Background
Charles Stephens was born on October 21, 1847, in Norway Lake, Maine, United States. He was the son of Simon and Harriet N. Upton Stevens.
255 Maine St, Brunswick, ME 04011, United States
Charles attended Bowdoin College, but dropped out because of lack of funds.
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, United States
Charles received a Doctor of Medicine from Boston University in 1887.
United States
Charles Stephens
United States
Charles and his wife
United States
Charles Stephens
Charles Stephens was born on October 21, 1847, in Norway Lake, Maine, United States. He was the son of Simon and Harriet N. Upton Stevens.
Charles attended Bowdoin College, but dropped out because of lack of funds. He then received a Doctor of Medicine from Boston University in 1887.
Charles Stevens was a long time contributor to Youth's Companion periodical. Around the early 1890s Stephens began traveling to various places, with the intention of relaying his experience in Youth’s Companion. Over the course of about twenty years he traveled over much of North and Central America, to the West Indies and Europe, most of which he reported in Youth’s Companion and then later assembled in part in two series of books, the Camping Out series, published from 1872 to 1874, and the Knockabout Club series, published in 1882 and 1883. In several of these books he promoted his idea of a traveling college, which he envisioned as a group of young men on board a ship journeying to some unusual place and there studying its characteristics and history. The characters Stephens used in these stories are thinly disguised presentations of himself and some of his close associates.
The owner of Youth’s Companion encouraged Stephens to get a medical degree, because he wanted a member on the staff of Youth's Companion who could report medical items factually and accurately. After earning a Doctor of Medicine from Boston University Charles turned more actively to research, building a laboratory near his old home in Norway, Maine. He developed a theory that life could be prolonged by renewing the biogen, a hypothetical protein molecule thought to be essential for such basic biological processes as assimilation and disassimilation. From 1888 to 1920, he wrote a series of books on his theory and research. Terms such as ‘long life,’ ‘natural salvation,’ ‘immortal life,’ all taken from the titles of his books, reflect the nature of his interest.
Most of Stevens's writing for children can be classified into two categories, travel stories and reminiscences of his childhood. His work, particularly his travel stories, contains a strong pedagogical element, even to the point that educating readers at times becomes the primary emphasis. Convinced that children preferred stories which they believed to be real, Stephens cultivated that characteristic in his writing, making his presentation as factual and circumstantial as he could. His stories often read like freshly remembered records of his own experience. For example, Katahdin Camps is a story that contains a great deal of valuable information on the creatures of the wild, and no reader can as much as scan the book without learning a good deal about woodcraft. The author tells the story with reminiscent humor and with full appreciation of the dramatic quality of most of his incidents.
The other large component of Stephens's writing for children is his stories about his childhood experiences in Maine. In these reminiscences the reader finds a sense of continuity, of looking backward through a long vista into a past which has a reality that no modern imaginative reconstruction could convey. Told with reticence, warmth of feeling and salty humor, it is an authentic record of a life and atmosphere, and more especially of a character that fortunately has not wholly disappeared, but is today more unspoiled, perhaps, in Maine than in any other part of the country.
Charles married Christine Stevens on April, 1871. She died in 1911. A year later, he married Minnie Scalar Plummer, an opera singer.