane by Thomas Beer (1923); Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography by John Berryman (1950); Stephen Crane by Robert W. Stallman (1968); Stephen Crane by Edwin Harrison Cady (1980); Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane by Michael Fried (1988); Red Badge of Courage: Redefining the Hero by Donald B. Gibson (1988); The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane 1871-1900 by Stanley Wertheim, Paul Sorrentino (1994); The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane by Patrick K. Dooley (1994); Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature by Michael Robertson (1997); Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane by Linda H. Davis (1998); Readings on Stephen Crane, ed. by Bonnie Szumski (1998); Understanding The Red Badge of Courage by Claudia D. Johnson (1998) - American Civil War in fiction: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians by Ambroce Bierce (1891); The Red Bandge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895); Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936); The Unvanisquished by William Faulkner (1938); The History of Rome, Hanks and Kindred Matters by Joseph Stanley Pennell (1944); When the War is Over by Stephen Becker (1970); Roots by Alex Haley (1976); Shiloh by Shelby Foote (1976); Marching Home by Donald Honing (1980); Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganis (1989); The Double Life of Stephen Crane by Christopher Benfey (1992); Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane by Linda H. Davis (1998)
Selected works:
MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS, 1893 - Maggie, katujen tyttö
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, 1895 - Punainen kunniamerkki - film 1951, written and directed by John Huston, starring Audie Murphy, Bill Mauldin, Douglas Dick; the story of its production is told by Lillian Ross in Picture. Television film in 1974
THE BLACK RIDERS, 1895
GEORGE'S MOTHER, 1896
THE BLUE HOTEL, 1896
THE LITTLE REGIMENT, 1896
THE BRIDE COMES TO YELLOW SKY, 1896
THE THIRD VIOLET, 1897
THE OPEN BOAT, 1898
ACTIVE SERVICE, 1899
THE MONSTER AND OTHER STORIES, 1899
WAR IS KIND, 1899
WOUNDS IN THE RAIN, 1900
WHILOMVILLE STORIES, 1900
MEN, WOMEN AND BOATS, 1921
COLLECTED WORKS, 1925-26 (12 vols.)
LETTERS, 1960
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF STEPHEN CRANE, 1988
American author, whose second book, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE (1895), brought him international fame. Crane's first novel, MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS, was a milestone in the development of literary naturalism. At its appearance in 1893 Crane was just twenty-one. His manuscript was turned down by the publishers, who considered its realism too "ugly". Crane had to print the book at his own expense, borrowing the money from his brother. In its inscription Crane warned that "it is inevitable that you be greatly shocked by this book but continue, please, with all possible courage to the end." The srory of the descent of a slum girl in turn-of-the-century New York into prostitution was first published under a pseudonym. Maggie was generally ignored by readers but it won the admiration of other realist writers.
"In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels. Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure corners. A thousand odors of cooking food came forth to the street. The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels." (from Maggie)
Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, as the 14th child of a Methodist minister Jonathan Townley Crane and his wife Mary Helen Peck Crane. Crane started to write stories at the age of eight; at 16 he was writing articles for the New York Tribune. Both of his parents did some writing and two of his brothers became newspapermen. His mother was active in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and published fiction. His first article, on the explorer Henry M. Stanley, appeared in 1890 in Villette. Crane studied at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. After his mother's death in 1890- his father had died earlier-Crane moved to New York. He worked as a free-lance writer and journalist for the Bachellor-Johnson newspaper syndicate. While supporting himself by his writings, he lived among the poor in the Bowery slums to research his first novel, Maggie. Crane's faithfulness to accuracy of details led him once to dress up as a tramp and spend the night in a flophouse. This produced the sketch 'Experiment in Misery' in 1894. Crane's work also inspired other writers, such as Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1944), to examine the Lower East Side.
Crane's unromanticized war novel The Red Badge of Courage depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. It has been called the first modern war novel. In England readers believed that the book was written by a veteran soldier-the text was so believable. Crane dismissed this theory by saying that he got his ideas from the football field. The story is set during the American Civil War. Henry Fleming enrolls as a soldier in the Union army. He has dreamed of battles and glory all his life, but his expectations are shattered in his encounter with the enemy when he witnesses the chaos on the battle field and starts to fear that the regiment was leaving him behind. He flees from the battle. "Since he had turned his back upon the fight his fears had been wondrously magnified. Death about to thrust him between the shoulder blades was far more dreadful than death about to smite him between the eyes. When he thought of it later, he conceived the impression that it is better to view the appalling than to be merely within hearing. The noises of the battle were like stones; he believed himself liable to be crushed."
Henry wanders into a thick wood, and meets a group of wounded men. He tries to help a tall soldier, who dies, and leaves a tattered soldier on a field. He returns to the lines and a deserter hits him with a gun. Henry gets a head wound. Marked by the "red badge" in the evening he falls asleep with his comrades. Next day he feels sore and stiff from his experiences, but in his hatred starts to shoot blindly at the enemy. "Some of the men muttered and looked, awe struck, at the youth. It was plain that as he had gone on loading and firing and cursing without the proper intermission, they had found time to regard him. And they now looked upon him as a war devil." In the heat of the battle, he picks up the regiment's flag with his friend when it falls from the color sergeant's hands. An officer, who has called him and the other soldiers "mule drivers" calls them again "a lot of mud diggers". Henry wants to die in the battle to prove the officer is wrong. He tries to seize the enemy flag, but his friend is faster and wrenches it free from the hands of the dying color bearer. He is filled with guilt when he remembers the tattered soldier whom he had deserted. "Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks -- an existence of soft and eternal peace." Following the conventions of a bildungsroman, Henry has matured after the final battle and he understands better his strengths and weaknesses.
Crane's collection of poems, THE BLACK RIDER, which appeared also in 1895, has much in common with Emily Dickinson's simple, stripped style. Crane's rising fame brought him better reporting assignments and he sought experiences as a war correspondent in combat areas. Crane travelled to Greece, Cuba, Texas and Mexico, reporting mostly on war events. His short story, 'The Open Boat,' is based on a true experience, when his ship, a coal-burning tug heavy with ammunition and machetes, sank on the journey to Cuba in 1896. With a small party of other passengers, Crane spent several days drifting in a dinghy off the coast of Florida before being rescued. This experience impaired his health permanently. In the story, originally published in Scribner's Magazine in June 1897, Crane focused on four men, who eventually decide to swim for shore.
--When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.--Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot at he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: 'Yes, but I love myself.' (from 'The Open Boat')
In Greece Crane wrote about the Greco-Turkish War, settling in 1898 in Sussex, England, where he lived with the author Cora Taylor, who was the proprietress of the Hotel de Dream, a well-known Jacksonville sporting house. In England Crane became friends with Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and Henry James. 'The Blue Hotel' (1898), Crane's much anthologized short story, was first published serially in Collier's Weekly. Swede, a nervous New Yorker, fascinated by tales of the Wild West, enters Pat Scully's hotel in Fort Romper, Nebraska; the hotel is a haven of rest in a blizzard. Swede meets Mr. Blanc from the East, and a reserved cowboy. He drinks heavily and beats Scully's son, Johnnie, after accusing him of cheating at cards. When the Swede attacks another hotel customer, he is stabbed and killed. Several months later Mr. Blanc, feeling responsible for the death, confesses that Johnnie indeed cheated. In a letter from 1898 Conrad wrote to Crane: "You have the terseness, the clear eye the easy imagination. You have all - and I have only the accursed faculty of dreaming. My ideas fade -Yours come out sharp cut as cameos - they come all living out of Your brain and bring images - and bring light." Like Emile Zola (1840-1902) in France, Crane used realism - or naturalism - as a method of exposing social ills, as in GEORGE'S MOTHER (1896), which explored life in the Bowery. Crane himself did not much like Zola. In 1899 ACTIVE SERVICE appeared, which was based on the Greco-Turkish War.
In 1899 Crane returned to Cuba, to cover the Spanish-American War. Due to poor health he was obliged to return to England. There he rented with Cora a cold and wet 14th-century Sussex estate, called Brede Place. Crane died on June 5, 1900 at Badenweiler in Germany of tuberculosis, that was worsened by malarial fever he had caught in Cuba. He was 28-his career has lasted only eight years. Crane's posthumous publications include the sketches and stories from his life as a correspondent in WOUNDS IN THE RAIN (1900) and WHILOMVILLE STORIES (1900), depicting a childhood in a small state. After Crane's death his work was neglected for many years until such writers as Amy Lowell and Willa Cather brought it again to public attention. Although Crane introduced realism into American literature, his use of symbolism also gave his work a romantic quality.
For further reading: Stehpen Crane by Thomas Beer (1923); Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography by John Berryman (1950); Stephen Crane by Robert W. Stallman (1968); Stephen Crane by Edwin Harrison Cady (1980); Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane by Michael Fried (1988); Red Badge of Courage: Redefining the Hero by Donald B. Gibson (1988); The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane 1871-1900 by Stanley Wertheim, Paul Sorrentino (1994); The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane by Patrick K. Dooley (1994); Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature by Michael Robertson (1997); Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane by Linda H. Davis (1998); Readings on Stephen Crane, ed. by Bonnie Szumski (1998); Understanding The Red Badge of Courage by Claudia D. Johnson (1998) - American Civil War in fiction: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians by Ambroce Bierce (1891); The Red Bandge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895); Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936); The Unvanisquished by William Faulkner (1938); The History of Rome, Hanks and Kindred Matters by Joseph Stanley Pennell (1944); When the War is Over by Stephen Becker (1970); Roots by Alex Haley (1976); Shiloh by Shelby Foote (1976); Marching Home by Donald Honing (1980); Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganis (1989); The Double Life of Stephen Crane by Christopher Benfey (1992); Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane by Linda H. Davis (1998)
Selected works:
MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS, 1893 - Maggie, katujen tyttö
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, 1895 - Punainen kunniamerkki - film 1951, written and directed by John Huston, starring Audie Murphy, Bill Mauldin, Douglas Dick; the story of its production is told by Lillian Ross in Picture. Television film in 1974
THE BLACK RIDERS, 1895
GEORGE'S MOTHER, 1896
THE BLUE HOTEL, 1896
THE LITTLE REGIMENT, 1896
THE BRIDE COMES TO YELLOW SKY, 1896
THE THIRD VIOLET, 1897
THE OPEN BOAT, 1898
ACTIVE SERVICE, 1899
THE MONSTER AND OTHER STORIES, 1899
WAR IS KIND, 1899
WOUNDS IN THE RAIN, 1900
WHILOMVILLE STORIES, 1900
MEN, WOMEN AND BOATS, 1921
COLLECTED WORKS, 1925-26 (12 vols.)
LETTERS, 1960
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF STEPHEN CRANE, 1988
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
My Life
I was born on January 3rd, 1985, in Mashhad. My parents were both born in Kermanshah. My parental grandfather was from a distinguished family. He was a serious and respectful man who died when he lost his properties. My mother’s family was from Azarbayejan in former Soviet Union. My parents emigrated from Kermanshah to Khorramshahr when they married because my father had found a good job there. Khorramshahr was not a suitable place to live in. The summers had muggy weather and the cold of winters was not tolerable; but people were nice and happy and Little by little they accustomed to their new life and began to find happiness in that town. After revolution the situation was changed, Iraqis thought that Khorramshahr belongs to them and wanted to attach this small city to their country. They attacked khorramshahr but my family could not run away on time because my father believed that the war would last only 3 days! Finally when Iraqis started to enter the city my family had no way but to get on the last mini bus and leave everything behind. The hardship had started for them; they did not have any place to go, and wanted their home, their beds, and their own peaceful life. After a while they went Tehran to live near my aunt. They could not stay there too long because of missile attacks on Tehran. When my father was proposed a job in Mashhad, He accepted and they leaved Tehran. They had to make everything again. It was hard to adopt to new place and people with different way of living and special traditions. We were just strangers among them. My parents were concerned of my education so they sent me to special school after I finished primary school. Although the teachers were perfect and we had everything there, but I was not happy. I had to study all the time, we were expected to study extra hours to come up with school’ schedules. I recall my loneliness and sleeplessness clearly. We came back to Tehran when I finished secondary school. Again I had to adopt myself to the new conditions. I was good at high school but not as good as I used to be. Instead of studding my lessons I spent my time reading different books! At that time I thought everything is futile, and I did not know why people trying that hard to gain something that is transitory. My major was mathematic and I liked it but it needed too much effort to be successful in entrance examination of university. I believed that I was wasting my time by staying at home and studding all the time. I did not want to torture myself like this, so I went abroad to live there. First I thought that I found the paradise lost and everything was attractive for me, after a while I came to this idea that it was not what I wanted. The foreigner’s situation was not good. They were given the second rate jobs. The cost of living did not permit them to afford to go to university and some of them had to marry the ones older than them to get credit cards. I did not like to live like them, so I decided to come back to Iran although my mother did not agree. After that I started to study for entrance examination and was admitted in university, since then my life has been calm and I have found my way in life.
I was born on January 3rd, 1985, in Mashhad. My parents were both born in Kermanshah. My parental grandfather was from a distinguished family. He was a serious and respectful man who died when he lost his properties. My mother’s family was from Azarbayejan in former Soviet Union. My parents emigrated from Kermanshah to Khorramshahr when they married because my father had found a good job there. Khorramshahr was not a suitable place to live in. The summers had muggy weather and the cold of winters was not tolerable; but people were nice and happy and Little by little they accustomed to their new life and began to find happiness in that town. After revolution the situation was changed, Iraqis thought that Khorramshahr belongs to them and wanted to attach this small city to their country. They attacked khorramshahr but my family could not run away on time because my father believed that the war would last only 3 days! Finally when Iraqis started to enter the city my family had no way but to get on the last mini bus and leave everything behind. The hardship had started for them; they did not have any place to go, and wanted their home, their beds, and their own peaceful life. After a while they went Tehran to live near my aunt. They could not stay there too long because of missile attacks on Tehran. When my father was proposed a job in Mashhad, He accepted and they leaved Tehran. They had to make everything again. It was hard to adopt to new place and people with different way of living and special traditions. We were just strangers among them. My parents were concerned of my education so they sent me to special school after I finished primary school. Although the teachers were perfect and we had everything there, but I was not happy. I had to study all the time, we were expected to study extra hours to come up with school’ schedules. I recall my loneliness and sleeplessness clearly. We came back to Tehran when I finished secondary school. Again I had to adopt myself to the new conditions. I was good at high school but not as good as I used to be. Instead of studding my lessons I spent my time reading different books! At that time I thought everything is futile, and I did not know why people trying that hard to gain something that is transitory. My major was mathematic and I liked it but it needed too much effort to be successful in entrance examination of university. I believed that I was wasting my time by staying at home and studding all the time. I did not want to torture myself like this, so I went abroad to live there. First I thought that I found the paradise lost and everything was attractive for me, after a while I came to this idea that it was not what I wanted. The foreigner’s situation was not good. They were given the second rate jobs. The cost of living did not permit them to afford to go to university and some of them had to marry the ones older than them to get credit cards. I did not like to live like them, so I decided to come back to Iran although my mother did not agree. After that I started to study for entrance examination and was admitted in university, since then my life has been calm and I have found my way in life.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
The Skylight Room
By
O. Henry
FIRST Mrs. Parker would show you the double parlors. You would not dare to interrupt her description of their advantages and of the merits of the gentleman who had occupied them for eight years. Then you would manage to stammer forth the confession that you were neither a doctor nor a dentist.
Mrs. Parker's manner of receiving the admission was such that you could never afterward entertain the same feeling toward your parents, who had neglected to train you up in one of the professions that fitted Mrs. Parker's parlors.
Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second-floor-back at $8. Convinced by her second-floor manner that it was worth the $12 that Mr. Toosenberry always paid for it until he left to take charge of his brother's orange plantation in Florida near Palm Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre always spent the winters that had the double front room with private bath, you managed to babble that you wanted something still cheaper.
If you survived Mrs. Parker's scorn, you were taken to look at Mr. Skidder's large hall room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder's room was not vacant. He wrote plays and smoked cigarettes in it all day long. But every room-hunter was made to visit his room to admire the lambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the fright caused by possible eviction, would pay something on his rent.
Then-oh, then-if you still stood on one foot, with your hot hand clutching the three moist dollars in your pocket, and hoarsely proclaimed your hideous arid culpable poverty; never-more would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk loudly the word "Clara," she would show you her back, and march downstairs. Then Clara, the colored [African-American] maid, would escort you up the carpeted ladder that served for the fourth flight, and show you the Skylight Room. It occupied 7 x 8 feet of floor space in the middle of the hall. On each side of it was a dark lumber closet or storeroom.
In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was the dresser. Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the sides of a coin. Your hand crept to your the glass of the little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity.
"Two dollars, suh," Clara would say in her half-contemptuous, half-Tuskegeenial tones.
One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a typewriter made to be lugged around by a much larger lady. She was a very little girl, with eyes and hair that had kept on growing after she had stopped and that always looked as if they were saying: "Goodness me! Why didn't you keep up with us?"
Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlors. "In this closet," she said, "one could keep a skeleton or an anesthetic or coal--"
"But I am neither a doctor nor a dentist," said Miss Leeson, with a shiver.
Mrs. Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare that she kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists, and led the way to the second-floor-back.
"Eight dollars?" said Miss Leeson. "Dear me! I'm not Hetty if I do look green. I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me something higher and lower."
Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at the rap on his door.
"Excuse me, Mr. Skidder," said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's smile at his pale looks. "I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady to have a look at your lambrequins."
"They're too lovely for anything," said Miss Leeson, smiling in exactly the way the angels do.
After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the tall, black-haired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and insetted a small, roguish one with heavy, bright hair and vivacious features.
"Anna Held'll jump at it," said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his feet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial cuttlefish.
Presently the tocsin call of "Clara!" sounded to the world the state of Miss Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway, thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and cabalistic words:
"Two dollars!"
"I'll take it!" sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky iron bed.
Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter.
Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would sit on the steps of the high stoop with the other roomers.
Miss Leeson was not intended for a skylight room when the plans were drawn for her creation. She was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies. Once she let Mr. Skidder read to her three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy, "It's No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway."
There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss Leeson had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss Longnecker, the tall blonde who taught in a public school and said, "Well, really!" to everything you said, sat on the top step and sniffed.
And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at Coney [Island] every Sunday and worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed. Miss Leeson sat on the middle step and the men, would quickly group around her. Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star part in a private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life.
And especially Mr. Hoover, who was forty-five, fat, flush and foolish.
And especially very young Mr. Evans, who set up a hollow cough to induce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes. The men voted her "the funniest and jolliest ever," but the snifis on the top step and the lower step were implacable.
(I pray you to let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlights and drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune the pipes to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance to the ton than would have Romeo's rickety ribs to the ounce. A lover may sigh, but he must not puff. To the train of Momus are the fat men remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt, Hoover!
Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat is meat for perdition. There was never a chance for you, Hoover.) [parentheses mine, web designer]
As Mrs. Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's evening, Miss Leeson looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:"Why, there's Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too."
All looked up-some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about for an airship, Jackson-guided.
"It's that star," explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger. "Not the big one that winkles-the steady blue one near it. I can see it every night through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson."
"Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker. "I didn't know you were an astronomer, Miss Leeson."
"Oh, yes," said the small star gazer, "I know as much as any of them about the style of sleeves they're going to wear next fall in Mars."
"Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker. "The star you refer to is Gamma, of the constelation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second magnitude, arid its meridian passage is--"
"Said the very young Mr. Evans, "I think Hilly Jackson is a much better name for it,"
"Same here," said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss Longnecker. "I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars as any of those old astrologers had?'
"Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker.
"I wonder whether it's a shooting star," remarked Miss Dorn.
"I hit nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday."
"He doesn't show up very well from down here," said Miss Lesson. "You ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars even in the daytime from the bottom of a well. At night my room is like the shaft of a coal mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono with."
There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidable papers home to copy. And when she went out in the morning, instead of working, she went from office to office and let her heart melt away in the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent office boys. This went on.
There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker's stoop at the hour when she always returned from her dinner at the restaurant. But she had had no dinner.
As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance. He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an avalanche. She dodged, and caught the balustrade.
He tried for her hand, and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face.
Step by step she went up, dragging herself by the railing. She passed Mr. Skidder's door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme (Miss Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to "pirouette across stage from L to the side of the Count." Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last and opened the door of the skylight room. She was too weak to light the lamp to undress. She fell upon the iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs.
And in that Erehus of a room she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and smiled. For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a pit of blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing the star that she had so whimsically and oh, so ineffectually, named. Miss Longnecker must be right. It was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson.
And yet she could not let it be Gamma. As she lay on her back, she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply.
"Good-bye, Billy," she murmured, faintly. "You're millions of miles away and you won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most of the time up there when there wasn't anything else but darkness to look at, didn't you? . . . Millions of miles. . . . Good.bye, Billy Jackson."
Clara, the colored maid, found the door locked at 10 the next day, and they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and burnt feathers proving of no avail, some one ran to phone for an ambulance.
In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active, confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the steps,
"Ambulance call to 49," he said, briefly. "What's the trouble?"
"Oh, yes, doctor," sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that there should be trouble in the house was the greater. "I can't think what can be the matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring her to. It's a young woman, a Miss Elsi--yes, a Miss Elsie Lessson. Never before in my house--"
"What room?" cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker was a stranger.
"The sky1ight room. It-"
Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker followed slowly, as her dignity demanded.
On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomer in his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel of his tongue, not loudly.
Gradully Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that slips down from a nail. Ever afterwards there remained crumples in her mind and body. Sometimes her curious roomers would ask her what the doctor said to her.
"Let that be," she would answer. "If I can get forgiveness for having heard it I will be satisfied."
The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along the sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who bears his own dead.
They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in the ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was: "Drive like h-l, Wilson," to the driver.
That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning's paper I saw a little news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me) to weld the incidents togetber. It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who had been removed from No. 49 East _____ Street, suffering from debility induced by starvation. It concluded with these words:
"Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the
case, says the patient will recover."
***
The End of the story "The Skylight Room"
By
O. Henry
FIRST Mrs. Parker would show you the double parlors. You would not dare to interrupt her description of their advantages and of the merits of the gentleman who had occupied them for eight years. Then you would manage to stammer forth the confession that you were neither a doctor nor a dentist.
Mrs. Parker's manner of receiving the admission was such that you could never afterward entertain the same feeling toward your parents, who had neglected to train you up in one of the professions that fitted Mrs. Parker's parlors.
Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second-floor-back at $8. Convinced by her second-floor manner that it was worth the $12 that Mr. Toosenberry always paid for it until he left to take charge of his brother's orange plantation in Florida near Palm Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre always spent the winters that had the double front room with private bath, you managed to babble that you wanted something still cheaper.
If you survived Mrs. Parker's scorn, you were taken to look at Mr. Skidder's large hall room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder's room was not vacant. He wrote plays and smoked cigarettes in it all day long. But every room-hunter was made to visit his room to admire the lambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the fright caused by possible eviction, would pay something on his rent.
Then-oh, then-if you still stood on one foot, with your hot hand clutching the three moist dollars in your pocket, and hoarsely proclaimed your hideous arid culpable poverty; never-more would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk loudly the word "Clara," she would show you her back, and march downstairs. Then Clara, the colored [African-American] maid, would escort you up the carpeted ladder that served for the fourth flight, and show you the Skylight Room. It occupied 7 x 8 feet of floor space in the middle of the hall. On each side of it was a dark lumber closet or storeroom.
In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was the dresser. Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the sides of a coin. Your hand crept to your the glass of the little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity.
"Two dollars, suh," Clara would say in her half-contemptuous, half-Tuskegeenial tones.
One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a typewriter made to be lugged around by a much larger lady. She was a very little girl, with eyes and hair that had kept on growing after she had stopped and that always looked as if they were saying: "Goodness me! Why didn't you keep up with us?"
Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlors. "In this closet," she said, "one could keep a skeleton or an anesthetic or coal--"
"But I am neither a doctor nor a dentist," said Miss Leeson, with a shiver.
Mrs. Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare that she kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists, and led the way to the second-floor-back.
"Eight dollars?" said Miss Leeson. "Dear me! I'm not Hetty if I do look green. I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me something higher and lower."
Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at the rap on his door.
"Excuse me, Mr. Skidder," said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's smile at his pale looks. "I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady to have a look at your lambrequins."
"They're too lovely for anything," said Miss Leeson, smiling in exactly the way the angels do.
After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the tall, black-haired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and insetted a small, roguish one with heavy, bright hair and vivacious features.
"Anna Held'll jump at it," said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his feet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial cuttlefish.
Presently the tocsin call of "Clara!" sounded to the world the state of Miss Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway, thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and cabalistic words:
"Two dollars!"
"I'll take it!" sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky iron bed.
Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter.
Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would sit on the steps of the high stoop with the other roomers.
Miss Leeson was not intended for a skylight room when the plans were drawn for her creation. She was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies. Once she let Mr. Skidder read to her three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy, "It's No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway."
There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss Leeson had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss Longnecker, the tall blonde who taught in a public school and said, "Well, really!" to everything you said, sat on the top step and sniffed.
And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at Coney [Island] every Sunday and worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed. Miss Leeson sat on the middle step and the men, would quickly group around her. Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star part in a private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life.
And especially Mr. Hoover, who was forty-five, fat, flush and foolish.
And especially very young Mr. Evans, who set up a hollow cough to induce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes. The men voted her "the funniest and jolliest ever," but the snifis on the top step and the lower step were implacable.
(I pray you to let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlights and drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune the pipes to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance to the ton than would have Romeo's rickety ribs to the ounce. A lover may sigh, but he must not puff. To the train of Momus are the fat men remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt, Hoover!
Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat is meat for perdition. There was never a chance for you, Hoover.) [parentheses mine, web designer]
As Mrs. Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's evening, Miss Leeson looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:"Why, there's Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too."
All looked up-some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about for an airship, Jackson-guided.
"It's that star," explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger. "Not the big one that winkles-the steady blue one near it. I can see it every night through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson."
"Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker. "I didn't know you were an astronomer, Miss Leeson."
"Oh, yes," said the small star gazer, "I know as much as any of them about the style of sleeves they're going to wear next fall in Mars."
"Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker. "The star you refer to is Gamma, of the constelation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second magnitude, arid its meridian passage is--"
"Said the very young Mr. Evans, "I think Hilly Jackson is a much better name for it,"
"Same here," said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss Longnecker. "I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars as any of those old astrologers had?'
"Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker.
"I wonder whether it's a shooting star," remarked Miss Dorn.
"I hit nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday."
"He doesn't show up very well from down here," said Miss Lesson. "You ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars even in the daytime from the bottom of a well. At night my room is like the shaft of a coal mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono with."
There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidable papers home to copy. And when she went out in the morning, instead of working, she went from office to office and let her heart melt away in the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent office boys. This went on.
There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker's stoop at the hour when she always returned from her dinner at the restaurant. But she had had no dinner.
As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance. He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an avalanche. She dodged, and caught the balustrade.
He tried for her hand, and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face.
Step by step she went up, dragging herself by the railing. She passed Mr. Skidder's door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme (Miss Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to "pirouette across stage from L to the side of the Count." Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last and opened the door of the skylight room. She was too weak to light the lamp to undress. She fell upon the iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs.
And in that Erehus of a room she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and smiled. For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a pit of blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing the star that she had so whimsically and oh, so ineffectually, named. Miss Longnecker must be right. It was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson.
And yet she could not let it be Gamma. As she lay on her back, she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply.
"Good-bye, Billy," she murmured, faintly. "You're millions of miles away and you won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most of the time up there when there wasn't anything else but darkness to look at, didn't you? . . . Millions of miles. . . . Good.bye, Billy Jackson."
Clara, the colored maid, found the door locked at 10 the next day, and they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and burnt feathers proving of no avail, some one ran to phone for an ambulance.
In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active, confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the steps,
"Ambulance call to 49," he said, briefly. "What's the trouble?"
"Oh, yes, doctor," sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that there should be trouble in the house was the greater. "I can't think what can be the matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring her to. It's a young woman, a Miss Elsi--yes, a Miss Elsie Lessson. Never before in my house--"
"What room?" cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker was a stranger.
"The sky1ight room. It-"
Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker followed slowly, as her dignity demanded.
On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomer in his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel of his tongue, not loudly.
Gradully Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that slips down from a nail. Ever afterwards there remained crumples in her mind and body. Sometimes her curious roomers would ask her what the doctor said to her.
"Let that be," she would answer. "If I can get forgiveness for having heard it I will be satisfied."
The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along the sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who bears his own dead.
They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in the ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was: "Drive like h-l, Wilson," to the driver.
That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning's paper I saw a little news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me) to weld the incidents togetber. It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who had been removed from No. 49 East _____ Street, suffering from debility induced by starvation. It concluded with these words:
"Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the
case, says the patient will recover."
***
The End of the story "The Skylight Room"
William Sydney Porter1862-1910
Short Story Writer Greensboro, North Carolina
The most popular short story writer of his era, William Sydney Porter was born on Polecat Creek in Guilford County, and raised and educated in Greensboro by an unmarried aunt who ran a private school. Young William Sydney Porter worked in an uncle's drug store until he moved at nineteen to Texas where he held a variety of jobs including paying and receiving teller at the First National Bank of Austin. To supplement his income, he wrote free-lance sketches, and was briefly editor and co-owner of a humorous weekly called The Rolling Stone. While he was working as a columnist for the Houston Daily Post, Porter was indicted for the embezzlement of bank funds during his time as a teller. His trial was delayed for two years first by his escape to New Orleans and Honduras, then by his wife's illness and death.
Although it is not known for certain whether Porter was an embezzler or merely an incompetent bookkeeper, he was sentenced to five years in the Ohio Penitentiary. His jobs as the prison's night druggist and as secretary to the steward allowed him time to write, and he published his first short story from prison under a pen name. He used several pseudonyms, but upon his early release for good behavior, he chose to write as O. Henry.
Porter moved to New York City in 1902, ostensibly to obtain material, although for the next few years his work continued to reflect his experiences in the southwest and Central America. All but 16 of the 115 stories he wrote in 1904 and 1905 dealt with New York, and on the publication of his second book, The Four Million, he was declared the discoverer of romance in that city's streets. Until 1911 (one year after his death), two collections of his stories were published annually, many of them appearing first in the New York Sunday World. In 1907, Porter married his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Lindsay Coleman of Weaverville, North Carolina. He died in 1910, and is buried in Asheville.
William Sydney Porter's stories follow a standard formula, dealing with commonplace events in the lives of ordinary people and arriving at a surprise ending through coincidence. His two favorite themes were the situation of the imposter and fate as the one unavoidable reality of life. Some of his best known tales are "The Gift of the Magi," "A Municipal Report," and "The Ransom of Red Chief." Stories which hark back to his North Carolina background include "Let Me Feel Your Pulse" and "The Fool-Killer." Although his stories have been criticized for sentimentality and for their surprise endings, they remain popular to this day for those very reasons, and because of their author's unmistakable affection for the foibles of human nature.
Short Story Writer Greensboro, North Carolina
The most popular short story writer of his era, William Sydney Porter was born on Polecat Creek in Guilford County, and raised and educated in Greensboro by an unmarried aunt who ran a private school. Young William Sydney Porter worked in an uncle's drug store until he moved at nineteen to Texas where he held a variety of jobs including paying and receiving teller at the First National Bank of Austin. To supplement his income, he wrote free-lance sketches, and was briefly editor and co-owner of a humorous weekly called The Rolling Stone. While he was working as a columnist for the Houston Daily Post, Porter was indicted for the embezzlement of bank funds during his time as a teller. His trial was delayed for two years first by his escape to New Orleans and Honduras, then by his wife's illness and death.
Although it is not known for certain whether Porter was an embezzler or merely an incompetent bookkeeper, he was sentenced to five years in the Ohio Penitentiary. His jobs as the prison's night druggist and as secretary to the steward allowed him time to write, and he published his first short story from prison under a pen name. He used several pseudonyms, but upon his early release for good behavior, he chose to write as O. Henry.
Porter moved to New York City in 1902, ostensibly to obtain material, although for the next few years his work continued to reflect his experiences in the southwest and Central America. All but 16 of the 115 stories he wrote in 1904 and 1905 dealt with New York, and on the publication of his second book, The Four Million, he was declared the discoverer of romance in that city's streets. Until 1911 (one year after his death), two collections of his stories were published annually, many of them appearing first in the New York Sunday World. In 1907, Porter married his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Lindsay Coleman of Weaverville, North Carolina. He died in 1910, and is buried in Asheville.
William Sydney Porter's stories follow a standard formula, dealing with commonplace events in the lives of ordinary people and arriving at a surprise ending through coincidence. His two favorite themes were the situation of the imposter and fate as the one unavoidable reality of life. Some of his best known tales are "The Gift of the Magi," "A Municipal Report," and "The Ransom of Red Chief." Stories which hark back to his North Carolina background include "Let Me Feel Your Pulse" and "The Fool-Killer." Although his stories have been criticized for sentimentality and for their surprise endings, they remain popular to this day for those very reasons, and because of their author's unmistakable affection for the foibles of human nature.
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