(Excerpt from Love's Dilemmas
It was momentous for both. ...)
Excerpt from Love's Dilemmas
It was momentous for both. Ultimately his world as well as hers looked at their drama from her point of view. Although he never complained at this lack of discernment, there was a fuller interpretation.
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
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As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
(Excerpt from The Common Lot
From time to time the door o...)
Excerpt from The Common Lot
From time to time the door opened to admit some tardy person. Then the May sunlight without flooded the dim, long hall with a sudden radiance, even to the arched recess in the rear, where the coffin was placed. The late-comers sank into the crowd of black-coated men, who filled the hall to the broad stairs. Most of these were plainly dressed, with thick, grizzled beards and lined faces: they were old hands from the Bridge Works on the West Side, where they had worked many years for Powers Jackson. In the parlors at the left of the hall there were more women than men, and more fashionable clothes than in the hall. But the faces were scarcely less rugged and lined; for these friends of the old man who lay in the coffin were mostly life-worn and gnarled, like himself. Their luxuries had not sufficed to hide the scars of the battles they had waged with fortune.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
(Robert Welch Herrick (1868-1938) was a novelist who was p...)
Robert Welch Herrick (1868-1938) was a novelist who was part of a new generation of American realists. His novels deal with the turbulence of industrialized society and the turmoil it can create in sensitive, isolated people. He was also briefly acting – Governor of the United States Virgin Islands in 1935. From1905 to 1923, he was a professor of literature at the University of Chicago, during which time he wrote thirteen novels. Among those considered to be his finest was Web of Life (1900). His art was free of dogmaticisms and achieves its power from a melancholic fatalism. He dreaded the brutality and ignorance of the mob as much as he despised the avarice and ennui of the upper class. He was suspicious of political doctrines and utopian legislation, feeling that true progress for human happiness must always lie in individuals making moral choices. His works include: Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories (1897), The Man Who Wins (1897), The Gospel of Freedom(1898), The Real World (1901), Their Child (1903), Together(1908)and A Life for a Life (1910).
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Robert Welch Herrick was an American novelist. He was part of a new generation of American realists who dealt with the turbulence of industrialized society and its influence to people's lives. He also served as a professor of English at the University of Chicago, and briefly acting-Governor of the United States Virgin Islands.
Background
Robert Welch Herrick was born on April 21, 1868 in Cambridge, Massachussets, United States. He was the fourth child and third son of William Augustus and Harriet Peabody (Emery) Herrick. His ancestry in America on both sides was Puritan middle-class and extended back to the earliest settlements of New England.
His father practised law in Boston and had a local reputation as the author of legal reference works; his mother, the daughter of a Congregational minister in Weymouth, Massachussets, was a strong-minded woman who felt that she had married beneath her.
Its winters the family spent in Cambridge and its long summers in Boxford, Massachussets, where the Herricks had been small farmers for over a century. A frank, if somewhat disguised, account of these early years may be found in two of Herrick's novels, The Real World and Waste.
Education
After preparing at the Cambridge Latin School, Herrick entered Harvard in 1885. There he came particularly under the influence of Barrett Wendell, whose classroom praise of one of his themes prompted Herrick to send his first stories to the Harvard Advocate and Monthly and whose method of teaching English composition Herrick was later to introduce at the University of Chicago.
Under the combined aegis of Wendell and the Monthly, which he edited for a year, Herrick participated in the remarkable undergraduate renaissance in letters that enlisted the budding talents of such students as William Vaughn Moody, George Pierce Baker, Norman Hapgood, George Santayana, Bernard Berenson, and Robert Morss Lovett.
In the middle of his sophomore year Herrick left college temporarily to tour Cuba, Mexico, the Pacific Coast, and Alaska with his roommate Philip S. Abbot. The trip inaugurated his lifelong passion for foreign travel but delayed his graduation a year.
In 1890 he received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard.
Career
In 1890 Herrick became an instructor in composition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Three years later he was invited to organize the composition and rhetoric program at the newly founded University of Chicago.
Although he had been writing steadily since his Harvard years, it was not until 1894 that Herrick's stories began appearing in the Atlantic and Scribner's and not until 1897 that his first book, a novelette called The Man Who Wins, made its unobtrusive debut. Following two collections of short stories, Literary Love-Letters, and Other Stories (1897) and Love's Dilemmas (1898), which exploited a vein of light irony that Herrick soon abandoned, he captured serious critical attention with his first full-length novel, The Gospel of Freedom (1898), begun two years earlier in Europe. Although it belonged essentially to the growing category of "new woman" novels about restless and socially ambitious middle-class wives, it also set the pattern for subsequent Herrick novels dealing with the manifold problems of urban middle-class existence. Taken together, these were to constitute a record of his attempt to mediate between the ethos of puritanism and the blatant commercial spirit of Chicago.
Herrick was first exposed to the disagreeable newspaper publicity that was to be a feature of his career when his second novel, The Web of Life (1900), offended Chicagoans by its portrait of their city in its crude adolescence. His reaction to adverse criticism, then as later, was to take refuge in a poetic treatment of reality for which his talents were ill suited. The early chapters of The Real World (1901), reminiscent of William Dean Howells in their subject and method, gave way to an unsatisfactory, semi-allegorical account of a young man's attempt to discover the "real world" created by the individual will. "Realism did not satisfy my whole nature, " Herrick once wrote. "There was something within me, as in every pure-blooded New Englander, of the mystic, the transcendentalist, the idealist. "
Over the years this impulse produced, besides The Real World, his other so-called "idealistic" novels--A Life for a Life (1910) and The Healer (1911)--and the popular short tale The Master of the Inn (1908). His important contribution, however, was a kind of realism conditioned by the progressivism of the period but in no sense identified with the muckraking movement, since its emphasis was on the power of the individual to remold his environment rather than on the need to change existing social institutions.
His best novels belong to the period before the first World War: The Common Lot (1904), The Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905), Clark's Field (1914), and the somewhat less successful One Woman's Life (1913). The same period saw the publication of his most ambitious and controversial novel, Together (1908), a candid and at the time rather daring study of modern marriage, which has more value as a social document than as a novel. During these years, and in fact until 1923, Herrick maintained his association with the University of Chicago, teaching only part of the year and the rest of the time devoting himself to writing.
In 1915 he went to Europe as a special correspondent for the Chicago Tribune to cover the political aspect of the war, his articles urging American intervention being later collected in The World Decision (1916). In 1916 Herrick returned to the Chicago campus, disillusioned with the course of the war, to resume his teaching.
The hiatus in his career as a novelist, extending over nearly a decade from the publication of Clark's Field, was broken by the appearance in 1923 of Homely Lilla, another tale of domestic unhappiness. In Waste (1924) he recapitulated most of the themes and many of the situations of his earlier novels in a long spiritual autobiography which drew heavily, as did most of his novels, on the actualities of his life and of his friends' lives. Alongside the fiction of the new generation, Herrick's novels came to seem increasingly old-fashioned, and he was never able to regain his earlier audience. Waste was followed by Wanderings (1925), a collection of short tales; the academic novel Chimes (1926), an informal and highly colored account of the early history of the University of Chicago; The End of Desire (1932), a novel about the problems of love in middle age; and, finally, the utopian fantasy Sometime (1933), along with Waste the most bitterly disillusioned of Herrick's novels.
After his resignation from the Chicago faculty in 1923, Herrick spent his winters in foreign travel or in Florida and his summers in York Village, Maine, where in 1912 he had purchased a small house. In 1935 Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes appointed him government secretary of the Virgin Islands, a post which he held with distinction until his death, even assuming for two intervals the role of acting governor while his superiors were defending their administrations in Washington. The record of his years in the Virgin Islands is one of growing irritation under the restraints of bureaucracy, a belated access of conservatism which is in marked contrast to his earlier liberalism, and steadily deteriorating health under heart attacks which had threatened his life for twenty years. The last years of his life were marked by a deepening stoicism in the face of financial anxieties and what he regarded as inevitable world chaos. Following his death from a stroke at St. Thomas, his body was returned to York Village for burial.
Achievements
Herrick is remembered as a prominent novelist and educator. His books revealed his strengths as a progressive critic of commercial and materialistic society, notably of Chicago, and established his intellectual kinship with other social realists such as Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. Of his later novels, Together, One Woman's Life, and The End of Desire are of interest for their treatment of modern marriage, sexual liberation, and feminism. His 1914 essay The Background of the American Novel is an important document in the history of American literary realism.
Herrick's appearance was distinguished, his personality austere. In manner he was formal and reserved and almost too self-consciously the model of the Harvard gentleman, but he nevertheless was capable of deep friendships. Temperamentally he was conditioned by his frustrated idealism.
Connections
Herrick had been in Chicago only a few months when he became engaged to his first cousin, Harriet Peabody Emery, to whom he was married on June 9, 1894. They had one son, Philip Abbot.
In 1916 his wife obtained a consent decree of divorce on the ground of desertion.
