(Bob Coxon had been a guide for a long time . . . long eno...)
Bob Coxon had been a guide for a long time . . . long enough to know people inside out. He knew from the beginning that this hunting party would be trouble. There were Warren and Carlotta, hosts who were not the lovers they used to be. Then Bill, who always said the wrong thing, the doctor who had his eye on Grace, and Grace who obviously loved the wrong man.
(Ellen's wants always prevailed. She could get the time an...)
Ellen's wants always prevailed. She could get the time and the place and the man all together just about all of the time. It did not matter who was in the way. Ellen was judge and executioner. She knew how to escape earth's usual penalties. Never was there a woman whose appearance so belied her heart.
(First published in 1947, this bestselling historical nove...)
First published in 1947, this bestselling historical novel is cherished and remembered as one of the finest retellings of the Civil War saga—America's own War and Peace. In the first hard pinch of the Civil War, five siblings of an established Confederate Virginia family learn that their father is the grandfather of Abraham Lincoln.
Ben Ames Williams was an American journalist, novelist, and author. He wrote hundreds of short stories and over thirty novels.
Background
Ethnicity:
Williams’s Welsh grandfather settled in southern rural Ohio when he immigrated to the United States.
Ben Ames Williams was born on March 7, 1889, in Macon, Mississippi, United States. He was the son of Daniel Webster and Sarah Marshall (Ames) Williams.
Education
At the age of fifteen, Ben Williams left Ohio to attend the Allen School in West Newton, Massachusetts. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1910.
Williams began his writing career in 1910 as a reporter for the Boston American. He began writing and submitting short stories; for four years he wrote doggedly, but publication eluded him. He finally published his first story in July 1915, in the pulp publication Smith’s Magazine. For the next four years, Williams’s rejections outnumbered his acceptances, but he attracted the attention of other editors. In April 1917, he made his debut in the mass-circulations market with the publication of “The Mate of Susie Oakes” in the Saturday Evening Post. Thus began a twenty-four-year-long professional relationship with the magazine. Williams quit his job as a reporter and from then on derived Iris entire living from his fiction writing. By 1919, he was publishing stories in American, Blue Book, Collier’s, Munsey’s, People’s Home Journal and Redhook.
The opportunity to write in serial form allowed Williams to break from his short-story formulas and indulge in rich characterization and setting description. The story “They Grind Exceedingly Small” (which first appeared in the September 13, 1919, Saturday Evening Post), begins perfunctorily but develops in a manner so leisurely and lyrical that no editor of the pulps would have tolerated it an artful, knowing story, displaying the maturity and craft that Williams had attained in the little-more-than-four years of his career as a published short-story writer.
The story was selected for the 1919 O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories collection, edited by Blanche Colton Williams. Though Williams customarily submitted his stories first to the Saturday Evening Post editors George Horace Lorimer and Thomas B. Costain, he published stories in other journals such as Country Gentleman, Cosmopolitan, Elks Magazine, Liberty, Railroad Man’s Weekly, and Snappy Stories. The mid-1920s were the peak of Williams' short-story-writing career. In 1926, he published an impressive twenty-one stories in the Saturday Evening Post in addition to the stories he published in other magazines that same year. There were two main factors contributing to his slow fade out of the spotlight: the Great Depression and the trend towards shorter fiction, a tough mold for the often-verbose Williams to fit into. This transition away from magazine culture enabled him to focus on novel-writing.
Williams enjoyed his success as a short-story writer through the 1920s; in the 1930s he met with a significant obstacle, the Great Depression. The Post reduced its size to one-third its original. Other magazines either followed or folded. Editors preferred what they called “short shorts,” and when they did accept Williams’s work, it was severely condensed. Constricted by the limitations of such a short format, Williams abandoned short stories for film adaptations and finally novels. In 1940, he published his first novel, Come Spring, set in Maine during the Revolutionary War. Critics thought the novel heavy with dialogue and detail, but otherwise looked upon it favorably. Though he contributed non-fiction pieces for magazines, Williams focused primarily on writing novels.
Following to completion of The Unconquered (1953), a sequel to House Divided, Williams suffered a fatal heart attack. He died in Brookline, Massachusetts on February 4, 1953.
Williams’s stories are subtle, sharply observed, graceful, and seemingly effortless, edging again and again toward the sketch rather than the plotted story and creating an ethic and a sense of place that is often pastoral and atavistic but by no means facile and superficial. Williams lavished detail on his characters and settings, often at the expense of his plots.
Personality
Ben Ames Williams is described as a simple, unassuming and hardworking man. Williams has not been remembered as a significant or influential writer. He took his literary models from the nineteenth century: Balzac, Maupassant, Tolstoy and Stevenson. Contemporary readers have come to expect more from short stories.
Quotes from others about the person
“A reader of William’s fiction now would be likely to feel the energies of style and craft that made Lorimer accept his ‘sketches’ in spite of himself. The best of the stories create a myth of the human spirit in a difficult word; they are pastoral but strenuous, at once hedonistic and rigorously moral, and carry conviction even now.” - Earl Stevick
Interests
fishing, hiking, hunting
Writers
Balzac, Maupassant, Tolstoy, Stevenson
Connections
On September 4, 1912, Williams married Florence Talpey, a Maine native, Wellesley graduate, and daughter of an English mother and American sea captain, in 1912. They had three children, Roger, Ben and Penelope.
DLB 102: American Short Story Writers 1910-1945, Second Series (Dictionary of Literary Biography)
The break with traditional forms becomes the hallmark of 20th century writings . . . and nowhere is this shift more evident than in the American short story, states series editor Bobby Ellen Kimbel in the foreword to this second series covering writers active during one of the literary forms most influential periods.
1991
The Oxford Companion to American Literature
For more than half a century, James D. Hart's The Oxford Companion to American Literature has been an unparalleled guide to America's literary culture, providing one of the finest resources to this country's rich history of great writers. Now this acclaimed work has been completely revised and updated to reflect current developments in the world of American letters.