Charles Warren Stoddard

Background

Charles Stoddard was born on August 7, 1843, in Rochester, New York. He was the son of Samuel Burr and Harriet Abegail Stoddard. In 1855, Stoddard's family moved to San Francisco, where his father found a job in the shipping industry. Upon returning east, he settled with his maternal grandparents in western New York. At age fifteen, Stoddard returned to San Francisco at his father's request.

Education

Charles Stoddard did not finish his formal education.

Career

Charles Stoddard, determined to become a poet, befriended various journalists, took on work as a handyman in a bookstore, and studied in San Francisco and Oakland. He contributed poems to Bret Harte's Golden Era, under the pseudonym Pip Pepperpod. He also struggled with his homosexuality, which society than did not understand well.

Charles Stoddard's poor health led a doctor to advise him to go to Hawaii. He went in 1864 and, for six months, immersed himself in native Polynesian culture. Stoddard had an affair with a native boy named Kane-Aloha, a relationship he describes in The Island of Tranquil Delights: A South Sea Idyl and Others. In 1868 he arrived in Hawaii again to visit his sister and returned for an eight-month stay. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin commissioned him to write travel sketches about his experiences there.

Upon returning to California, Charles Stoddard started writing a weekly column for the Golden Era. He helped form the Golden Gate Trinity (also known as the Overland Trinity), a trio of writers that included Bret Harte and Ina Coolbrith. Stoddard, Harte, and Coolbrith formed the editorial team of the Overland Monthly, a California literary journal Anton Roman founded in 1868. Stoddard and Coolbrith co-edited the Overland under Harte's direction. For the Overland, Stoddard also wrote sketches of Hawaii, particularly about youths he met there.

Charles Stoddard's fascination with Polynesian and South Pacific culture intensified, and, in 1870, he set off to Tahiti on a French ship with a gay crew. Short on funds, he stayed only three months, but the voyage provided him with stories he told in The Island of Tranquil Delights. In 1872 Stoddard published an article titled A Prodigal in Tahiti in the Atlantic Monthly. The following year he departed to Europe as a traveling correspondent and met literary figures that included Ambrose Bierce, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), and Joaquin Miller. Shortly after he arrived, he worked as a secretary-companion for Clemens during his lecturing throughout the United Kingdom. That same year, Stoddard's most significant travel book, South-Sea Idyls, was published. Chatto & Windus in London republished it a year later as Summer Cruising in the South Seas. Many prominent writers, including Robert Louis Stevenson, read the book, with Polynesia becoming a literary trend. Stevenson and Stoddard became friends. Stoddard was later the model for a character in Stevenson's novel The Wrecker, in which he was described as a "youngish, good-looking, fellow lively and engaging."

Charles Stoddard then visited the Middle East. He sailed there in 1876 and returned to the United States via Europe the following year. Back in the United States, Stoddard borrowed money and relied on friends' generosity, never really working regularly. His next three works reflected his experiences abroad: Mashallah! A Flight into Egypt, A Cruise Under the Crescent: From Suez to San Marco, and Exits and Entrances: A Book of Essays and Sketches.

In the early 1880s, because of financially strapped, Charles Stoddard became an editorial writer for a newspaper in Honolulu. In that period, he wrote another book, The Lepers of Molokai, based on his visit to the Molokai leper colony. He also had another affair with a young man.

In 1885, Stoddard began to teach English and American literature at the University of Notre Dame, where he stayed for a year and a half. During that time, he traveled to Alaska with one of the professors and described the trip in hoi book, Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska.

After leaving Notre Dame, Stoddard settled in Kentucky, where he had an affair with a youth named Tom Cleary. In 1888, he traveled to Europe. The following year Stoddard became chairman of English literature at the new Catholic University of America in Washington. He remained there for thirteen years. Stoddard's health worsened, and he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, returning after two years to San Francisco in 1905, and settling in Monterey, in 1906, where he died three years later.

Achievements

• Charles Stoddard was a widely known poet, educator, and travel writer. His most influential travel book is South-Sea Idyls. Stoddard's account of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, A Troubled Heart and How It Was Comforted, at Last, is regarded as one of his most outstanding works. In addition to almost twenty books, Charles Stoddard also contributed more than nine hundred articles to periodicals.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Poems of Charles Warren Stoddard;

    (The book was published after Charles Stoddard's death in ...)

    1917
  • Poems 1867
  • South Sea Idyls 1873
  • Mashallah! 1881
  • A Trip to Hawaii 1885
  • A Troubled Heart and How It Was Comforted at Last 1885
  • The Lepers of Molokai 1886
  • Hawaiian life 1894
  • The Wonder-worker of Padua 1896
  • A Cruise Under The Crescent 1898
  • Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska 1899
  • Father Damien, the martyr of Molokai 1901
  • In the Footprints of the Padres 1902
  • Exits and entrances 1903
  • For the Pleasure of His Company 1903
  • The Island of Tranquil Delights 1904

Religion

In 1867 Charles Stoddard converted to Catholicism and held a tender devotion for the faith.

Views

Quotations: "When we can say no not only to things that are wrong and sinful, but also to things enjoyable, profitable, and well which would hinder and clog our grand duties and our chief work, we shall understand more fully what life is worth, and how to make the most of it."

Membership

• Charles Stoddard was a member of the Bohemian Club in the 1870s.

  Bohemian Club , United States

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Mary Elizabeth Grenander: "His talents as a good listener and fondness for the bottle contributed to his popularity with a variety of friends, including Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and, in 1870, Joaquin Miller."

Connections

Father:

Samuel Burr Stoddard

Mother:

Harriet Abigail Stoddard

Harriet Abigail Stoddard's maiden name was Freeman.

colleague:

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce was an American newspaperman, wit, satirist, and author of sardonic short stories based on themes of death and horror.

colleague:

Bret Harte

Bret Harte was a 19th-century American author and poet famous for his stories about California mining towns, and about the pioneering life in the California of his day.

Friend:

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish essayist, poet, and author of fiction and travel books, best known for his novels Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Master of Ballantrae.

colleague:

Mark Twain

Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi, and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

colleague:

Ina Donna Coolbrith

Ina Coolbrith was a popular American poet who became a major figure in literary and cultural circles of 19th- and early 20th-century San Francisco.

colleague:

Joaquin Miller

Joaquin Miller, pseudonym of Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, was an American poet and journalist whose best work conveys a sense of the majesty and excitement of the Old West. His best-known poem is Columbus with its refrain, On, sail on!, once familiar to millions of American schoolchildren.