Regionalism and Local Color

Final Examination  Information

Sarah Orne Jewett grew up in South Berwick, Maine, in the home of her paternal grandfather, a retired sea captain who had secured a great deal of wealth. As a child, Sarah traveled about the New England countryside with her father, on his rounds as a physician, which was a kind of “open-air” therapy (“(Theodora)”) for her childhood arthritis. Biographers like to link this early experience to her significant observational power as a writer in the regional mold.

Sarah had the wherewithal to devote herself to writing, which she did assiduously, submitting stories to periodicals as early as 1867. She published several sketches of Maine coastal village life in the Atlantic, which assistant editor William Dean Howells, a name that ought to be very familiar to us by now, suggested she collect and revise for a stand-alone publication.  The result was Deephaven (1877), an “episodic work” (“(Theodora)”) that is typically classed as a novel (though sometimes criticized for lacking coherence). Continue reading →

I’ve changed the schedule.  Yes, I did.

I cut a short story by Jewett and made Monday(4/15)  an “open office hours” day instead of a regular class meeting.  “Open office hours” is not, however, merely a euphemism for “day off.”  I will really be in my office, and you can really come see me. In fact, I invite you to come to my office as early as 9:00, though you must leave by 10:50, for I have a bunch of hobbits (first year students) coming in for draft conferences at 11:00.

That is all…

Born Mary Eleanor Wilkins in Randolph, MA, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is a writer best known for her concern with the often isolated lives of women in New England villages at an historical moment in which modern, industrialized society is washing away the rural, small town character of New England life.  Her prose marks an adaptation of the concerns of regionalism within a realist frame, a key element of which is a concern for the psychology and choices of central characters.

At 15, Mary moved with her family from Massachusetts to Brattlebro, VT, where her father went into the dry goods business. After finishing high school, Mary was enrolled in Mount Holyoak Female Seminary, but this only lasted a year, as she found the experience a terribly strict and confining one.  She returned to Brattlebro to attend a local seminary and teach in a local girl’s school in order to help support the family after the failure of her father’s business.  The teaching did not last long, however, as the school, too, soon failed.  In the Continue reading →

Born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans to a middle-class, mixed race family, Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote poetry, short fiction, and essays.  While she is now widely known for her writing, she made her living as a teacher, at first in New Orleans after her graduation at 17 from Straight University and later in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York.  She also continued her schooling later, with time at Cornell University, for an M.A., and at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and the University of Pennsylvanian (Psychology and educational testing).

Soon after she published her first book, a multi-genre compilation (Violets and Other Tales, ’95), she moved with her family from New Orleans to Massachusetts and struck up an epistolary relationship with Paul Laurence Dunbar, a young African American writer Continue reading →

… by me.

Why was it in my head that “The Storm” is “prequel” to “At the ‘Cadian Ball”?  I somehow got that into my head in the most stuck-in-the-head kind of way possible, even included it in the PDF of the text I posted and which stood uncorrected until 15 minutes ago.

Suffice it to say that you need to strike any memory of my having said it and correct it if you are using a hard copy.

Sorry ’bout that.

Kate Chopin, best known for her feminist 1899 short novel, The Awakening, was born Katherine O’Flaherty  in St. Louis, Missouri to a French Creole mother prominent in the French-descended gentry of St. Louis and an Irish immigrant father, who was a successful merchant and a founder of the Pacific Railroad who died in a train wreck when Kate was very young.  By all accounts, she had a rough childhood, adding to her father’s early death that of her half-brother, a confederate soldier, and her beloved great-grandmother, with whom she spent a great deal of time and from whom she heard stories of the early French settlers of St. Louis.  She turned inward for a time, deeply absorbed in books; in fact, for “two years she secluded herself in the family attic–even missing school–and pored over more books” (“Katherine”).

Continue reading →

Grace King was born into a well-heeled, aristocratic family in New Orleans and lived a life that such status entails, until New Orleans fell into the Union Army’s hands in 1862.  Her family left the city at that time to her father’s plantation Sugar Plantation near New Iberia, LA. When they returned to New Orleans after the war, they had to live in far more straitened and humble circumstances, in a house in a poor area of town.  Nonetheless, Grace was able to continue her education and lay the foundations for her ambition to write and travel (Kirby, American Short-Story Writers).

Reportedly, her break came as a result of a conversation she had in 1885 with Richard Watson Gilder, then editor Continue reading →

A native son of New Orleans, Cable began his literary career a few years after the Civil War, during which he had served in the Confederate Calvary.  After the war, having worked a couple years in the cotton business and as a surveyor, he contracted malaria.  While he was laid up, he started publishing humorous sketches under the pen name “Drop Shot” in a column for the New Orleans Picayune.  The newspaper offered him a reporting job, though he was eventually dropped from the paper because, for religious reasons, he wouldn’t review theater. He went back to work for the cotton business but continued to write.

Cable’s “big break came, appropriately enough for a writer steeped in New Orleans color,” during the Mardi Gras celebration in 1873 (“George”). Edward King, a journalist with Scribner’s Monthly was in town to report on the South after the war. Cable, having struck up an acquaintance with King, showed him some of his unpublished stories, and King, in turn,  showed them to his editors, who ended up Continue reading →

Mary Austin, born in Illinois (Mary Hunter), after completing college in 1888 (at the age of 19), moved West to California to homestead with her family. This was, essentially, a bust, and a few years later, Mary, unable to keep a position as a teacher, in 1891 married Stafford Wallace Austin, whom she would separate from in 1906; they were divorced in 1914.

She published her first story, “The Mother of Felipe” in The Overland Monthly  in 1892.  Her “first significant publication,” though,  appeared a little over ten years later (Fetterley and Pryse  565), The Land of Little Rain (1903), from which we draw our selections for Wednesday and Friday of this week. In that time in between her Overland Monthly piece and Little Rain, Austin moved with her husband to the vicinity of Death Valley, from which she drew inspiration. In general terms, she is best known for her writing depicting the Southwest.  I put the selections from Little Rain in the unit with Jack London’s Northland stories, Zitkala-Sa’s short Sioux fiction, and Gary Totten’s piece on the problems of reading Indigenous writing as regional writing in order to develop discussion about regionalism’s complicated engagement with Native America.  Continue reading →