(Excerpt from Daddy Do Funny's Wisdom Jingles The grizzle...)
Excerpt from Daddy Do Funny's Wisdom Jingles The grizzled brown dispenser of homely admonitions is a figure not unfamiliar to those who have moved in plantation circles in the cotton and sugar country, and touched hands with the kindly dark survivors of the old regime. 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.
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Ruth was born on May 21, 1849 in Marksville, Louisiana, United States. She was the eldest of the eight children of James and Mary Routh (Stirling) McEnery of Marksville, Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. Her father was born in Limerick, Ireland; her mother, of St. Francisville, Louisiana, was the daughter of Sir John Stirling, a Scotchman from Edinburgh. Plantation owners and professional and business men, the Stirlings and McEnerys and their kinsfolk were also active in affairs of state.
From the age of three Ruth McEnery lived in New Orleans, where she attended both public and private schools and for several years taught in the primary grades.
After her husband's death and her return to New Orleans, she began to turn to account a remarkably full and accurate knowledge of Southern "characters" - Louisiana Creoles, New Orleans trades-and market-people, plantation negroes, Arkansas "poor whites. "
Her first story appeared in the New Princeton Review in January 1888; her second, the characteristic "Lamentations of Jeremiah Johnson, " in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, May 1888. In the early nineties she moved to New York City.
Between 1891 and 1917 she published more than twenty books, most of them collections of humorous short stories, sketches, and verses reprinted from Harper's, the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, and other magazines.
Stuart died in New York City in 1917 and was buried in New Orleans.
Ruth Stuart produced about 20 books, short stories, sketches, and reprinted verses, that she had originally published in magazines. She was the first to describe the after-the-War plantation negro in his own social environment. Her most famous work is said to be Sonny (1896). She was also occasionally a sub-editor at Harpers, Harper's Bazaar and other publications. In 1915 a literary club, Ruth McEnery Stuart Clan, was founded and named in her honor.
(Excerpt from Daddy Do Funny's Wisdom Jingles The grizzle...)
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Her fiction was well received, not wholly, it may be thought, because the South had recently become an interesting literary subject, or because she wrote with a sometimes extravagant humor and with sentiment and optimism - rewarding the deserving, finding the long lost, and uniting the long separated.
She had a genuine affectionate sympathy for the originals of her characters; and she had an extraordinary skill in the use of the habitual locutions of her illiterate whites and blacks, a manner of speaking manifestly no one's invention, accurate in spirit and letter.
She became a member of the Lyceum Club in England in 1904.
Though always an industrious writer, she made many friends, for she possessed charm and sympathy, and her vivacious and witty conversation made her a delightful companion.
Quotes from others about the person
Stuart has been characterized as belonging to the school of "American local color writing that emphasizes regional characteristics in landscape, way of life, and language. "
On August 6, 1879, she married Alfred Oden Stuart, a cotton planter of Washington, Ark. She had one child, a son, who died in 1904. In 1883 her husband died, and she returned to New Orleans.
