The man in the street. Papers on American topics (The Meredith Nicholson Collection Book 12)
(My right to speak for the man in the street, the average ...)
My right to speak for the man in the street, the average American, is, I am aware, open to serious question. Possibly there are amiable persons who, if urged to pass judgment, would appraise me a trifle higher than the average; others, I am painfully aware, would rate me much lower. The point is, of course, one about which I am not entitled to an opinion. I offer no apology for the apparent unrelated character of the subjects herein discussed, for to my mind the volume has a certain cohesion. In that part of America with which I am most familiar, literature, politics, religion, and the changing social scene are all of a piece. We disport our selves in one field as blithely as in another. Within a few blocks of this room, on the fifteenth floor of an office-building in the centre of my home town, I can find men and women quite competent to answer questions pertaining to any branch of philosophy or the arts.
CONTENTS
Let Main Street Alone I I
James Whitcomb Riley 26
The Cheerful Breakfast Table 65
The Boulevard of Rogues 92
The Open Season for American Novelists 106
The Church for Honest Sinners 139
The Second-Rate Man in Politics 150
The Lady of Landor Lane 190
How, Then, Should Smith Vote ? 223
The Poor Old English Language 263
(Come, sweetheart, let us ride away beyond the city's boun...)
Come, sweetheart, let us ride away beyond the city's bound, And seek what pleasant lands across the distant hills are found. There is a golden light that shines beyond the verge of dawn, And there are happy highways leading on and always on; So, sweetheart, let us mount and ride, with never a backward glance, To find the pleasant shelter of the Valley of Romance. Before us, down the golden road, floats dust from charging steeds, Where two adventurous companies clash loud in mighty deeds; And from the tower that stands alert like some tall, beckoning pine, E'en now, my heart, I see afar the lights of welcome shine! So loose the rein and cheer the steed and let us race away To seek the lands that lie beyond the Borders of To-day.
The provincial American and other papers (The Meredith Nicholson Collection Book 14)
(The provincial American. --Edward Eggleston. --A provinci...)
The provincial American. --Edward Eggleston. --A provincial capital. --Experience and the calendar. --Should Smith go to church? --The tired business man. --The spirit of mischief: a dialogue. --Confessions of a "best-seller"
Meredith Nicholson was an American writer, lecturer, and diplomat. He was a best-selling author.
Background
Meredith Nicholson was born on December 9, 1866 in Crawfordsville, Indiana, United States. He was the first of four children of Edward Willis Nicholson and Emily (Meredith) Nicholson. His father was a substantial farmer of Kentucky ancestry and a Union officer in the Civil War. His maternal grandfather was a printer-journalist of Centerville, Indiana. The family moved to Indianapolis in 1872.
Education
Nicholson's formal schooling ended at the age of fifteen after difficulties with mathematics, whereupon he proceeded to become an exceptional example of the self-educated American man of letters. He studied law for a time.
Nicholson received local academic honors: master's degrees from Wabash College (1901) and Butler University (1902); Doctor of Letters from Wabash (1907); Doctor of Letters from Indiana University (1928) and Butler (1929).
Career
Nicholson worked at various jobs, read widely, taught himself foreign languages, and began in the middle 1880's to publish poems in newspapers. A regular assignment on the Indianapolis News extended from 1885 to 1897.
His first book of poetry, Short Flights, was published in 1891. The appearance of Poems (1906) terminated Nicholson's short and undistinguished career in this medium.
In Denver, Colorado Nicholson engaged in business for about three years, an experience reflected in his first novel, The Main Chance (1903). During his western residence, Nicholson asserted his loyalty to Indiana in a collection of delightful essays on local history, The Hoosiers (1900), a book as likely to survive as anything he wrote.
Returning to Indianapolis in 1901, he began a long career as popular novelist, essayist for a wide range of magazines, and leading Hoosier personality, much in demand as a speaker and lecturer.
His second novel, Zelda Dameron (1904), was a realistic portrayal of Indianapolis business and social life. The House of a Thousand Candles (1905), a best seller and later a popular motion picture, was a Hoosier romance.
Nicholson's fiction was governed by the invariable triumph of true, young love over familiar obstacles and by insistence on the virtues of wholesome, bourgeois life. The protagonist is typically an irresistible Hoosier girl who saves honor, fortune, and happiness for family and community. Within this formula Nicholson alternated between light romance and a serious "realism relieved by humor and lifted by cheer and hope, " to cite the author's own description of The Lords of High Decision (1909), a novel that depicted conflicts in industrial society.
The best novel in this vein is A Hoosier Chronicle (1912), based on Nicholson's intimate knowledge of Indiana politics. Except for the girl's heroism and the happy endings, The Proof of the Pudding (1916), Broken Barriers (1922), The Hope of Happiness (1923), and And They Lived Happily Ever After! (1925) are convincing explorations of changing times in Indianapolis society, dealing with divorce, drinking, illicit love, corrupt business practices, and briefly with class conflicts. Otherwise Phyllis (1913) portrays the same elements in small-town life.
Nicholson closed a successful career as a novelist with his twenty-first book, The Cavalier of Tennessee (1928), a competent if old-fashioned historical fiction based on the lives of Andrew Jackson and his wife Rachel (Robards) Jackson.
As The Hoosiers indicated early, Nicholson was at his best as an essayist. His work in this form, including much delightful autobiography, can be surveyed in a number of collections.
The number of his miscellaneous pieces, such as reviews, speeches, introductions to books, is considerable. Compared with Tarkington the novelist, Riley the Hoosier poet, and Ade the humorist and satirist, Nicholson cannot be said to have produced an impressive body of writing. He was in the service of his city and state, even as a novelist, and therefore wrote much that dated quickly. Riley's own success owed much to Nicholson's speaking and writing about him, including a brief romantic novel, The Poet (1914). As a professional Hoosier and self-styled patriotic, stay-at-home Midwesterner, Nicholson probably scattered a modest talent too thin for permanent recognition.
He admonished his fellow Hoosiers to clean up local government and participated in Democratic party politics as party leader, candidate, and for one term (1928 - 1930) as a "reform" city councilman in Indianapolis.
Nicholson was a moderate Democrat with Whig-Republican antecedents but began his own political life as a Mugwump in 1884. He could not support Bryan, but his voice against the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana Republican politics of the 1920's was eloquent and much needed. He supported national candidates in sane, practical, bipartisan terms. Upon the election of Franklin Roosevelt, his service to the party was rewarded with three ministries in Latin America: Paraguay (1933 - 1934), Venezuela (1935 - 1938), and Nicaragua (1938 - 1941).
Personality
Nicholson's personal magnetism and charm were very great. With humor and a light touch, he preached the healthy pursuit of happiness and a faith in the goodness of "folks. " To the problems and dangers faced by a democracy of the "folks, " Nicholson was actively responsive.
Connections
On June 16, 1896, Nicholson married the cultured and wealthy Eugenie Kountze of Omaha, Nebraska. They had four children: Meredith, Elizabeth Kountze, Eugenie (who died in infancy), and Charles Lionel. In 1898 the couple moved to Denver, Colorado. Nicholson's wife died in 1931.
On September 20, 1933, Nicholson married Dorothy (Wolfe) Lannon, of Marion, Indiana. They were divorced in 1943.