31 W Coulter St, Philadelphia, PA 19144, United States
Shy and bookish, and not robustly healthy, Hergesheimer was sent for his early education to an orthodox Quaker school.
College/University
Gallery of Joseph Hergesheimer
118-128 N Broad St, Philadelphia, PA 19102, United States
At eighteen, wanting to be a painter, Hergesheimer entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia to study drawing.
Career
Gallery of Joseph Hergesheimer
1938
Justice Stanley Reed, left, and Mrs. E.B. McLean listen attentively to author Joseph Hergesheimer at Mrs. McLean's gold plate breakfast at the Carlton Hotel following various birthday balls in honor of the Chief Executive's 56th birthday.
Justice Stanley Reed, left, and Mrs. E.B. McLean listen attentively to author Joseph Hergesheimer at Mrs. McLean's gold plate breakfast at the Carlton Hotel following various birthday balls in honor of the Chief Executive's 56th birthday.
(Joseph Hergesheimer was a prominent American writer of th...)
Joseph Hergesheimer was a prominent American writer of the early 20th century known for his naturalistic novels of decadent life amongst the very wealthy.
(Hergesheimer was born in Philadelphia and initially studi...)
Hergesheimer was born in Philadelphia and initially studied as a painter but quickly turned to writing. He established an early reputation with his first novel The Lay Anthony in 1914. Three Black Pennys, which followed in 1917, chronicled the fictional lives of three generations of Pennsylvania ironmasters and cemented the author's style of dealing with upperclass characters through a floridly descriptive style he referred to as "aestheticism." Hergesheimer also received critical recognition for his novels Java Head (1919), Linda Condon (1919), and Balisand (1924). Hergesheimer's reputation fluctuated wildly in his own lifetime, from a peak of acclaim and popularity in the 1920s to almost total obscurity by the time of his death. Java Head, a miscegenation story told from multiple viewpoints that is generally considered his best novel, was a considerable popular success, and his flamboyant, ornate, highly descriptive style (which can be seen to best effect in works like the travelogue San Cristobal de la Habana) was considered elegant and powerful. Hergesheimer's manner of writing, known at the time as the "aesthetic" school, remained in demand throughout the 1920s (with F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby being the most durable example of a book written in this style). Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt includes an extensive passage in which the title character reads from Three Black Pennies. A 1922 poll of critics in Literary Digest voted Hergesheimer the "most important American writer" working at the time. Hergesheimer's works of long-form and short fiction sold well with both male and female readerships; a 1929 teaser in for an upcoming serialized story in Cosmopolitan, for example, called Hergesheimer a writer "who understands women better than any writer alive today." On the other hand, John Drinkwater wrote that "His constant complaint is that women readers, with their craving for sentimentality, are a blighting influence upon the American fiction of the age."
(Joseph Hergesheimer was a prominent American writer of th...)
Joseph Hergesheimer was a prominent American writer of the early 20th century known for his naturalistic novels of decadent life amongst the very wealthy.
(Joseph Hergesheimer was a prominent American writer of th...)
Joseph Hergesheimer was a prominent American writer of the early 20th century known for his naturalistic novels of decadent life amongst the very wealthy.
(Hergesheimer was born in Philadelphia and initially studi...)
Hergesheimer was born in Philadelphia and initially studied as a painter but quickly turned to writing. He established an early reputation with his first novel The Lay Anthony in 1914. Three Black Pennys, which followed in 1917, chronicled the fictional lives of three generations of Pennsylvania ironmasters and cemented the author's style of dealing with upperclass characters through a floridly descriptive style he referred to as "aestheticism." Hergesheimer also received critical recognition for his novels Java Head (1919), Linda Condon (1919), and Balisand (1924). Hergesheimer's reputation fluctuated wildly in his own lifetime, from a peak of acclaim and popularity in the 1920s to almost total obscurity by the time of his death. Java Head, a miscegenation story told from multiple viewpoints that is generally considered his best novel, was a considerable popular success, and his flamboyant, ornate, highly descriptive style (which can be seen to best effect in works like the travelogue San Cristobal de la Habana) was considered elegant and powerful. Hergesheimer's manner of writing, known at the time as the "aesthetic" school, remained in demand throughout the 1920s (with F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby being the most durable example of a book written in this style). Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt includes an extensive passage in which the title character reads from Three Black Pennies. A 1922 poll of critics in Literary Digest voted Hergesheimer the "most important American writer" working at the time. Hergesheimer's works of long-form and short fiction sold well with both male and female readerships; a 1929 teaser in for an upcoming serialized story in Cosmopolitan, for example, called Hergesheimer a writer "who understands women better than any writer alive today." On the other hand, John Drinkwater wrote that "His constant complaint is that women readers, with their craving for sentimentality, are a blighting influence upon the American fiction of the age."
(This collection of literature attempts to compile many of...)
This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.
Joseph Hergesheimer was an American novelist, short-story writer, and biographer. In his works he concerned with the decadent and sophisticated milieu of the very wealthy.
Background
Joseph Hergesheimer was born on February 15, 1880 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of Joseph Hergesheimer, a skilled cartographer who worked at times for the United States Coastal and Geodetic Survey, and Helen Janet MacKellar Hergesheimer.
Because of his father's frequent absences on surveys and his mother's frail health, Joseph Hergesheimer spent much of his youth in the home of his maternal grandfather, Thomas MacKellar, a devout Presbyterian who had come to the United States from Scotland as a youth, and who had helped to establish Philadelphia's first type foundry. Hergesheimer described this period movingly in the autobio-graphical volume The Presbyterian Child (1923).
Education
Shy and bookish, and not robustly healthy, Hergesheimer was sent for his early education to an orthodox Quaker school.
At eighteen, wanting to be a painter, he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia to study drawing.
He inherited some money from his grandfather when he was twenty-one and went to Venice and Florence to study art and to paint. While abroad, however, he experienced long periods of illness and anxiety and finally decided he lacked the inherent ability to become a first-rate painter. After meeting and reading proof for a woman novelist who wrote under the name Lucas Cleeve, Hergesheimer conceived the idea of becoming a writer himself - it would be impossible, he believed, to write worse than she did.
Hergesheimer's early interest in color and form was later reflected in his decorative prose. "The years in which I failed as a painter, " he said, "left me with an enormous interest in surfaces. "
It was not until 1913 that three of his articles were accepted by the Forum. His first novel, The Lay Anthony, was published in 1914. It was a rambling story of a sheepish hero who rejects the advances of a mad scientist's daughter and returns home to find the girl he loves dead. H. L. Mencken sharply criticized the melodramatic book in Smart Set; an exchange of letters followed, and the two men began a close friendship that continued for forty years.
Confident that he had not mistakenly evaluated his writing capability, Hergesheimer turned out another novel, Mountain Blood, in 1915, and two years later published his first superior novel, The Three Black Pennies. In the judgment of some critics it remains his best book. Set against a background of ironmaking in Pennsylvania, it sensitively delineates the hereditary flaws appearing in three generations of a family. Preparation for the book entailed exceptional antiquarian interest and extensive historical research. The proficiency Hergesheimer displayed in such research was advantageously employed later in his historical romances Balisand (1924), The Limestone Tree (1931), and The Foolscap Rose (1934), and in Sheridan (1931), his biography of the Civil War general, and Swords and Roses (1929), a collection of elegiac sketches of Confederate leaders.
The Hergesheimers bought and for many years lived in a large pre-Revolutionary stone farmhouse near West Chester, known as the Dower House. In his partly autobiographical book, From an Old House (1925), Hergesheimer fondly described the place and his devotion to its maintenance and embellishment. He relished the life of a country gentleman, and at Dower House he entertained, as Mencken jestingly said, "Russian grand dukes, Long Island millionaires, the editors of The Saturday Evening Post, the more conservative United States Senators, and such members of the literati and cinemati as had aseptic table manners. "
From 1914 to 1934 Hergesheimer published some two dozen books, half of them novels. The rest were collections of short stories, autobiographical works, travel sketches, a biography, and a book of history. Java Head (1919) is probably his best-remembered novel and perhaps the outstanding example of his descriptive prose. Dramatic and interesting, it is a gorgeously colored costume piece whose theme is the eternal opposition of the West and East; the romance of Old Salem in the days of the clipper ships set against the romance of the far older Orient. The novel was made into a film (1935), as was "Tol'able David, " his famed short story, which was included in the collection of stories The Happy End (1919). The novels Linda Condon (1919) and Cytherea (1922) were stories of illicit, disappointed love in exotic settings, with vivid portraits and analyses of women, somewhat Freudian in inspiration.
Much of Hergesheimer's fiction was written in a luxuriant, highly mannered style. He was fond of short, verbless sentences, and his prose, replete with languid adjectives, is occasionally reminiscent of the mood and manner of the fin de siècle.
Hergesheimer's extraordinary interest in style for its own sake seemed strangely in contrast with the austerities of his upbringing and his early years as a struggling artist. He had the conservative's disdain for "progress" and a nostalgia for the amenities of a vanished civilization. But beneath Hergesheimer's preciosity, which became unfashionable and was scorned by the literary critics of the 1930s, there remained his exceptional writing skill and his diligent historical scholarship.
For a time Hergesheimer's works were immensely popular. It is said that The Saturday Evening Post, which published many of his articles, short stories, and, serially, some of his novels, paid him $500, 000 during his lifetime. James Branch Cabell, with whom Hergesheimer is often linked by literary historians, tempered the admiration expressed in his little book Joseph Hergesheimer (1921) with the suspicion that Hergesheimer had lowered his artistic ideals in quest of popularity. Some critics felt that Linda Condon marked the end of his artistic sincerity.
In any case, his popularity waned as the Great Depression settled in. His last book was published in 1934. During the remaining two decades of his life, he wrote little. Depressed at times by his inability to write salable books, he sought his friend Mencken's advice and encouragement. Mencken responded generously but without any notable results, although Hergesheimer wrote sporadically on an autobiographical work that was never published.
Most of Hergesheimer’s later work appeared only in mass-circulation magazines, like the Saturday Evening Post. While these magazines paid well and Hergesheimer certainly profited financially from such publication. It only provided further evidence for critics that Hergesheimer was a popular writer and nothing more. He stayed out of the limelight for the last twenty years of his life, publishing very little. Czech critic Ingeborg Kejzlarova summed up Hergesheimer’s life and works in her 1976 essay in Philologica Pragensia. “Joseph Hergesheimer,” she wrote, “seems to be quite forgotten, though from 1914 to 1922 (and even later) he was one of the most popular and widely read authors and also played an important part in the American literary development leading from the first generation of American realists and naturalists to the postwar young radicals. [He] filled a gap in the evolution of American prose fiction in the years of World War I enriching American regionalism with European aestheticism. And that is why this author, and at least two or three of his early novels ... should not fall into complete oblivion.”
During World War II the difficulties of maintaining Dower House became burdensome, and the Hergesheimers moved to a smaller place at Stone Harbor, New Jersey, on Cape May. They resided there until Hergesheimer died after a brief illness at Sea Isle City, New Jersey.
Quotations:
“So long as you are learning, you are not growing old. ”
Membership
Joseph Hergesheimer was a member of the American Academy in 1921.
American Academy
,
United States
1921
Personality
In his spare time, Hergesheimer collected furniture, china, and glass. The money earned during the period of his popularity enabled Hergesheimer to live in later years the life of a leisured country gentleman and to pursue his hobbies of fishing, golf, and collecting antiques.
Many critics maintained that Hergesheimer’s tendency toward cheap entertainment was not the result of fortune-seeking, but remained consistent in works written throughout the author’s life.
Physical Characteristics:
In his late years, Joseph Hergesheimer suffered from diabetes and arteriosclerosis and died of complications from these illnesses.
Quotes from others about the person
Critic Clifton Fadiman, in a witty, satiric article in the Nation February 15, 1933, referred to Hergesheimer as "the jongleur of modern feudalism. "
Edmund Wilson remarked that "Hergesheimer, though he knows how to tell a story, writes nearly as badly in a fancy way as Dreiser does in a crude one. "
Writing in The Dial, critic Lucian Cary expressed mixed feelings about The Lay Anthony, “I thought ... that I had discovered a writer who knew American life and had both the courage and the skill to record it. But Mr. Hergesheimer is bound to move his readers at any cost. He is not satisfied with the stuff he has in his head; he must dress it up with the stuff that he has found in yellow newspapers and in the speeches of romantic social workers.”
Interests
antique
Sport & Clubs
fishing, golf
Connections
On November 14, 1907, Hergesheimer married Dorothy Hemphill, whom he had met in Italy; she was the daughter of William Hemphill, a grain merchant of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Their marriage was childless.
Mrs. Hergesheimer, a talented, vivacious woman, encouraged her husband's desire to write, although his early efforts were extremely disappointing, and he bore a prolonged period of adversity and editorial rebuffs with great fortitude.
