The Lady, or the Tiger? And Other Stories (Classic Reprint)
(Latin neighbors, were still large, florid, and untrammell...)
Latin neighbors, were still large, florid, and untrammelled, as became the half of him which was barbaric. He was a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible that, at his will, he turned his varied fancies into facts. He was greatly given to selfcommuning; and, when he and himself agreed upon any thing, the thing was done. When every member of his domestic and political systems moved smoothly in its appointed course, his nature was bland and genial; but whenever there was a little hitch, and some of his orbs got out of their orbits, he was blander and more genial still, for nothing pleased him so much as to make the crooked straight, and crush down uneven places. A mong the borrowed notions by which his barbarism had become semified was that of the public arena, in which, by exhibitions of manly and beastly valor, the minds of his subjects were refined and cultured.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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HarperCollins continues with its commitment to reissue ...)
HarperCollins continues with its commitment to reissue Maurice Sendak's most beloved works in hardcover by making available again this 1964 reprinting of an original fairytale by Frank R. Stockton, as illustrated by the incomparable Maurice Sendak.
In the ancient country of Orn there lived an old man who was called the Bee-man, because his whole time was spent in the company of bees. One day a Junior Sorcerer stopped at the hut of the Bee-man. The Junior Sorcerer told the Bee-man that he has been transformed. "If you will find out what you have been transformed from, I will see that you are made all right again," said the Sorcerer. Could it have been a giant, or a powerful prince, or some gorgeous being whom the magicians or the fairies wish to punish?
The Bee-man sets out to discover his original form.
The lady, or the tiger? and other stories. By: Frank R. Stockton: Short story collections
("The Lady, or the Tiger?" is a much-anthologized short st...)
"The Lady, or the Tiger?" is a much-anthologized short story written by Frank R. Stockton for publication in the magazine The Century in 1882. "The Lady, or the Tiger?" has entered the English language as an allegorical expression, a shorthand indication or signifier, for a problem that is unsolvable.The short story takes place in a land ruled by a semi-barbaric king. Some of the king's ideas are progressive, but others cause people to suffer. One of the king’s innovations is the use of a public trial by ordeal as an agent of poetic justice, with guilt or innocence decided by the result of chance. A person accused of a crime is brought into a public arena and must choose one of two doors.1 Behind one door is a lady whom the king has deemed an appropriate match for the accused; behind the other is a fierce, hungry tiger. Both doors are heavily soundproofed to prevent the accused from hearing what is behind each one. If he chooses the door with the lady behind it, he is innocent and must immediately marry her, but if he chooses the door with the tiger behind it, he is deemed guilty and is immediately devoured by it. The king learns that his daughter has a lover, a handsome and brave youth who is of lower status than the princess, and has him imprisoned to await trial. By the time that day comes, the princess has used her influence to learn the positions of the lady and the tiger behind the two doors. She has also discovered that the lady is someone whom she hates, thinking her to be a rival for the affections of the accused. When he looks to the princess for help, she discreetly indicates the door on his right, which he opens. The outcome of this choice is not revealed. Instead, the narrator departs from the story to summarize the princess's state of mind and her thoughts about directing the accused to one fate or the other, as she will lose him to either death or marriage. The story ends with the question, "And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door – the lady, or the tiger?".... Frank Richard Stockton (April 5, 1834 – April 20, 1902) was an American writer and humorist, best known today for a series of innovative children's fairy tales that were widely popular during the last decades of the 19th century.Born in Philadelphia in the year 1834, Stockton was the son of a prominent Methodist minister who discouraged him from a writing career. After he married Mary Ann Edwards Tuttle, they moved to Burlington, New Jersey.where he produced some of his first literary work. The couple then moved to Nutley, New Jersey. For years he supported himself as a wood engraver until his father's death in 1860; in 1867, he moved back to Philadelphia to write for a newspaper founded by his brother. His first fairy tale, "Ting-a-ling," was published that year in The Riverside Magazine; his first book collection appeared in 1870. He was also an editor for Hearth and Home magazine in the early 1870s. He died in 1902 of cerebral hemorrhage and is buried at The Woodlands in Philadelphia.
Frank Richard Stockton was an American writer and humorist, best known today for a series of innovative children's fairy tales that were widely popular during the last decades of the 19th century.
Background
Frank was born on April 5, 1834 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the third of nine children of William Smith and Emily (Drean) Stockton. The Stockton family, descended from Richard Stockton who came to Long Island before 1656, had been conspicuous and influential in New Jersey since the seventeenth century, and another Richard Stockton had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Education
After his graduation at eighteen from the Central High School in Philadelphia Frank chose to learn wood-engraving, for which before the days of photo-engraving there was a large demand.
Career
Stockton worked at his engraving craft, in Philadelphia and New York, until 1866 and possibly later. He is said to have been an expert craftsman, but his wood-engravings for the Poems (1862) of his clerical half-brother are undistinguished.
Stockton had won prizes for writing while still at school.
In 1860, he published the same year a pamphlet called A Northern Voice for the Dissolution of the United States of North America. But while he remained a wood-engraver, what he wrote was, on the whole, hardly more than so much text for pictures.
In 1867 he contributed to the Riverside Magazine for Young People the stories collected in 1870 as Ting-a-Ling, and he followed this with the abundantly illustrated Round-About Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy (1872). He began to write for Hearth and Home in 1869, served for a few months on the staff, and became a frequent contributor to Scribner's Monthly (afterwards the Century Magazine).
When in 1873 the St. Nicholas Magazine was founded, under the editorship of Mary Elizabeth Mapes Dodge, Stockton was made assistant editor. In this post he remained until 1881, when he retired from editing to live entirely by writing. As editor he had been primarily a writer. His experiences with Hearth and Home had led him to compile, in collaboration with his wife, a straightforward handbook on The Home: Where It Should Be and What to Put in It (1873).
By his colleagues of Scribner's and St. Nicholas he had been, it appears, regarded as amusing, eccentric, and gifted, and encouraged to write for both magazines. During these years he published What Might Have Been Expected (1874), Tales Out of School (1875), Rudder Grange (1879), A Jolly Fellowship (1880).
The quick success of Rudder Grange, of which an episode had appeared in Scribner's five years before, and others since, determined Stockton's subsequent career.
At forty-five he was almost entirely unknown except for his stories for children, of which the Ting-a-Ling tales were as admirable as the later Floating Prince and The Bee Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales (1887) were to be. After 1880 he wrote largely for adults, out of the vein of absurd invention which he had discovered that he had and that the public liked in him.
His other stories "The Transferred Ghost" (1882), "The Remarkable Wreck of the 'Thomas Hyke'" (1884), "A Tale of Negative Gravity" (1884), and in general the stories in his own collection called A Chosen Few (1895) are almost equally ingenious. He survives by them, by one or two novels, and by some of his stories for children. Stockton was the principal humorist of the genteel tradition during the 1880's.
In the midst of all the crowding issues of the decade he remained gaily aloof, letting his lively fancy go its happy way in many books, some of them dictated while he lay at ease in a hammock.
His last three years he passed at a house which he had bought in West Virginia not far from Harpers Ferry. He was as sharp-eyed for Virginia singularities, for example in The Late Mrs. Null (1886), as for those he studied with greater variety in New Jersey.
Always a traveler, he was one of the earliest Americans to write about the charms of Nassau in the Bahamas ("An Isle of June, " in Scribner's, November 1877); his Personally Conducted (1889) was devoted to European travel. "The Lady or the Tiger?" was made into an operetta by Sydney Rosenfeld (Wallack's Theatre, May 7, 1888) and The Squirrel Inn (1891) into a play with the help of Eugene W. Presbrey, who produced it in 1893 (Theatre of Arts and Letters). Neither of them had notable success.
He died in 1902 in Washington, District of Columbia of cerebral hemorrhage.
In secular matters he was a temperance advocate and an abolitionist.
Personality
He had slight, limping figure, swarthy face. He also had few close friends.
Interests
Writers
He said that he valued Defoe and Dickens most among "all who have created fiction".
Music & Bands
However circumstantial Stockton might be, his imagination worked in a world of cheerful impossibility, as easygoing as a fairy-tale or a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.
Connections
He married Marian Edwards Tuttle, of Amelia County, Virginia, in 1860. He was survived by his wife. He had no children.