Grant Wood Was a Drone Pilot

At work with ninety seconds to kill as the microwave atomizes day old haddock and rice for the benefit of the entire lunchroom you could do a lot worse than scroll the twitter feed of @culturaltutor


The Tutor’s bite sized pieces and visuals have few rivals in the twittosphere for a person looking for a brief break from the monochrome of sports-twitter pontification. Where else could someone learn that Grant Wood was a drone pilot, and a half-dozen other factoids about the man who did this, but is so well known for American Gothic?

Along with a quick tour of perspective, lighting, the non-existence of electric lighting in 18th century New England, how horses run, and some quick side-tours into Copyright, public domain, and the life of Longfellow, the reader might stop to wonder whether Grant Wood had ever flown or otherwise spent time aloft. Wood died in 1942 so it is not a given.

Wood was, in 1931, memorializing Longfellow’s work first seen in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1861, which in turn memorialized Revere’s ride of nearly a century earlier. So all of it is mythologized, or imaginary, or fanciful even. But here is a real version of the Longfellow original.

If you can’t find the cultural tutor on twitter, or your abhorrence for it outweighs your curiosity you can find the Tutor here. The Tutor also produces a nice weekly news letter that more or less collects the twitter bits in prose. I get it, but generally only sample bits as it doesn't fill the interstitial space quite like the Tutor’s twitter.

If you do still tolerate twitter, and like this sort of thing, another great feed for a little on the go thoughtful cultural eduction is @Victoria_s_reed  Senior Curator for Provenance at @mfaboston. “Mainer. Art, due diligence, restitution, provenance, museums, and ladies with severed heads,”as her bio reads.

This link takes you to a listing for The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere in the Atlantic Monthly from January 1861.

Laura E. Richards's House, Lost to a Christmas Fire

Laura E. Richards’s house in Gardiner Maine burned down this Christmas. Known as the Yellow House, it was a causality of the winter storm just before Christmas that dumped vast rains accompanied by hurricane winds across much of Maine and left other cataclysmic weather damage across the country. The storm itself didn’t cause the fire; a generator used during the resulting long power outage ignited the blaze. One more bit of historical architecture, an artifact of the past, a building with a story to tell, is now gone.

A nice old house in and of itself, it had stood in Gardiner since about 1810 so it represents another blow to the character of an old Maine village; it had many stories to tell. One story is its connection to literary and historical figures,

Laura E. Richards, was the daughter of Julia Ward Howe who wrote the lyrics for The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Richards herself was a prolific writer; among ninety other works, she wrote one that took the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1917. Written with two of her sisters, it chronicled her mother’s life. Her father, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, a well known abolitionist, founded the Perkins Institution, the Massachusetts School for the Blind. In 1876 Richards moved to this house in Gardiner, Maine, where her husband managed a paper mill. An elementary school in Gardiner still bears her name.

The story of the fire as reported in the Portland Press Herald, a local news paper.

SAMPLES OF THE WORKS OF LAURA RICHARDS AND JULIA WARD HOWE

While Richards’s biography of Julia Ward Howe sold, the following works are still available:

Toto’s Merry Winter, by Laura Richards, $57

The Battle Hymn of the Republic, as first printed in the Atlantic Monthy, $321

What a Way to Go: A Scholar's Death

Like Irish peat, this post has been growing, in my imagination, at the rate of a millimeter a year. Yesterday someone bought the book so it’s now or never.

Getting the back story on an older book is half the fun in the rare book business, occasionally it makes me not want to sell ia book at all, and it often makes me jack the price after I’ve built a bit of a relationship. I am happy to have this book sell to a person with a very Irish sounding name in a city known for its Irish history. Chicago is also the City of its editor’s ignominious death.

About one of this book’s editors I learned this: Clark Harris Slover was an American Scholar appointed a Guggenheim Fellow of Medieval Literature in 1925 for an investigation of the channels which were available for the transmission of literature and tradition from Ireland to Great Britain before the appearance of the Arthurian Romances, principally in the libraries of Ireland and Great Britain. But my remaining bits of infomation came from extracts here and there as Slover does not warrant a Wikipedia page of his own. I think he should, but here for your consideration are some great old pieces of writing.

In addition to the details of his untimely and violent death, I learned that in his college days, Slover excelled on the Gridiron as Captain off the Whitman College football team of 1914. That may not seem like much as Whitman is now a College of 1500 or so undergraduates.

However, the Whitman College Pioneer of November, 1914, a year before Carlisle College’s Jim Thorpe would join the Canton Bulldogs, laid it all out. The side from Walla Walla, looking ever so much like Red Grange, was set to finish out the season at home against the University of Idaho; they had already met Washington State, the University of Washington and the University of Oregon.

Hey Catherine Maria Sedgwick, What's Your Pub Date?

1822. A scant 200 years ago. Why do you ask?



One thing I have discovered about Catherine Maria Sedgwick is that she is perpetually being discovered.

A second thing I have discovered is that, in my circles anyway, this author now acknowledged to have portrayed women in a more sophisticated and nuanced way than was typical of her era, remains an unknown. I have asked people who I consider to be smart, literate, well read, and well educated if they can tell me anything about her (Hint: she’s not a Facebook friend of a friend). The results have been underwhelming.

A third thing I have discovered is that most people, including me, meet their discovery of Catherine Maria Sedgwick with a touch of self-rebuke. We certainly should have known.

A fourth thing I have discovered is the Catherine Maria Sedgwick Society, a group of scholars and academics who get together annually to keep the fires burning, “promoting the study and awareness of Sedgwick’s life and works.”

But before I discovered any of these things I discovered that I own a first edition her first published novel, A New England Tale (1822), listed here.

Most sources book-end her career and notoriety within the nineteenth century with a rise to prominence and a fade to near obscurity by the end of the century.

“Catharine Maria Sedgwick was one of the leading figures in early-nineteenth-century American literary culture. Although she is less well known today, she set a pattern for the development of both domestic novels and historical novels in this country. Male writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant respected Sedgwick as a peer, while female authors such as Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe regarded her as a literary role model.” (Annenberg) Other sources note Sedgwick’s primacy in establishing a distinctly American canon, “Sedgwick was immediately recognized as one of the writers creating an indigenous American literature.” (women history blog)

Indigenous American literature was an important concept for the young country , as was an indigenous arts industry. S.G. Goodrich, editor of The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, an annual collection of literary works and “embellishments” noted in the preface to the 1836 edition that while for its nine years in existence, The Token had “been sustained by American writers” 1836 was the first year that the same could be said for its artworks. Owing to advances in the arts and production, the editors were proud to announce that the 1836 edition was the “first annual, and the only highly embellished book, issued from the American press, which could claim entire independence from foreign aid.”

A short story “New Year’s Day,” attributed to “Miss Sedgwick,” is the second piece in the 1836 Token.

But something else I have discovered about Sedgwick is that attribution of her authorship is often difficult to discern, and sometimes, apparently, willfully obscured. In fact, her second major novel, Redwood (1824), upon its translation for publication in France was attributed not to Sedgwick, but to James Fenimore Cooper. Why? Because of her known affinity with Cooper? Because, like Cooper’s work, Redwood featured sympathetic portrayals of Native American characters? Or perhaps because Cooper was an American author already well known to the French?

The photos of A New England Tale show Sedgwick’s name appeared nowhere in the title pages or elsewhere. Several sources suggest that her dedication of the work to Maria Edgeworth, the renowned Anglo-Irish writer, was a sly reference to the fact that this work too was written by a woman. 

Just the pencil markings of a previous owner tell us the author’s name.




Anonymity, even for male authors, was common in the era—Cooper and Hawthorne—both published anonymously or pseudonymously. Recently Stephen King made use of the gambit with the Richard Bachmann series. Sedgwick, at certain times anyway, made it a bit of an obsession. So much so that she even wrote a short story on the dilemma, Cacoethes Scribendi, that appeared in Titles and Sketches. Iironically Titles and Sketches was the only one of Sedgwick’s books published in her lifetime that did carry her name on the title page. Sedgwick’s use of anonymity is nicely explored in Behind the Veil. Catherine Sedgwick and Anonymous Publication by Melissa J. Homestead. Homestead’s piece, though it focuses on Sedgwick, covers a lot of ground; it is sure to up a reader’s Jeopardy skills.

Whatever conclusion you draw, it may help explain why Sedgwick now requires “discovery.” As her Wikipedia entry sums up “By the end of the 19th century, she had been relegated to near obscurity. There was a rise of male critics who deprecated women's writing as they worked to create an American literature. Interest in Sedgwick's works and an appreciation of her contribution to American literature has been stimulated by the late 20th century's feminist movement. Beginning in the 1960s, feminist scholars began to re-evaluate women's contributions to literature and other arts and created new frames of reference for considering their work.”

It may also explain why all my smart friends know who Hawthorne and Cooper are, but not Sedgwick.



(This post is a refreshed version of a post first published a couple years ago when I found this book and did the research on its origins.The republication is triggered by my observation in the Facebook book page of the Catherine Maria Sedgwick Society that the bicentennial of Sedgwick’s first novel, A New England Tale, approaches.)