Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Knowing All Nature’s ‘Moods and Manners’)

“I seek acquaintance with nature to know all her moods and manners. Primitive nature is the most interesting to me. I take infinitive pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and, then, to my chagrin I hear that is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know the entire heaven and an entire earth. All the great trees, and beasts, fishes and fowls are gone.” —American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), journal entry for Mar. 23, 1856, in The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 (2009)

PBS is giving Thoreau the same treatment it gave Ernest Hemingway a few years ago: a three-part documentary by Ken Burns, starting tonight. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this Transcendentalist as naturalist and protest figure.

Hailed by youth in the 1960s, Thoreau may be experiencing an even greater groundswell of interest now. Let’s hope so.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Irish Ice-Cutters in New England Winters)

“A hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and ‘cradle–holes’ were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty–five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss–grown and hoary ruin, built of azure–tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac—his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty–five per cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars.” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

One of those jobs that despised immigrants performed years ago...

The image accompanying this post, showing ice-harvesting in Massachusetts in the early 1850s, appeared first in Gleason's Drawing Room Companion (1852), p. 37.

Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on New Year’s Day, ‘A Harmless Annual Institution’)

“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.”—American novelist, humorist, lecturer, and journalist Mark Twain (1835-1910), “New Year's Day,” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, Jan. 1, 1863

Flashback, November 1900: Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie’ Released by Half-Hearted Publisher

When the publishing firm Doubleday, Page released Sister Carrie in November 1900, it was without publicity, reflecting the company’s growing doubts and lack of enthusiasm. 

Though an-house reader, novelist Frank Norris, enthusiastically recommended it, one executive or another must have had second doubts after taking it on, as Doubleday tried to offload it on another firm, until author Theodore Dreiser insisted that they were contractually obliged to put it out.

Praise on both sides of the Atlantic didn’t help the reception of the fictional debut of journalist Dreiser. Only a third of its first printing of 1,000 copies were sold, and Doubleday turned over what was left to a remainder house.

Little did anyone know that Sister Carrie would become a landmark in American literature, highlighting the rise of naturalism—a movement that viewed human beings as animalistic, subject to environmental and heredity forces, usually beyond their control. Free will played little to no role in characters’ actions.

If this sounds like a vision colored by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, you would be right. In depicting situations with the exactitude and objectivity of a scientist, Dreiser found a writing mode in which he could use to best advantage his skill as a fact-gathering journalist. 

(One key scene in Sister Carrie was based on a five-week Brooklyn trolley strike he had covered in 1895 for the New York World, when he actually rode the rails and observed clashes between union workers and scan drivers.)

Along with his champion Norris and Stephen Crane (another reporter-turned-fiction writer), Dreiser was one of the primary exponents of naturalism, revealing life among the lower classes to a degree most readers had never experienced.

As critical acceptance of this novel grew, it found its way into academe. Its relatively moderate length (roughly 500 pages) has facilitated its listing in many college American literature survey courses, and despite its massive size (900-plus pages), Dreiser’s later An American Tragedy also continues to be regarded as a classic.

Still, it is doubtful that any reader has enjoyed Sister Carrie. It’s not just that Dreiser lacked a sense of humor that could occasionally brighten his unrelentingly grim subject matter and worldview.

No, unlike Crane, Jack London, or European practitioners of naturalism like Emile Zola or Guy de Maupassant, Dreiser could not resist a hopelessly verbose, ham-fisted style, with clotted, cliched sentences.

When he mounted a rhetorical soapbox, not only do his chapter titles induce cringes (e.g., “When Waters Engulf Us We Reach for a Star”), but longer passages can strain credulity, as in this one introducing the title character, inexperienced teenager Carrie Meeber, traveling to the big city:

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”

In tone, that was out of sync with a quiet mastery of detail that lent his narrative believability.

No stranger to temptations of the flesh, Dreiser recorded, with a candor unusual for the time, his characters’ sexual desire. Even before publication, he had only reluctantly yielded to the urging of his wife Sara and friend Arthur Henry to tone down some passages.

Originally, for instance, he wrote of Carrie, “Her dresses draped her becomingly, for she wore excellent corsets and laced herself with care….She had always been of cleanly instincts and now that opportunity afforded, she kept her body sweet."

Sara revised it to read, “Her dresses draped her becomingly. . . . She had always been of cleanly instincts. Her teeth were white, her nails rosy."

(Readers would not know what Dreiser originally intended his book to convey until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published an edition based on the author's uncut holograph version, containing 36,000 words more than what Doubleday released.)

Indeed, Dreiser made no moral comment on Carrie (or most of his characters, for that matter). He outraged self-professed guardians of public morality especially by not punishing her for living out of wedlock.

As time went on, Dreiser pushed harder against such censors, observing in one 1940 letter, “Any writer, artist, painter or sculptor, or thinker of any breadth of mind who wants to present reality is now being presented by a kept Press."

Readers should not be left with the impression that the sense of authority Dreiser displayed derived solely from his skill as a reporter. He also understood all too well, through his own situation and that of family members, the quandaries that Carrie and her lovers faced as they reached for opportunities for love and money in a big metropolis:

*Like Carrie, Dreiser left home as a teenager for life in a large city;

*His sister Emma, like Carrie, caused a scandal by eloping with a married man;

*Like Carrie’s lover George Hurstwood, Lorenzo A. Hopkins, the man whom Emma ran off to Montreal with, absconded with his employer’s money, before dying, broken and alcoholic, in New York.

*Like Hurstwood, Dreiser himself loved possessions and fancy restaurants.

Sister Carrie concluded in tragedy, with Carrie triumphant as a Broadway actress but unable to shake the emptiness inside, while Hurstwood killed himself in a flophouse. Real life mirrored fiction for the author: A year consumed by bitter quarrels with Doubleday ended even more bleakly, as Dreiser’s often improvident father died on Christmas Day.

With a plot and style unrelieved by humor, even of the dark variety, Sister Carrie is about as lighthearted as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

While this flaw can frustrate readers, it doesn’t negate what a milestone and achievement the book represented in American literature. As Dreiser’s biographer Richard Lingeman noted, the novelist exhibited "sympathy with the outsiders looking in, those who didn't belong, who desire the light and warmth inside the walled city."

(The image accompanying this post comes from William Wyler’s 1952 adaptation of Dreiser’snovel, with the title shortened to Carrie. Jennifer Jones, as the title character, sits between her current lover, Charles Drouet, played by Eddie Albert, on the right, and her future one, George Hurstwood, played by Laurence Olivier.)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Walking and Writing)

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper. A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain. You need to increase the draft below, as the owners of meadow on Concord river say of the Billerica Dam. Only when we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical, wooden, dull to read.”— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), journal entry, August 19, 1851, “Thoreau’s Journal (Part IV),” in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1905

Quote of the Day (Flannery O’Connor, on the Direction of a Life)

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”—American novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor (1926-1964), Wise Blood: A Novel (1952)

I was glad to see, in the new film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, not only that The Boss is reading a Flannery O'Connor book, but also that his producer and manager Jon Landau recalls this quote for him.

 I hope that more readers will be curious enough to seek out more work by this startlingly original voice in American fiction.

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Power and Politics)

“All kinds of power usually emerge at the same time; good energy and bad; power of mind with physical health; the ecstasies of devotion with the exasperations of debauchery. The same elements are always present, only sometimes these conspicuous, and sometimes those; what was yesterday foreground, being to-day background;—what was surface, playing now a not less effective part as basis. The longer the drought lasts the more is the atmosphere surcharged with water. The faster the ball falls to the sun, the force to fly off is by so much augmented. And in morals, wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far. In politics, the sons of democrats will be whigs; whilst red republicanism in the father is a spasm of nature to engender an intolerable tyrant in the next age. On the other hand, conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.” — American essayist-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), “Power,” in The Conduct of Life (1860)

Quote of the Day (Herman Melville, on ‘Human Madness’)

“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and poet Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby-Dick or, the Whale (1851)

In the novel Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab personified “human madness.” Gregory Peck, shown here, played the character in the 1956 film adaptation directed by John Huston.

Quote of the Day (Robert Frost, on Acceptance)

“Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), “Acceptance,” in West-Running Brook (1928)

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Comparing Writers and Actors)

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.” — American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), The Last Tycoon, edited by Edmund Wilson (1941)

My favorite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was born on this day in 1896 in St. Paul, MN. Though his prose is marked by the feathery style of poetry, his literary aspirations revolved, to one extent or another, around acting:

*In the short story “The Captured Shadow,” his youthful alter ego, Basil Duke Lee, casts a girl he has a crush on as the lead of a play he’s written;

*As a student at the now-defunct Cardinal Newman Prep in Hackensack, NJ, he loved the opportunity to take the train into New York to catch plays;

*In college, he wrote music and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club, the university's undergraduate musical comedy troupe;

*In 1923, hoping for a Broadway smash, he wrote (and invested money in) his only published play, The Vegetable, only to see it die after a single performance in Atlantic City;

*Though no record of it has ever been found, the actress Lois Moran claimed to have arranged a screen test for the author—which, predictably, did not work out well; and

*In his later years, as he struggled with creditors and alcoholism, Fitzgerald found much-needed temporary employment (and eventual heartbreak) as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Well, no matter. To his credit, Fitzgerald recognized the potential for motion pictures as a new art form, and even in its unfinished form The Last Tycoon may well still be the best novel ever written about Hollywood.

(For an interesting take on a surprising Fitzgeraldian influence on a recent film-- Damien Chazelle’s sprawling examination of the transition from the silent to sound eras, Babylon—see Kathy Fennessy’s December 2022 post from the “Seattle Film Blog.”)

Quote of the Day (Richard Wilbur, on a Job of Poetry)

“One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable by clear, precise confrontation.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), “The Art of Poetry No. 22” (interviewed by Peter A. Stitt, Helen McCloy Ellison and Ellesa Clay High), The Paris Review, Issue 72 (Winter 1977)

Quote of the Day (Truman Capote, on Birthdays)

“I think always about somewhere else, somewhere else where everything is dancing, like people dancing in the streets, and everything is pretty, like children on their birthdays.” —American fiction writer, essayist and screenwriter Truman Capote (1924-1984), "Children on Their Birthdays" (1947), in The Complete Stories of Truman Capote (2004)

Quote of the Day (Laura Ingalls Wilder, on ‘Some Old-Fashioned Things’)

“Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let’s be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.”— American author, journalist, and teacher Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), A Family Collection: Life on the Farm and in the Country, Making a Home; the Ways of the World, a Woman's Role (1993)

The image accompanying this post shows cast members from the long-running TV series Little House on the Prairie, adapted from the Wilder books, featuring Michael Landon as star, executive producer, and director.

Quote of the Day (Barbara Kingsolver, on the Difference Between a Regional and Universal Novel)

“If a novel takes place between eight square blocks of Manhattan, it's universal. And if it happens in Kentucky, it's regional."—Kentucky native and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, poet, and essayist Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible), quoted by Madison Darbyshire, “Lunch With the FT: Barbara Kingsolver; ‘Everyone Has Friends Impacted by the Opioid Crisis,’” The Financial Times, Jan. 7-8, 2023

The image accompanying this post is of Barbara Kingsolver speaking at BookExpo 2018 during the Adult Author Breakfast. Also on the panel (not pictured) are Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Jill Lepore, Nicholas Sparks, and Trevor Noah. The photo was taken May 30, 2018, by Terry Ballard.

Quote of the Day (Henry James, on a Beach in Summer)

“As you recline upon the beach, you may observe Mademoiselle X… the actress of the Palais Royal Theater, whom you have seen and applauded behind the footlights. She wears a bathing dress in which, as regards the trousers, even what I have called the minimum has been appreciably scanted; but she trips down, surveying her breezy nether limbs. ‘C'est convemable, j'espere, eh?’ says Mademoiselle, and trots up the springboard which projects over the waves with one end uppermost, like a great seesaw. She balances a moment, and then gives a great aerial dive, executing on the way the most graceful of somersaults. This performance Mademoiselle X repeats during the ensuing hour, at intervals of five minutes, and leaves you, as you lie tossing little stones into the water, to ponder the curious and delicate question why a lady may go so far as to put herself into a single scant, clinging garment and take a straight leap, head downward, before 300 spectators, without violation of propriety, leaving the impropriety to begin with her turning over in the air in such a way that for five seconds her head is upward. The logic of the matter is mysterious; white and black are divided by a hair. But the fact remains that virtue is on one side of the hair and vice on the other. There are some days here so still and radiant, however, that it seems as if vice itself, steeped in such an air and such a sea, might be diluted into innocence.” — American expatriate novelist-essayist Henry James (1843-1916), Parisian Sketches: Letters to the “New York Tribune,”1875-1876, edited by Leon Edel (1957)

Quote of the Day (Poet Denise Levertov, With Thoughts in a Garden)

“In a garden grene whenas I lay—

you set the words to a tune so plaintive
it plucks its way through my life as through a wood.

As through a wood, shadows and light between birches,
gliding a moment in open glades, hidden by thickets of holly
your life winds in me.” — British-born American poet and Roman Catholic convert Denise Levertov (1923-1997), “Olga Poems,” in The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, edited by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey (2013)

Quote of the Day (John O'Hara, With Some Early July Social History)

“They dodged being in love at first, and because they always had been friends, his seeing her increasingly more frequently did not become perceptible until he asked her to go with him to the July 3 Assembly [a large society gathering held twice a year in Gibbsville, PA on New Year's Eve and July 3^rd]. You asked a girl at least a month in advance for the Assemblies, and you asked the girl you liked best. It was the only one he ever freely had asked her to; she knew his mother told him to ask her to the very first one. The Assembly was not just another dance, and in the time between her accepting and the night of the dance they both were conscious of it. A girl gave preference in dates to the man who was asking her to the Assembly.” —American novelist and short-story writer John O'Hara (1905-1970), Appointment in Samarra (1934)

When John O’Hara first wrote about the custom of “Assembly” in the early 1930s, it was contemporary. When he titled the first collection of his extraordinary short stories in the 1960s using the word, however, fewer readers would have recognized the reference. That number has surely dwindled in the sixty-plus years since.

In the foreword to his 1960 trio of novellas, Sermons and Soda-Water, O’Hara explained what he felt increasingly compelled to do, particularly for younger readers not familiar with the original context of the times:

“I have lived with as well as in the Twentieth Century from its earliest days. The United States in this Century is what I know, and it is my business to write about it to the best of my ability, with the sometimes special knowledge I have. The Twenties, the Thirties, and the Forties are already history, but I cannot be content to leave their story in the hands of the historians and the editors of picture books. I want to record the way people talked and thought and felt, and do it with complete honesty and variety.”

You can read O’Hara for his extraordinary facility with dialogue, as well as for the insights into characters that he wants you to infer from below the surface of the story.

But, especially in his later work—and even glancingly, here, in Appointment in Samarra—you come away with a better understanding of a particular time and region (what he called his “Pennsylvania Protectorate” of the anthracite coal area in which he grew up).

It is, as he hoped, something you’re unlikely to learn from “historians and the editors of picture books”—or, I might add, other writers of fiction. 

(For a further consideration of why, "Among American novelists, O'Hara remains our best, begrudging social historian," I urge you to read Charles F. McElwee III's fine 2014 essay on the Website of the John O'Hara Society.)

Quote of the Day (Sinclair Lewis, on an Evangelist’s Planned Jersey Shore Project)

“The pier was an immense structure, built of cheap knotty pine, painted a hectic red with gold stripes. It was pleasant, however, on hot evenings. Round it ran a promenade out over the water, where once lovers had strolled between acts of the opera, and giving on the promenade were many barnlike doors.

[Evangelist Sister] “Sharon [Falconer] christened it ‘The Waters of Jordan Tabernacle,’ added more and redder paint, more golden gold, and erected an enormous revolving cross, lighted at night with yellow and ruby electric bulbs….

“All of Clontar, with its mile of comfortable summer villas and gingerbread hotels, was excited over the tabernacle, and the Chamber of Commerce had announced, ‘We commend to the whole Jersey coast this high-class spiritual feature, the latest addition to the manifold attractions and points of interest at the snappiest of all summer colonies.’

“A choir of two hundred had been coaxed in, and some of them had been persuaded to buy their own robes and mortar boards.

“Near the sand dune against which Sharon and Elmer [Gantry] lolled was the tabernacle, over which the electric cross turned solemnly, throwing its glare now on the rushing surf, now across the bleak sand.

"‘And it's mine!’ Sharon trembled. ‘I've made it! Four thousand seats, and I guess it's the only Christian tabernacle built out over the water!’”—Pulitzer and Nobel Literature prize-winning American novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), Elmer Gantry (1927)

I came across this quote after watching on TCM, decades after the first time I saw it, the 1960 film adaptation of Elmer Gantry. (In the attached image, that’s Burt Lancaster as the titular preacher and Jean Simmons as Sharon Falconer.)

In the movie, the grand evangelical center that Sharon envisions is built (and then destroyed in a fire) in the fictional Midwestern city of Zenith. I was all the more surprised, then, to discover that Sinclair Lewis set Sharon’s project in a seaside community in New Jersey. I wondered, given that the novelist conducted extensive interviews and research while writing his fiction, if he had a particular Jersey Shore town in mind.

For help, I turned to Dr. Sally E. Parry, Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Illinois State University and Executive Director of the Sinclair Lewis Society. She wrote back that though the novelist did most of his research in the Midwest as he visited churches (especially in Missouri), he did not, to the best of her knowledge, model the tabernacle on a particular place.

Sharon Falconer, she continued, is strongly based on Aimee Semple McPherson, whose ministry was primarily centered in California.  “The novel was also inspired to a certain extent by Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), which Lewis admired (Carol Kennicott discusses it in Main Street). Theron Ware is a Methodist preacher who is awakened to a variety of religious beliefs, including some by Sister Soulsby.”

Dr. Parry confirmed one possibility I raised: that Lewis might have learned about some Jersey Shore spots while working as a janitor for six months at Helicon Hall, the novelist Upton Sinclair’s 1906 utopian experiment in Englewood, NJ.

Now that I think of it, locating Sharon’s tabernacle by the shore might have appealed to the novelist in a couple of other ways: it would have testified to the growing national ambitions of her ministry, and this geographic location would have been even more resonant for a structure named after “the Waters of Jordan.”

Whatever the case may be, this novel, like so much of the writer’s other work at the height of his influence on American culture in the 1920s, continues to reverberate a century later.

In the late 1980s, in an appearance at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, Tom Wolfe highlighted the conclusion of this stinging satire, where Gantry notices “a new singer, a girl with charming ankles and lively eyes, with whom he would certainly have to become well acquainted.” Lewis had certainly anticipated the sensational sex scandals that had recently engulfed televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, he observed.

The death this past week of the latter reminded me that Swaggart was involved in another scandal three years after the one that led to his defrocking by the Assemblies of God. 

Unfortunately, the immense moral and political sway wielded by today’s mega-church leaders has led them to ignore the lessons of history offered by the Bakker and Swaggart cases, with Robert Morris and Mike Bickle among the recent high-profile preachers who have strayed from the straight and narrow path through sexual misconduct.

I can’t imagine that Sharon Falconer’s “Waters of Jordan” could cleanse the enormous sins they have committed.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (James Agee, on the Wonder of ‘High Summer’)

“High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, poet, screenwriter, and film critic James Agee (1909-1955), “Sure on This Shining Night,” in Permit Me Voyage (1934)

Flashback, June 1965: Last J. D. Salinger Work Published in His Lifetime

When New Yorker readers received their most recent copy of the magazine 60 years ago this week, they didn’t know they were experiencing something extraordinary: not just a 26,000-word novella by J. D. Salinger that filled 50 pages in that issue, but the last time with a new work by the novelist and short-story writer what would come out in his lifetime.

Considering Salinger’s output for the prior several years, “Hapworth 16, 1924” closed out his career in an appropriate fashion: a letter by Seymour, the eldest son in the Glass family, who had also figured in Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

Coming from an upper-class environment, the Glass children grew up privileged, precocious and dysfunctional, a tendency borne out in the 1948 short story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which a grown-up Seymour commits suicide.

A post of mine six years ago surveyed most of the course of the enigmatic writer’s career, but I didn’t concentrate on “Hapworth 16, 1924,” or what came after: silence.

If you want to encounter this last published story to date by the author of The Catcher in the Rye, you can’t find it in a collection of his work. You can’t even find it in a New Yorker anthology. Instead, you have to go to the actual physical issue of the magazine (June 21, 1965) online (if you have a subscription to the magazine and its archives) or click this YouTube link to listen to a reading.

In a March 2010 article in New York Magazine, Roger Lathbury discussed how his hopes for publishing this elusive title in book form were briefly fanned before dying.

He had sent a letter to Salinger in 1988 proposing that his tiny company, Orchises Press, issue the novella. After a quick note from the author saying he’d consider it, Lathbury heard nothing more for eight years when, out of the blue, he was contacted by Salinger’s literary agency, Harold Ober Associates. If a book were to be issued, he was told, it needed to be done “to exacting standards”—i.e., bound in buckram.

A cordial meeting at Washington’s National Gallery followed between publisher and novelist, with Lathbury acceding to Salinger’s unusual demands (e.g., limited distribution, the author’s name nowhere on the cover).

Then, the deal came unraveled after Lathbury confirmed to the press that the book would be published. Horrified by what he evidently felt was a betrayal of trust, Salinger withdrew his approval.

Six years ago, Salinger’s son Matt and widow Colleen indicated that they had since 2011 been preparing to release for publication stories written by the legendary New Hampshire recluse in the more than four decades after “Hapworth 16, 1924.” But it was an arduous process, Matt told   of the British publication The Guardian:

“[My father] wanted me to pull it together, and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time. This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. ... [But] there’s not a reluctance or a protectiveness: When it’s ready, we’re going to share it.”

Since then, silence—not unlike the sphinx who began it all.