Bryant and Dana: the stamp of your mind

The poet/novelist/critic Richard Henry Dana had written to William Cullen Bryant, praising his poem "The Tides." From his home in Roslyn, New York, Bryant wrote back on November 30, 1867:

I am glad that you can speak so well of my little poem, 'The Tides.' It was written in the mood in which I produce what seem to me my best verses; and I therefore was once quite disappointed when a friend told me that a person in whose judgment he seemed to have much reliance had told him that there was not much in it.

The poem, written in 1860, is about the relationship between the moon and the tides of a "restless Sea." It is a constant struggle for the tides as they reach to the moon: "Each wave springs upward, climbing toward the fair / Pure light that sits on high." Though the tide never reach their goal, they continue trying again day after day.

Both Dana and Bryant were greatly respected at this point in their careers, but they were also getting old (both were born in the previous century). Bryant reassured his friend that his life had been worthwhile: "I do not think that you ought to look, as you say, upon your life as a melancholy waste. You have impressed the stamp of your mind upon American literature, and have helped to make it what it is, and what it will yet be."

Yet, despite his reassurances, Bryant himself was equally despondent. He admitted that he had "little to say" about his life and only rarely ventured into the city. "I am in the main cheerful, but with some sad hours, and life to me has lost much of its flavor." Bryant also mentioned he was "trifling" with Homer (who he admits is not as perfect as critics say). In fact, in the following decade, Bryant would dedicate much of his time to translating both The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Birth of Grace King: what I can get

Grace Elizabeth King was born on November 29, 1852 in New Orleans, the third of what became seven children (her birth year has been listed variously as 1851 and 1853, but 1852 seems to be correct).

King, whose own writings include a history of Louisiana and one more specifically about New Orleans, met literary celebrities as varied as Julia Ward Howe, Joaquin Miller, and Mark Twain. Part Creole, she wrote many stories celebrating Creole culture. Among her earliest works was "Monsieur Motte,"  which was originally rejected by Richard Watson Gilder of Century Magazine before being accepted for the New Princeton Review in January 1886 with the help of Charles Dudley Warner. In that story, she paints a vivid picture of New Orleans life:

They were all dressed in calico dresses made in the same way, with very full, short skirts, and very full, short waists, fastened, matronfashion, in front. They all wore very tight, glossy, fresh, black French kid boots, with tassels or bows hanging from the top. With big sun-bonnets, or heavily veiled hats on their heads, thick gloves on their hands, and handkerchiefs around their necks, they were walking buttresses against the ardent sun. They held their lunch baskets like bouquets, and their heads as if they wore crowns. They carried on conversations in sweet, low voices, with interrupting embraces and apostrophic tendernesses : —

"Chère!"

"Chérie!"

"Ange!"

"M'amie!"

King lived to be 79 years old. In 1901, at the age of 49, however, she wrote: "Birthdays come to me now with increasing forceful admonition to enjoy all the pretty things I have and get the most of our time. There is no use waiting for any more future — preparations are all done and over — the future has come, and if this present is the thing for which my whole past has been a preparation, then I had better take what I can get."

*For the information in this post, I turned to Grace King: A Southern Destiny (1983) by Robert Bush.

Mr and Mrs Taylor: glad words

"These will be glad words for thee to read, I know, because they are probably the last I shall write to thee from San Francisco," wrote Bayard Taylor on November 28, 1849. The recipient of the letter, Mary Agnew, was engaged to become his wife and hadn't seen Taylor in months. Taylor was in California as a correspondent for the New York Tribune amidst the gold rush. "The stay here has been in the highest degree valuable to myself," he wrote.

He warned Agnew, however, that he would travel through Mexico on his way home, which would deter him for four weeks longer; he predicted he would not see her until February. He assured her he would be safe during the trip. In fact, Taylor made a career off of traveling for the rest of his life, in one form or another. As he broke down his experience as a sojourner in the west in this letter to his betrothed:

I wish thou couldst see me as I am now, — fat, brown, and rough as a mountaineer, heavier by fifteen pounds than I ever was before, and with the rugged feeling of health and strength I have so long coveted. I am fitted for three years' encagement in New York, without grumbling. I can make glorious use of my rough experience in this country, as thou shalt see anon. It will give me such a lift as I could not have attained by years of labor at home. 

Sure enough,Taylor wrote of his experience in El Dorado; or, Adventures in the Path of Empire, which is said to have sold 10,000 copies in its first two weeks. "My life is not all roughness here," he assured Agnew. He described the "warm, genial airs, skies soft and blue, sunsets far surpassing Italy, mountains green with springing grass, and glorious moonlights" of life in California. In fact, the experience was invigorating to his health: "Heaven has greatly blessed me, while nearly every one I know has been more or less ill. I have enjoyed from the first the most vigorous and exulting health."

After returning home, Bayard Taylor and Mary Agnew married in October 1850, though she was already sick with the disease that would kill her. "My future has tumbled into ruin," he wrote to his friend George Henry Boker shortly before his wife's death. Their married life lasted about two months.

Eugene Field: A Fool

Certainly, Eugene Field did write a few serious poems but, for the most part, he was a humorist. Though it's easy to label his work as "children's literature," his type of silly humor can be appreciated by people of all ages (some of his work can even be frustrating). Though a Missouri-born writer, Field later admitted his home town of St. Louis was an "ineffably uninteresting city" and claimed he was "a Yankee by pedigree and education."

True, Field's father was from Vermont and, after the death of his mother when he was about 6 years old, young Eugene was taken to Amherst, Massachusetts. He grew up there and in Newfane, Vermont, raised by family members. Later, he had a short stint at a college in Massachusetts, though he eventually transferred to a school in Missouri (or "Poor Old Mizzoorah," as he called it).

Field was lucky to have his humor, despite his odd, semi-orphaned displacement. Though he claimed he was himself a Yankee, he was a born Southerner, and often remarked on the strange influence of Puritanism in New England. His recollections of religious life in that area brought with it memories of cold and drafty meeting-houses, and uncomfortable, straight-backed chairs ("o, so hard," he recalled).

Eventually, Field moved to Chicago, and it was here that he wrote a short humorous verse titled "The Fool," dated November 26, 1886:

A Fool, when plagued by fleas by night,
   Quoth: "Since these neighbors so despite me
I think I will put out the light
   And then they cannot see to bite me!"

Thanksgiving Pie: a great moral crusade

William L. Alden was born in Massachusetts but, when his father was named president of Jefferson College in southwestern Pennsylvania, he became a student there as well. He became a lawyer and journalist and wrote short humor pieces and children's stories. Many of his works were published in the New York Times, including his sketch about "Thanksgiving Pie" (circa 1877).

This illustration is from Alden's book Among the Freaks

Calling Thanksgiving "the one national festival which is peculiarly and thoroughly American," founded by colonists in New England. Because of this important distinction, Alden writes, Americans should be careful that their celebration is beyond reproach. Only one aspect of that holiday, he warns, remains which is "barbarous," "deadly," and "demoralizing" — he refers, of course, to pie.

Even an innocent palate, Alden warns, is easily entrapped by the cunningly lavish nature of this food. The maker of the pie is not deliberately wicked, merely thoughtless, to place such temptation on the table. A grown man easily "abandons all self-restraint," but Alden worries for young people, who are so easily corrupted. "How can we wonder that children who are thus tempted to acquire the taste for pie by their own parents grow up to be shameless and habitual consumers of pie!" If evidence is needed, consider how many children have a stomach ache the next day after Thanksgiving. Alden concludes with an impassioned appeal:

All the efforts of good men and women to stay the torrent of pie which threatens to engulf our beloved country will be in vain, unless the reform is begun at the Thanksgiving dinner-table. Pie must be banished from that otherwise innocent board, or it is in vain that we try to banish it from shops, restaurants, and hotels. May we not hope for a great moral crusade which will sweep pie from every virtuous table, and unite all the friends of morality in a vigorous and persistent attack upon the great evil of the land.

Birth of Saltus: it is new

Born in New York on November 23, 1849, Francis Saltus Saltus became an accomplished linguist, musician, poet, and humorist. His first foray into literature came in 1873 when he published Honey and Gall. After that, his pen never stopped. One posthumous review of his work claimed he could dash off six sonnets in a single sitting; when he died, he left some 5,000 unpublished pieces.

Saltus wrote several volumes of poetry, a humorous history of the United States (among other comedic works), a few plays, and scored a few operas, including comic operas. He was a main character in Bohemian 19th-century New York, though his work was never particularly famous nationwide. One critic blamed his subject matter and style. Saltus was, after all, influenced by the "strangely weird work" of French poets like Baudelaire and Gautier. He also had a fondness for drink, particularly absinthe; in fact, he wrote an entire series of poems dedicated to alcohol.

For his birthday, however, perhaps it is best to focus on his humor. His poem, "The Modern Critic" (1895):

With pompous mien and all-important air,
   He'll say your views are premature and rash,
And with a grave grandiloquence declare
   That all the verse of later years is trash.

To satisfy his most aesthetic mind,
   In all the modern work he labors through,
He grieves to state he really cannot find
   One worthy line, one thought supremely new.

He calmly adds that it appears to him
   There's lack of power in overrated Keats,
That Shelley's very commonplace and dim,
   That Tennyson the same old song repeats.

You ask: "And Swinburne?" Well, he has some fire,
   He will allow; "but then so very crude."
"Browning?"—" Bah! verbose, of his style you tire."
   "Hugo?"—" A bard of second magnitude."

"Longfellow?"—" Dabbles in all kinds of verse."
   "Lowell?"—" A fraud, and so was Bryant, too.
They do not write," he cries, "in language terse,
   As real and god-born poets always do."

Then he will say, to your surprise,
   That Whittier is a rhymester, very low;
And finally, will harshly criticise
   The morbid ravings of that " crazy Poe."

"Rosetti?"—" Never made a decent rhyme,"
   He shrieks, while Bret Harte has no lofty flight.
"Byron?"—" A loon, he never was sublime."
   "And William Morris?" "Don't know how write."

And as he talks it seems as if the air
   Were tinted red with Tennysonian gore;
While bits of lacerated Baudelaire
   Seem to exist and quiver on the floor.

And as you gasp and dare not add a word,
   This critic gently smiles and says to you:
"I wrote a poem which you never heard;
   I think you will admire it—it is new."

Fortune and Turner: I will be free!

Timothy Thomas Fortune published his poem "Nat Turner" in the Cleveland Gazette on November 22, 1884. Certainly, Fortune would have felt a kinship with Nat Turner. Fortune was himself born enslaved in Florida, about a half a century after Nat Turner's birth. Turner led a bloody slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831. He was executed only a few months later. The two men were never alive at the same time.

In Fortune's poem, Turner is a larger-than-life heroic figure. A reader can't help but admire and fear Turner, whose eyes flash with fire as he makes only one strong demand (or prediction): "I will be free!" Tension is built in part by the changing pattern of lines in each stanza:

He stood erect, a man as proud
As ever to a tyrant bowed
Unwilling head or bent a knee,
And longed while bending to be free:
And o’er his ebon features came—
A shadow ’twas of manly shame—
Aye, shame that he should wear a chain
And feel his manhood withered with pain.
Doomed to a life of plodding toil,
Shamefully rooted to the soil!

He stood erect; his eyes flashed fire;
His robust form convulsed with ire;
“I will be free! I will be free!
Or, fighting, die a man!” cried he.

Virginia’s hills were lit at night—
The slave had risen in his might;
And far and near Nat’s wail went forth.
To South and East, and West and North,
And strong men trembled in their power.
And weak men felt ’twas now their hour.

“I will be free! I will be free!
Or, fighting, die a man!” cried he,
The tyrant’s arm was all too strong,
Had swayed dominion all too long;
And so the hero met his end,
As all who fail as Freedom’s friend.

The blow he struck shook Slavery’s throne:
His cause was just, e’en skeptics own;
And round his lowly grave soon swarmed
Freedom’s brave hosts for Freedom’s armed.

That host was swollen by Nat’s kin
To fight for Freedom, Freedom win,
Upon the soil that spurned his cry:
“I will be free, or I will die!”

Let tyrants quake, e’en in their power,
For sure will come the awful hour
When they must give an answer, why
Heroes in chains should basely die,
Instead of rushing to the field
And courting battle ere they yield?

Dodge: noble and enterprising

In the preface to her book Hans Brinker, or, The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland, Mary Mapes Dodge wrote it aimed "to combine the instructive features of a book of travels with the interest of a domestic tale." The preface is dated November 20, 1865. Among the most famous in the novels is the story of a young boy who plugs a leaking dam with his finger.

Dodge intentionally wrote the book for children, but worked hard to stay true to Dutch legends. She studied the work of well-known writers of Dutch history, literature, and art, while also contacting friends in Holland to tell their own stories. One of her hopes was that others would come to appreciate Dutch culture and recognize its people as "noble and enterprising."

In the book, the reader is first introduced to the titular "silver skates" in chapter three. Hans Brinker and his sister Gretel are poor children suffering in the cold December weather in Holland. Like everyone in town, young and old, they skate on the frozen canal as an easy method of transportation. The two Brinker children, however, have cheap wooden skates they made themselves that don't work very well before becoming water-logged. When they hear of a children's skating race and the prize of beautiful silver skates, they want to take part, but know they can't. Then, a local teenager named Hilda offers them money, but only enough to buy one pair of skates.

Hans wants Gretel to take the money; she wants him to have it. But they also know they should not accept the valuable gift. Hilda offers to use the money as payment in exchange for Gretel crafting one of her beautiful wooden necklaces. For this reason, Hans says the new skates should be Gretel's:

"No, Gretel," he answered at last, "I can wait. Some day I may have money enough saved to buy a fine pair. You shall have these."

Gretel's eyes sparkled; but in another instant she insisted, rather faintly: "The young lady gave the money to you, Hans. I'd be real bad to take it."

Hans insists that she keep it and buy new skates. Sure enough, a few paragraphs later, another wooden necklace is commissioned and both Hans and Gretel have nice, metal skates. The story is sappy, featuring two children in the poorest of conditions, yet not even slightly bothered by their situation. They are modest, loving, and kind (to the point of being unrealistic). And the race for the prized silver skates is much later in the book.

Death of Lazarus: can these dead bones live?

Emma Lazarus was only 38 years old when she died in New York City on November 19, 1887. The cause of death is presumed to be Hodgkin's lymphoma. Though she died at a young age, her career began early: she published her first book at the age of 17.

Lazarus's Jewish family had been in the United States for generations, but she felt a kinship with incoming immigrants, especially those fleeing from Russia. It was that sentiment that inspired her most famous poem, "The New Colossus," which helped raise funds for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. It was not the poem read at the statue's dedication though, decades after her death, its lines were inscribed on the pedestal in 1903.

Shortly after her death, Lazarus's sister Josephine helped compile an anthology of her poems. In the biographical introduction, Josephine notes her sister's desire for privacy and hesitated "to lift the veil and throw the light upon a life so hidden and a personality so withdrawn as that of Emma Lazarus." But, Lazarus was "a born singer," she writes, and "poetry was her natural language, and to write was less effort than to speak." Josephine notes, however, that this "singing" was not "like a bird," singing for "the joy of being alive." Instead, Lazarus felt suffering in the world and in her own life. According to Josephine, her sister was defined by her religion, her culture, and her sex, and those details directed her poems. Referring to work left unfinished, Josephine concludes her biographical sketch with questions: "And now, at the end, we ask, Has the grave really closed over all these gifts? Has that eager, passionate striving ceased, that hunger and thirst which we call life, and 'is the rest silence?'" Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Ezekiel":

What! can these dead bones live, whose sap is dried
   By twenty scorching centuries of wrong?
Is this the House of Israel whose pride
   Is as a tale that's told, an ancient song?
Are these ignoble relics all that live
   Of psalmist, priest, and prophet? Can the breath
Of very heaven bid these bones revive,
   Open the graves, and clothe the ribs of death?
Yea, Prophesy, the Lord hath said again:
   Say to the wind, Come forth and breathe afresh,
Even that they may live, upon these slain,
   And bone to bone shall leap, and flesh to flesh.
The spirit is not dead, proclaim the word.
   Where lay dead bones a host of armed men stand!
I ope your graves, my people, saith the Lord,
   And I shall place you living in your land.

150 years of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"

Julia Ward Howe and her husband Samuel Gridley Howe were invited to the Washington D.C. area to observe the troops during the early months of the American Civil War. There, she heard troops singing the tune "John Brown's Body" and her friend, the minister James Freeman Clarke, suggested she write new words for the old tune.

In the early morning hours of November 18, 1861, Julia Ward Howe wrote those new words. As she recalled later, she was having difficulty sleeping when "the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain." She let the words come over her until "the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts" before she finally got up and wrote it all down. It soon became one of the most popular tunes at military camps throughout the remainder of the war. The poem was published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862 as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
                                                   His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
                                                   His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
                                                   Since God is marching on."

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
                                                   Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
                                                   While God is marching on.

Birth of Solyman Brown, dentist-poet

Solyman Brown was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on November 17, 1790. A Yale graduate, he was a minister, teacher and, after moving to New York in 1812, a practicing Swedenborgian. Twenty years later, his career took a turn when he became a dentist. It was this line of work that made him famous. As a founding member of the American Association of Dental Surgeons, he also became an editor of The American Journal and Library of Dental Science.

Brown once wrote that "the proudest freedom to which a nation can aspire, not excepting even political independence, is found in complete emancipation from literary thraldom." In his own way, Brown tried to aspire to this kind of freedom. Combining his interests in dentistry and poetry, he published Dentologia, a Poem on the General Laws of the Teeth in 1838.

When man was fashioned by the Power Supreme,
Strange and mysterious as the fact may seem,
And cause of wonder; to his frame was given
Peculiar structure by the hand of heaven: —
...One common destiny awaits our kind; —
'Tis this, that long before the infant mind,
Attains maturity—and ere the sun
Has through the first septennial circle run,
The teeth, deciduous, totter and decay,
And prompt successors hurry them away.

Naturally, he became known as the poet laureate of the dental profession. Some of his other poems focused on more conventional themes. One of the best I found was "The Emigrant's Farewell":

Farewell to the land that my fathers defended;
   Farewell to the fields which their ashes inurn;
The holiest flame on their altars descended,
   Which, fed by their sons, shall eternally burn.
Ah! soft be the bed where the hero reposes!
And light be the green turf that over him closes!
Gay Flora shall deck with her earliest roses,
      The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth.

Adieu to the scenes which my heart's young emotions
   Have dressed in attire so alluringly gay;
Ah! never, no never can billowy oceans,
   Nor time, drive the fond recollections away!
From days that are past present comfort I borrow;
The scenes of to-day shall be brighter to-morrow;
In age I'll recall, as a balm for my sorrow,
   The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth.

I go to the West, where the forest, receding,
   Invites the adventurous axe-man along;
I go to the groves where the wild deer are feeding,
   And mountain-birds carol their loveliest song.
Adieu to the land that my fathers defended!
Adieu to the soil on which freemen contended!
Adieu to the sons who from heroes descended!
      The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth.

When far from my home, and surrounded by strangers,
   My thoughts shall recall the gay pleasures of youth;
Though life's stormy ocean shall threaten with dangers,
   My soul shall repose in the sunshine of truth.
While streams to their own native Ocean are tending,
And forest-oaks, swept by the tempest, are bending,
My soul shall exult, as she's proudly defending
      The graves of my sires, and the land of my birth.

Birth of Leland: in darksome lore

I was born on the 15th of August, 1824, in a house which was in Philadelphia, and in Chestnut Street, the second door below Third Street, on the north side. It had been built in the old Colonial time, and in the room in which I first saw life there was an old chimney-piece, which was so remarkable that strangers visiting the city often came to see it.

So begins the Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland, who grew up to become a prominent writer, particularly of humor and folklore. He credits his early interest in reading to his mother, who was "devoted to literature to a degree which was unusual at that time." He also notes he started reading because of chronic illness in his youth.

Leland told the story, almost certainly untrue, that his first nurse performed a ritual on him only a few days after his birth. He had been brought to the garret of the house by the Dutch woman and left sleeping next to an open Bible with a key and a knife on his infant chest. At his head were lighted candles, a plate of salt, and a pile of money. The nurse explained the ritual would ensure his rising in life. He later learned, however, she was a sorceress and the ritual ensured that the child would become interested "in darksome lore" and a scholar of the occult.

Sure enough, after studying at Princeton, traveling to Europe, and fighting in the French Revolution, working as a journalist, and fighting in the American Civil War, he studied more exotic religions and beliefs. He particularly showed an interest in Gypsies, Wicca, and more. From the introduction to his 1882 book The Gypsies:

I have frequently been asked, "Why do you take an interest in gypsies?"

And it is not so easy to answer. Why, indeed? ...But I cannot tell you why. Why do I love to wander on the roads to hear the birds; to see old church towers afar, rising over fringes of forest, a river and a bridge in the foreground, and an ancient castle beyond, with a modern village springing up about it, just as at the foot of the burg there lies the falling trunk of an old tree, around which weeds and flowers are springing up, nourished by its decay? Why love these better than pictures, and with a more than fine-art feeling? Because on the roads, among such scenes, between the hedge-rows and by the river, I find the wanderers who properly inhabit not the houses but the scene, not a part but the whole. These are the gypsies, who live like the birds and hares, not of the house-born or the townbred, but free and at home only with nature.

Moby-Dick: I have written a wicked book

In his home at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Herman Melville received the first copies of Moby-Dick on November 14, 1851. It was in that home, Arrowhead, that he wrote the book, partly inspired by his own whaling trip a decade earlier. The book's opening lines, "Call me Ishmael," have become among the most famous in American literature.

The book was dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, in "admiration for his genius." The two authors had met only recently and instantly formed a friendship. The night he received his book, Melville visited Hawthorne (who was then living nearby in the town of Lenox). Though he was in the midst of packing in preparation for his move back to Concord, Hawthorne did not hesitate to read Moby-Dick. Only two days later, he wrote a letter of appreciation to Melville (now lost). Melville was pleased that Hawthorne "understood the book." As he wrote, "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb."

The book itself follows now-iconic characters like the exotic Queequeg, the mates Starbuck and Flask, and, of course, the vengeful Captain Ahab and his obsessive quest for the white whale named Moby-Dick. It has also become the bane of students of American literature who find the detailed chapters on whaling tedious. Among its memorable scenes are the first meeting between Ishmael and Queequeg (who share a bed that night) and the fiery and foreboding sermon by Father Mapple. My personal favorite is the scene where Ahab nails a valuable doubloon to the mast to tempt his crewmen:

"I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what's all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true; and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won't smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's nine hundred and sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em out."

Typee: very entertaining and pleasing

On November 13, 1848, Allan Melville noted the progress of Typee, a novel written by his brother Herman Melville. The cost of publishing 6500 copies, including the process of stereotyping, totaled $1663.01. By then, 5753 copies were sold. Melville's portion of the profits, Allan noted, came to about $686.46.

Though this was certainly a good profit for a first book, the Melvilles were already looking forward. They were in the midst of negotiating terms for a new book, Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, with the publishers Harper & Brothers. Typee had been published by Wiley & Putnam but its sequel, Omoo, was brought to Harper & Brothers (within a few months after the above records, rights to Typee were brought there too).

Typee was, by all accounts, quite a success, and it brought the unknown Melville into the literary scene. Poet/editor Charles Fenno Hoffman called it "one of the most delightful and well written narratives that ever came from an American pen." Critic Margaret Fuller noted it was "a very entertaining and pleasing narrative." Idealist George Ripley approved of the "careless elegance" in the author's writing style. Though the veracity of the story was soon questioned, Typee sold very well.

Wiley had apparently been slow in making payments, often requiring a prompt from Melville himself before a check was cut. Harper, however, paid Melville up front with $500 before Mardi was even printed.

Percival: with loveliest creatures

According to the notice inside the book, "on the eleventh day of November in the forty-eighth year of the Independence of the United States of America," James Gates Percival copyrighted his book Poems. That date, in more modern terms, is November 11, 1823. In addition to being a poet, the Connecticut-born, Yale-educated Percival was also a practicing medical doctor and, for a short time, a chemistry professor, as well as an assistant in the making of Noah Webster's American dictionary.

Percival's book was massive, collecting nearly 400 pages of poems, including two that were over 40 pages each. Several focused on plant life, reflecting his interest in botany, many were odes, and few are short lyrics. One of the shortest is "My Heart Was a Mirror":

My heart was a mirror, that showed every treasure
Of beauty and loveliness, life can display;
It reflected each beautiful blossom of pleasure,
But turned from the dark looks of bigots away;
It was living and moving with loveliest creatures,
In smiles or in tears, as the soft spirit chose;
Now shining with brightest and ruddiest features,
Now pale as the snow of the dwarf mountain rose.

These visions of sweetness for ever were playing,
Like butterflies fanning the still summer air;
Some sported a moment, some, never decaying,
In deep hues of love are still lingering there:
At times some fair spirit, descending from Heaven,
Would shroud all the rest in the blaze of its light;
Then wood nymphs and fays o'er the mirror were driven,
Like the fire-swarms, that kindle the darkness of night.

But the winds and the storms broke the mirror, and severed
Full many a beautiful angel in twain;
And the tempest raged on, till the fragments were shivered
And scattered, like dust, as it rolls o'er the plain :
One piece, which the storm, in its madness, neglected
Away, on the wings of the whirlwind, to bear,
One fragment was left, and that fragment reflected
All the beauty, that Mary threw carelessly there.

A bad manuscript and worse proof-reading

The novel Precaution was published on November 10, 1820, priced at $2 for both volumes. Its author, James Fenimore Cooper, wrote the book as a challenge to himself. His publisher (A. T. Goodrich & Co.), however, soon learned he was himself a challenge to work with.

Cooper was highly concerned with its marketing (he denied it should be referred to as an "original" American work, and hoped people would infer it was a republication of a British work along the lines of Walter Scott) and asked his name not be included. Another reason for this was that he was already working on a new book, The Spy, which he recognized as a superior work. As he told his publisher, "I can make a much better one — am making a much better one."

Still, Cooper hoped Precaution would be successful, and certainly hoped for a respectable financial return. He was concerned, nonetheless, that British publishers would pirate his book. About three months before its American publication, Cooper asked his publisher, "What do you mean to do about England?" He was not impressed by the slow response and took matters into his own hands — but was fairly limited because of his desire for anonymity. His plan was to take a pseudonym, Edward Jones.  Instead, his publisher found a lawyer friend who would negotiate on his behalf.

All this was ironic for a book Cooper never intended to publish at all. Further, Cooper was so disappointed in the poor quality of the first American edition (the fault of his own poorly-written manuscript) that the British edition had scores of corrections. As a later preface noted:

[There] were many defects in plot, style, and arrangement, that were entirely owing to precipitation and inexperience, and quite as many faults, of another nature, that are to be traced solely to a bad manuscript and worse proof-reading. Perhaps no novel of our times was worse printed than the first edition of this work. More than a hundred periods were placed in the middle of sentences, and perhaps five times that number were omitted, in places where they ought to have been inserted. It is scarcely necessary to add, that passages were rendered obscure, and that entire paragraphs were unintelligible.

*For much of this information, I am indebted to the biography James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years by Wayne Franklin.

Frost: those great careless wings

Robert Frost claimed he first heard his own poetic voice when he published "My Butterfly." The poem was published in The Independent on November 8, 1894, later collected in his book A Boy's Will (1913). It was his first professionally published poem (though he also included it in his self-published book Twilight). Decades later, Frost told a correspondent that he particularly liked the lines beginning "The gray grass is scarce dappled with snow." It was then, he noted, "when I first struck the note that was to be mine."

Even so, the poem is surprisingly un-Frost-like, utilizing a more old-fashioned, highly-technical style inspired by Romantic poetry. As Frost recalled years later, he first came across the Independent in an old library and was impressed that it included a poem on the front page. "This experience gave me my very first revelation that a publication existed, anywhere in my native land, that was a vehicle for the publication of poetry," he noted. It was for this reason he sent his first poem to that magazine. "My Butterfly" sometimes includes the subtitle, "An Elegy":

Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead:
        Save only me
   (Nor is it sad to thee!)
        Save only me
   There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.

        The gray grass is not dappled with the snow;
Its two banks have not shut upon the river;
           But it is long ago—
        It seems forever—
   Since first I saw thee glance,
   With all the dazzling other ones,
           In airy dalliance,
        Precipitate in love,
   Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above,
Like a limp rose-wreath in a fairy dance.

        When that was, the soft mist
Of my regret hung not on all the land,
        And I was glad for thee,
        And glad for me, I wist.

Thou didst not know, who tottered, wandering on high,
That fate had made thee for the pleasure of the wind,
        With those great careless wings,
        Nor yet did I.

        And there were other things:
It seemed God let thee flutter from his gentle clasp:
        Then fearful he had let thee win
        Too far beyond him to be gathered in,
     Snatched thee, o’er eager, with ungentle grasp.

        Ah! I remember me
        How once conspiracy was rife
        Against my life—
The languor of it and the dreaming fond;
Surging, the grasses dizzied me of thought,
   The breeze three odors brought,
And a gem-flower waved in a wand!

        Then when I was distraught
           And could not speak,
        Sidelong, full on my cheek,
What should that reckless zephyr fling
      But the wild touch of thy dye-dusty wing!

I found that wing broken to-day!
   For thou are dead, I said,
        And the strange birds say.
I found it with the withered leaves
        Under the eaves.

Cranch: one in the Land of Sleep

The November 7, 1885 issue of the New York-based weekly The Critic included a poem by Christopher Pearse Cranch. Cranch was a minister-turned-Transcendentalist who alternated his career as a writer and artist. His poem "The Two Dreams" was later referred to by one critic as "one of his more subtle and imaginative bits of verse."  When published in The Critic, it coincidentally followed an article on American Art galleries.

The poem is unusual for Cranch in many ways. For one, it is written in the voice of a woman and it also expresses an atypical sentimentalism for Cranch. Many of his other works are humorous or philosophical, often employing nature and scenery for metaphorical purposes. "The Two Dreams":

I met one in the Land of Sleep
   Who seemed a friend long known and true.
I woke. That friend I could not keep —
   For him I never knew.

Yet there was one in life's young morn
   Loved me, I thought, as I loved him.
Slow from that trance I waked forlorn,
   To find his love grown dim.

He by whose side in dreams I ranged,
   Unknown by name, my friend still seems;
While he I knew so well has changed.
   So both were only dreams.

Moore: To my friend

The New Orleans-born writer Alice Ruth Moore dedicated her first book Violets and Other Tales (1895), "To my friend of November 5, 1892." The ambiguous message is better understood through her diary: "November 5, I began my romance with Nelson Mitchell."

Moore would have been about 17 years old when she began that romance. It did not last. In fact, the young Moore was known for being flirtation (to the dismay of her eventual husband, Paul Laurence Dunbar). Violets and Other Tales, which included both prose and poetry, came out three years later when Moore was 20; she later called it "sheer slop." A contemporary review, however, called it "evidence of great intelligence among persons of African birth." Sure enough, Moore was soon accepted among the elite black community.

Her poem, "Love and the Butterfly":

I heard a merry voice one day
And glancing at my side;
Fair Love, all breathless, flushed with play,
A butterfly did ride.
"Whither away, oh sportive boy?"
I asked, he tossed his head;
Laughing aloud for purest joy,
And past me swiftly sped.

Next day I heard a plaintive cry
And Love crept in my arms;
Weeping he held the butterfly,
Devoid of all its charms.
Sweet words of comfort, whispered I
Into his dainty ears,
But love still hugged the butterfly,
And bathed its wounds with tears.

O Henry: When the cows come home

William Sidney Porter, known by the pseudonym O. Henry, turned to writing while incarcerated to raise money for his family. The majority of his works were short stories, often humorous tales. On occasion, however, he also wrote poetry.

Not all of his poems include the wit of his short prose. His poem "Looking Forward," dated November 3, 1895, is a harmless and fun poem that experiments a bit with form in its repeated phrases "when (till) the cows come home":
 

Soft shadows grow deeper in dingle and dell,
  Night hawks are beginning to roam;
The breezes are cooler; the owl is awake,
The whippoorwill calls from his nest in the brake;
When
            the
                    cows
                              come
                                        home.

The cup of the lily is heavy with dew;
  In heaven's aerial dome
Stars twinkle; and down in the darkening swamp
The fireflies glow, and the elves are a-romp;
When
            the
                    cows
                              come
                                        home.

And the populist smiles when he thinks of the time
  That unto his party will come;
When at the pie counter they capture a seat,
And they'll eat and eat and eat and eat
Till
            the
                    cows
                              come
                                        home.

The poem was published in the Houston Daily Post while Henry was employed as a columnist there. It was a role he held for less than a year.

Stowe: we get into regular gales

On November 2, 1872, Harriet Beecher Stowe continued her public reading tour, this time in Bangor, Maine. Her first reading ever took place less than two months earlier. It was a far cry from her tour of England in 1853, during which Stowe merely stood up for her audiences, accepted their applause, and sat down; the actual reading was done by her brothers. Her motivation for the tour was simple: she needed the money. Each audience member (150 to 1,500, depending on the venue) paid between 50 and 75 cents to hear the "most noted woman in America" according to one billing.

The reading was encouraged in part by her publisher James T. Fields, though Stowe admitted, "I am appalled by finding myself booked to read." Billed as "the world-famous author of Uncle Tom's Cabin," she naturally chose to read sections from her best-selling novel. But Stowe also presented selections from some of her New England-themed short stories and The Pearl of Orr's Island.

Despite her reticence at the beginning of the tour, she eventually admitted she enjoyed her audience's reaction: "how they do laugh! We get into regular gales." And, of course, her most important motivation: "it is as easy a way of making money as I have ever tried, though no way of making money is perfectly easy." Despite the success of her writing, Stowe was a bit to willingly parted with her earnings, often donating to various causes or to those in need.

Still, the tour proved rewarding for Stowe. In Bangor, a woman who was deaf traveled 50 miles just to see Stowe and admitted, "I'd rather see you than the Queen." Stowe might also have felt at home: two decades earlier, while writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, she lived in Brunswick, Maine, only slightly southwest of Bangor.