AT LARGE
AND AT SMALL
ALSO BY ANNE FADIMAN
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Ex Libris
EDITED BY ANNE FADIMAN
The Best American Essays 2003
Rereadings
A N D AT S M A L L
C O N F E S S I O N S O F A
L I T E R A R Y H E D O N I S T
ALLEN LANE
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1
Copyright © Anne Fadiman, 2007
The moral right of the author has been asserted
With the exception of “Under Water,” an earlier version of which appeared in The New Yorker, the essays
in this book appeared, in somewhat different form, in The American Scholar
Endpapers: Plate 79, “Insects of the Orders Hymenoptera, Diptera, Lepidoptera, and Odonata,”
engraving by Henry Winkles after J. G. Heck,
from J. G. Heck,
Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature, and Art (New York: Rudolph Garrigue, 1851).
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eISBN: 978–0–141–90369–9
FOR KIM
Collector of Tiger Swallowtails,
Emperor of Ice Cream
Preface
COLLECTING NATURE
THE UNFUZZY LAMB
ICE CREAM
NIGHT OWL
PROCRUSTES AND THE CULTURE WARS
COLERIDGE THE RUNAWAY
MOVING
A PIECE OF COTTON
THE ARCTIC HEDONIST
COFFEE
UNDER WATER
Sources
Acknowledgments
I am an enthusiastic amateur, not a scholar. My bookshelves and file cabinets resemble the nest of a magpie that collects shiny objects, with diamond rings tucked next to tinfoil candy wrappers. Though the bibliography that follows contains some valuable standard works and some obscure gems, along with some oddities, I’m sure it leaves out many helpful books that I would have known about, and made good use of, if I were an expert on any of the topics below.
PREFACE
The best recent works on the personal essay—and its subset, the familiar essay—are, unsurprisingly, by two of its leading practitioners, Joseph Epstein and Phillip Lopate. Those interested in the history of the essay may enjoy the online roundtable, a transcription of a radio conversation with four participants, including Epstein. Readers who share my enthusiasm for the work of Lamb and Hazlitt may be charmed, as I was, by the elegance with which Marie Hamilton Law captures the essential characteristics of the familiar essay.
Bryan, William Frank, and Ronald S. Crane. The English Familiar Essay. Boston: Atheneum Press, 1916.
Epstein, Joseph. “The Personal Essay: A Form of Discovery.” In The Norton Book of Personal Essays, ed. Joseph Epstein. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Epstein, Joseph, et al. “Roundtable: The History of the Essay.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Robert_Root/background/Roundtable.html.
Fadiman, Clifton. “A Gentle Dirge for the Familiar Essay.” In Party of One. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1955.
———. Introduction. In Party of Twenty. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963. Hazlitt, William. Table-Talk: Essays on Men and Manners. London: Grant Richards, 1903.
Law, Marie Hamilton. “The English Familiar Essay in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1934. Reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1965.
Lopate, Phillip. Introduction. In The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.
Robertson, Stuart. Familiar Essays. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1930.
COLLECTING NATURE
Both my essay and my childhood owe a great deal to Alexander B. Klots’s splendid field guide to butterflies. I am also particularly fond of—and drew many details from—David Elliston Allen’s charming and learned book on amateur natural history in Britain.
Though the Darwin biography by Adrian Desmond and James Moore is admirable, those who know Darwin only from secondary sources should try the Voyage of the Beagle—and then move on to Darwin’s captivating contemporaries, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates.
Brian Boyd’s two-volume biography of Nabokov is thoughtful and comprehensive. Readers of my essay already know that I consider the sixth chapter of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory the holy grail of butterfly literature.
ON BUTTERFLIES
Antram, Charles B. The Collecting and Preservation of Butterflies and Moths, with Practical Hints for Collecting in the Field. Lymington, U.K.: Charles T. King, 1951.
Harman, Ian. Collecting Butterflies and Moths. London: Williams and Norgate, 1950.
Ingpen, Abel. Instructions for Collecting, Rearing, and Preserving British & Foreign Insects. London: William Smith, 1843.
Klots, Alexander B. A Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America, East of the Great Plains. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951.
Packard, A. S., Jr. How to Collect and Observe Insects. Reprint from The Maine Scientific Survey for 1862. Augusta, Maine: Kennebec Journal, 1863.
ON COLLECTING IN GENERAL
Elsner, John, and Roger Cardinal, eds. The Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Muensterberger, Werner. Collecting: An Unruly Passion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Pearce, Susan M. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge, 1995.
Theroux, Alexander. “Odd Collections.” The Yale Review 86:1 (January 1998).
ON NATURAL HISTORY, ESPECIALLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY
Allen, David Elliston. The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Bates, Henry Walter. The Naturalist on the River Amazons. Intro. Alex Shoumatoff. New York: Penguin, 1989.
Kastner, Joseph. A Species of Eternity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
Ritvo, Harriet. The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Wallace, Alfred Russel. Island Life: Or, the Phenomena and Causes of Insular Faunas and Floras. London: Macmillan, 1902.
———. The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise, A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature. London: Macmillan, 1886.
BY AND ABOUT CHARLES DARWIN
Darwin, Charles. “Recollections of the Development of My Mind and Character.” In Frederick William Roe, ed., Victorian Prose. New York: Ronald Press, 1947.
———. Voyage of the Beagle. London: Penguin, 1989.
Clark, Ronald W. The Survival of Charles Darwin. New York: Random House, 1984.
Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. Darwin. London: Michael Joseph, 1991.
Huxley, Francis. “Charles Darwin: Life and Habit,” parts 1 and 2. The American Scholar 28:4 (Autumn 1959) and 29:1 (Winter 1959/60).
Marks, Richard Lee. Three Men of the Beagle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
BY AND ABOUT VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Appel, Alfred, Jr. Notes to The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
———. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Boyd, Brian, and Kurt Johnson. “Nabokov, Scientist.” Natural History, July–August 1999.
Coates, Steve. “Nabokov’s Work, on Butterflies, Stands the Test of Time.” New York Times, May 27, 1997.
Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
Johnson, Kurt, and Steve Coates. Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius. Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland, 1999.
Johnson, Kurt, G. Warren Whitaker, and Zsolt Bálint. “Nabokov as Lepidopterist: An Informed Appraisal.” Nabokov Studies 3 (1996).
Nabokov, Vladimir. “The Aurelian.” In Nabokov’s Dozen: A Collection of Thirteen Stories. New York: Avon, 1973.
———. “Christmas.” In Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
———. Pale Fire. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962.
———. Speak, Memory. New York: Pyramid, 1968.
Pick, Nancy. “Vladimir Nabokov’s Genitalia Cabinet.” In The Rarest of the Rare. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES
Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. London: Penguin, 1985.
Fowles, John. The Collector. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997.
Jones, James H. Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
THE UNFUZZY LAMB
Winifred F. Courtney’s biography of the young Lamb was especially useful. For contemporary perspectives, see the Hazlitt essay and the brief memoir by Thomas Noon Talfourd at the end of Lamb’s Literary Sketches and Letters, both of which vividly capture the weekly soirées Charles and Mary Lamb held in their lodgings at No. 4 Inner Temple Lane. Chapter 16 of Leigh Hunt’s autobiography also contains a graceful tribute to Lamb.
BY CHARLES LAMB
Lamb, Charles. Charles Lamb & the Lloyds: Comprising Newly-Discovered Letters of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Lloyds, Etc., ed. E. V. Lucas. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1899.
———. The Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Charles Lamb, ed. R. H. Shepherd. Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske, and Company. Undated.
———. The Essays of Elia. London: Edward Moxon and Company, 1867.
———. Everybody’s Lamb: Being a Selection from the Essays of Elia, the Letters and the Miscellaneous Prose of Charles Lamb, ed. A. C. Ward. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1933.
———. Literary Sketches and Letters: Being the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, ed. Thomas Noon Talfourd. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1849.
———. The Life and Works of Charles Lamb. Vol. 1, The Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. Alfred Ainger. New York: International Publishing Company. Undated.
———. The Life and Works of Charles Lamb.Vol. 2, Poems, Plays and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Alfred Ainger. New York: International Publishing Company. Undated.
———. The Works of Charles Lamb in Five Volumes. New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1885.
ON CHARLES LAMB
Barnett, George L. Charles Lamb. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976.
Burton, Sarah. A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb. London: Penguin, 2004.
Courtney, Winifred F. Young Charles Lamb, 1775–1802. New York: New York University Press, 1982.
Cruse, Amy. “A Supper at Charles Lamb’s.” In Bouillabaisse for Bibliophiles, ed. William Targ. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1955.
Frank, Robert. Don’t Call Me Gentle Charles! Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1976.
Hazlitt, William. “On the Conversation of Authors.” In The Essays of William Hazlitt, ed. Catherine MacDonald MacLean. New York: Coward-McCann, 1950.
Hunt, Leigh. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J. E. Morpurgo. London: Cresset, 1949.
Johnson, Edith Christina. “Lamb and Coleridge.” The American Scholar 6:2 (Spring 1937).
Prance, Claude A. Companion to Charles Lamb: A Guide to People and Places, 1760–1847. London: Mansell, 1983.
ICE CREAM
I could not have written the section on the history of ice cream without Elizabeth David’s exemplary book.
A note for the pedantic: Several sources—including myself, in an earlier version of this essay—have erroneously cited 1700, not 1744, as the year of the first recorded ice-cream consumption in America. Thomas Bladen, one of Maryland’s colonial governors, served it to a group of Virginia commissioners on their way to a meeting with the Iroquois nation. Bladen was born in 1698 and is unlikely to have been a dinner host at age two.
Burke, A. D. Practical Ice Cream Making. Milwaukee: Olsen, 1947. David, Elizabeth. Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices. London: Michael Joseph, 1994.
Dickson, Paul. The Great American Ice Cream Book. New York: Atheneum, 1973.
“Flying Fortresses Double as Ice-Cream Freezers.” New York Times, March 13, 1943.
Geeslin, Campbell, ed. The Nobel Prize Annual 1991. New York: International Management Group, 1992.
Gilbert, Susan. “Headaches Come in Icy Flavors.” New York Times, May 14, 1997.
Grimes, William. “In the Ice Cream Follies, Anything Goes.” New York Times, August 5, 1998.
Herszenhorn, David M. “A Town’s Last Word to the Ice Cream Man: Quiet!” New York Times, March 4, 1998.
Keeney, Philip G. “Ice Cream Manufacture.” Course 102, Correspondence Courses in Agriculture, Family Living and Community Development. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University.
McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984.
Nieves, Evelyn. “Savoring Legal Success, an Ice Cream Vendor Calls the Tune.” New York Times, May 7, 1998.
Skow, John. “They All Scream for It.” Time, August 10, 1981.
NIGHT OWL
Among the literary sources, my favorite is the Dickens essay. For atmosphere and eclecticism, the indispensable night author is A. Alvarez, who writes about everything from hypnagogic hallucinations to an all-night “ride-along” in a New York City patrol car. Although his book does not concentrate primarily on literary topics, he writes so beautifully that I believe Night itself is likely to be remembered as a work of literature.
LITERARY SOURCES
Alvarez, A. Night. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Carroll, Lewis. “Pillow Problems.” In Night Walks: A Bedside Companion, ed. Joyce Carol Oates. Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1982.
Dickens, Charles. “Night Walks.” In The Uncommercial Traveller. New York: Macmillan, 1896.
Dreifus, Claudia. “A Conversation with John McPhee.” New York Times, November 17, 1998.
Fadiman, Clifton. “It’s a Puzzlement.” In Worth a Jot (unpublished manuscript).
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “Sleeping and Waking.” In The Literary Insomniac, ed. Elyse Cheney and Wendy Hubbert. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Jackson, Holbrook. “Specimen Days.” In Bookman’s Pleasure. New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947.
Lamb, Charles. “Popular Fallacies: That We Should Lie Down with the Lamb.” In The Essays of Elia. London: Edward Moxon and Company, 1867.
Proulx, E. Annie. “Waking Up.” In The Literary Insomniac, ed. Elyse Cheney and Wendy Hubbert. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Spender, Stephen. Interview. In Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Sixth Series, ed. George Plimpton. New York: Viking, 1984.
Thomson, James. “The City of Dreadful Night.” In Poetry of the Victorian Period, ed. Jerome Hamilton Buckley and George Benjamin Woods. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1965.
Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” In Whitman, ed. Robert Creeley. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973.
Young, Edward. Night Thoughts, or, the Complaint and the Consolation. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1975.
MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES
Blakeslee, Sandra. “Biologists Close In on the ‘Tick-Tock’ Genes.” New York Times, December 15, 1998.
Goode, Erica. “New Hope for the Losers in the Battle to Stay Awake.” New York Times, November 3, 1998.
Lamberg, Lynne. Bodyrhythms: Chronobiology and Peak Performance. New York: William Morrow, 1994.
Melbin, Murray. Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World After Dark. New York: Free Press, 1987.
Miller, Louise. Careers for Night Owls & Other Insomniacs. Chicago: VGM Career Horizons, 1995.
Moore-Ede, Martin C., Frank M. Sulzman, and Charles A. Fuller. The Clocks That Time Us: Physiology of the Circadian Timing System. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.
PROCRUSTES AND
THE CULTURE WARS
This essay is loosely adapted from talks given to the Phi Beta Kappa chapters of Yale College, Harvard College, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Gettysburg College. Part of it focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson because the year I delivered the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Oration happened to be the 160th anniversary of Emerson’s 1837 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Oration, “The American Scholar.”
ON THE CULTURE WARS AND THE LITERARY CANON
Anson, J. Cameron. Letter. Harper’s Magazine, April 1996.
Arendt, Hannah. “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance.” In Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin, 1993.
Arnold, Matthew. “Wordsworth.” In Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. Walter Jackson Bate. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1952.
Denby, David. Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Kaplan, Justin. “Selling ‘Huck Finn’ Down the River.” New York Times Book Review, March 10, 1996.
Ronholt, Sharon Uemura. Letter. New York Times Book Review, January 19, 1997.
Smiley, Jane. “Say It Ain’t So, Huck.” Harper’s Magazine, January 1996.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Weiss, Philip. “Herman-Neutics.” New York Times Magazine, December 15, 1996.
ON PROCRUSTES AND THESEUS
Apollodorus, The Library, vol. 2, trans. James George Frazer. Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1970.
Diodorus Siculus. Bibliotheca Historica. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1985–1991. Unpublished translation of Book 4, 59.2 by Adam Goodheart.
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths: Complete Edition. London: Penguin, 1992.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York: Mentor, 1962.
Hyginus. The Myths of Hyginus, trans. Mary Grant. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960.
Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. New York: Prometheus, 1959.
Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Plutarch. Lives: Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, Solon and Publicola, trans. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1993.
ON JAMES STOCKDALE AND EPICTETUS
Admiral Stockdale: The Official Site for Admiral James B. Stockdale, www.admiralstockdale.us.
Epictetus. The Enchiridion, trans. Elizabeth Carter. The Internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html.
Stockdale, James B. Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1993.
———. Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1995.
———. A Vietnam Experience: Ten Years of Reflection. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1984.
ON RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Chapman, John Jay. “Emerson, Sixty Years After.” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1897.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” In Selected Essays. New York: Penguin, 1985.
McAleer, John. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.
Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
ON THE QUARREL OF THE ANCIENTS AND THE MODERNS
Nelson, Robert J. “The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.” In A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Swift, Jonathan. “The Battle of the Books.” In A Tale of a Tub and Other Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
COLERIDGE THE RUNAWAY
This essay describes my journey through Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, and most of it is therefore drawn from those two magical volumes. I also admire Walter Jackson Bate’s brief but perceptive biography. Leigh Hunt’s autobiography, also mentioned in the sources for the Charles Lamb essay, includes a memorable portrait of Coleridge. The online Samuel Taylor Coleridge Archive contains many useful links.
Bate, Walter Jackson. Coleridge. New York: Macmillan, 1968.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
———. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 5: 1820–1825, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
———. Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, ed. Donald A. Stauffer. New York: Modern Library, 1951.
Forster, E. M. “Trooper Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke.” In Abinger Harvest. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1964.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834. New York: Pantheon, 1999.
———. Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804. New York: Viking, 1990.
Hunt, Leigh. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J. E. Morpurgo. London: Cresset, 1949.
Johnson, Edith Christina. “Lamb and Coleridge.” The American Scholar 6:2 (Spring 1937).
Perkins, David, ed. English Romantic Writers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967.
Saintsbury, George. “Lesser Poets, 1790–1837: Hartley Coleridge.” Cambridge History of English and American Literature, vol. 12. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–1921.
Tiefert, Marjorie A. The Samuel Taylor Coleridge Archive, etext .virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/stc.html.
Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. London: Penguin, 1999.
I relied extensively on Christopher Browne’s lively history of British mail and Bernhard Siegert’s imaginative study of the connections between the postal system and literature.
The last name of Jean-Jacques Renouard de Villayer, the man who invented the paper wrapper that some historians view as a proto-stamp, is sometimes spelled “Vélayer.” I opted for “Villayer” because it’s the spelling used by most philatelic scholars as well as on a 1944 French commemorative stamp.
ON POSTAL AND EPISTOLARY HISTORY
Barker, G. E. “The ‘Billets de Port Payé’ of 1653.” Journal of the France and Colonies Philatelic Society 35:2 (June 1985).
Browne, Christopher. Getting the Message: The Story of the British Post Office. Phoenix Mill, U.K.: Alan Sutton, 1993.
Bruns, James H. Mail on the Move. Polo, Ill.: Transportation Trails, 1992.
Carroll, Andrew, ed. Letters of a Nation. New York: Broadway, 1999.
Pryor, Felix, ed. The Faber Book of Letters: Letters Written in the English Language, 1578–1939. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
Siegert, Bernhard. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Wood, Kenneth A. Post Dates: A Chronology of Intriguing Events in the Mails and Philately. Albany, Oreg.: Van Dahl, 1985.
ON E-MAIL
Ardell, Donald B. The Smileys and Acronyms Dictionary, www.seek wellness.com/wellness/smiley_file.htm.
Flynn, Nancy, and Tom Flynn. Writing Effective E-Mail. Menlo Park: Crisp, 1998.
Gil, Paul. Glossary of Internet Abbreviations: Email and Chat Shorthand!netforbeginners.about.com/cs/netiquette101/a/abbreviations.htm.
Gopnik, Adam. “The Return of the Word.” The New Yorker, December 6, 1999.
“Netiquette 101 for New Netizens,” www.microsoft.com/southafrica/ athome/security/online/netiquette.mspx.
The Unofficial Smiley Dictionary. In EFF’s (Extended) Guide to the Internet, www.eff.org/Net_culture/Net_info/EFF_Net_Guide/EEGTTI _HTML/eeg_286.html.
MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES
Barnett, George L. Charles Lamb. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976.
Crane, Hart. “My Grandmother’s Love Letters.” In The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1966.
Fadiman, Clifton. “Life’s Minor Pleasures.” In Any Number Can Play. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1957.
Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971.
Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady. London: Penguin Classics, 1986.
Sutherland, James, ed. The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes. New York: Touchstone, 1977.
Zaslaw, Neal, and William Cowdery, eds. The Compleat Mozart: A Guide to the Musical Works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
MOVING
Persuasion is the wittiest novel about moving I know, but A Little Princess remains the most poignant—as tear-inducing today as it was when I first read it at age seven—because of the unexpected changes it rings on the theme of attempting to make a home for oneself in an alien place.
Though family lore and some scholars hold that James Montgomery Whitmore was killed by Paiute Indians (an account supported by the fact that five Paiutes were captured with money and articles that had belonged to Whitmore and his companion), several sources suggest that Navajos may have been responsible.
ON MOVING
Brown, Patricia Leigh. “For Sale: Everything but the Props.” New York Times, February 10, 2000.
Jasper, James M. Restless Nation: Starting Over in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
“Setting the Stage.” Rock Talk: The Magazine for Prudential Real Estate Professionals, Spring 1998.
ON MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHERS
JAMES MONTGOMERY WHITMORE AND JOHN SHARP
Carter, Kate B., ed. Our Pioneer Heritage, vols. 1 and 9. Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1958.
Esshom, Frank. Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah. Salt Lake City: Utah Pioneers, 1913.
Jenson, Andrew. Latter-Day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, vol. 1. Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History, 1901.
Lavender, David. The History of Arizona’s Pipe Spring National Monument. Salt Lake City: Paragon, 1997.
Martin, Ruth J., ed. Twentieth Ward History, 1856–1979. Salt Lake City: Twentieth Ward History Committee, 1979.
“Public Workers: John Sharp.” The Improvement Era, February 1904.
Raynor, W. A. The Everlasting Spires: A Story of the Salt Lake Temple. Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1965.
Warrum, Noble, ed. Utah Since Statehood: Historical and Biographical, vol. 4. Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1919.
NOVELS
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. New York: Bantam, 1989.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932.
———. The Secret Garden. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962.
Dickens, Charles. Martin Chuzzlewit. London: Penguin, 1986.
Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street. New York: Signet Classics, 1998.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. The Little House series. New York: HarperTrophy, 1971.
A PIECE OF COTTON
The most helpful historical sources were Robert Justin Goldstein’s richly annotated collection of primary documents on flag desecration and Scot M. Guenter’s thought-provoking study of how the flag’s meaning has changed over time.
ON THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FLAG
Goldstein, Robert Justin, ed. Desecrating the American Flag: Key Documents of the Controversy from the Civil War to 1995. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Guenter, Scot M. The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.
Hinrichs, Kit, and Delphine Hirasuna. Long May She Wave: A Graphic History of the American Flag. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2001.
Keenan, Marney Rich. “Stars & Stripes: Chicago Exhibit Attracts Unflagging Criticism.” Detroit News, March 19, 1989.
Loeffelbein, Robert L. The United States Flagbook: Everything about Old Glory. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 1996.
Sedeen, Margaret. Star-Spangled Banner: Our Nation and Its Flag. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1993.
West, Delno C., and Jean M. West. Uncle Sam and Old Glory: Symbols of America. New York: Atheneum, 2000.
ON THE FLAG AFTER 9/11
Dewan, Shaila K. “The Tattooed Badge of Courage.” New York Times, September 30, 2001.
Grimes, William. “On Menus Everywhere, a Big Slice of Patriotism.” New York Times, October 24, 2001.
Haberman, Clyde. “60’s Lessons on How Not to Wave Flag.” New York Times, September 19, 2001.
Marling, Karal Ann. “The Stars and Stripes, American Chameleon.” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 26, 2001.
Packer, George. “Recapturing the Flag.” New York Times Magazine, September 30, 2001.
Pollitt, Katha. “Put Out No Flags.” The Nation, October 8, 2001.
“Torn U.S. Flag from Trade Center Rubble Has New Life.” Reuters, November 1, 2001.
Welch, Liz. “Stamp Act.” New York Times Magazine, October 21, 2001.
THE ARCTIC HEDONIST
The biographies of Stefansson by Richard Diubaldo and William R. Hunt are the most complete and least biased. D. M. LeBourdais, a longtime Stefansson colleague, and Erick Berry, a writer for young adults, place Stefansson on a pedestal; Jennifer Niven knocks him off. Despite its one-sidedness, Niven’s book, from which I drew many particulars, provides the most detailed account of the Karluk disaster. The understandably angry memoir by McKinlay, a Karluk survivor, is also worth reading. In The Friendly Arctic, Stefansson gives his own fascinating, if self-serving, account of the ill-starred Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–1918 (his third arctic foray), of which the Karluk expedition was only one branch. In addition to the eleven Karluk men who died, five men in the expedition’s southern party were lost, two of them while attempting to rescue Stefansson, who had failed to return to Banks Island on schedule. (In fact, he was happily mapping and exploring the area and was in no need of rescue.)
BY VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
Stefansson, Vilhjalmur. Arctic Manual. New York: Macmillan, 1944.
———. Discovery: The Autobiography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
———. The Friendly Arctic. New York: Macmillan, 1922.
———. My Life with the Eskimo. New York: Collier, 1962.
———. The Northward Course of Empire. New York: Macmillan, 1924.
———. Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic. New York: Macmillan, 1938.
———. Writing on Ice: The Ethnographic Notebooks of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, ed. Gísli Pálsson. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001.
———, ed. Great Adventures and Explorations. New York: Dial, 1947.
ON VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
Berry, Erick. Mr. Arctic. New York: David McKay, 1966.
Diubaldo, Richard. Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978.
Hunt, William R. Stef: A Biography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986.
LeBourdais, D. M. Stefansson, Ambassador of the North. Montreal: Harvest House, 1963.
McKinlay, William Laird. The Last Voyage of the Karluk. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1976.
Niven, Jennifer. The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk. New York: Hyperion, 2000.
ON THE HISTORY OF ARCTIC EXPLORATION
Berton, Pierre. The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909. New York: Penguin, 1989.
Holland, Clive, ed. Farthest North. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999.
Imbert, Bertrand. North Pole, South Pole. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.
Mirsky, Jeannette. To the Arctic! The Story of Northern Exploration from Earliest Times to the Present. Intro. Vilhjalmur Stefansson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.
MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES
Fadiman, Clifton. “I Shook Hands with Shakespeare.” In Any Number Can Play. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1957.
Hahn, J. G. von. “How the Dragon Was Tricked.” In The Pink Fairy Book, ed. Andrew Lang. New York: Dover, 1967.
Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
COFFEE
The classic history is by Heinrich Eduard Jacob, who also happens to be an enormously enjoyable literary stylist. I drew much excellent material from Mark Pendergrast, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer (to whom I owe the London–New York coffeehouse extrapolation). By far the most entertaining author on my coffee shelf is Stewart Lee Allen; he is best appreciated in a highly caffeinated state.
Much good writing has been done on (and in) coffeehouses. My favorite sources are Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous passage on coffeehouses as a political institution in late-seventeenth-century London and Harold V. Routh’s seminal studies on the influence of coffeehouse conversation on English literature.