(Excerpt from Land's End: And Other Stories
Mr. Steele's ...)
Excerpt from Land's End: And Other Stories
Mr. Steele's pictorial sense is somewhat akin to that of Fromentin in Dominique, though less hard by virtue of his sense of wonder. The stories collected in this volume have, in fact, a quality of romantic escape rare in our American life, and so correspondingly rare in our American literature. Landscape, with its human fore ground, gives Mr. Steele a sense of liberation, so that it is a refuge for him from the impact Of facts, so falsely called reality by most men. He is, therefore, a romantic realist, who refuses to escape from life, but contents himself by making a truce with it. If his stories reveal a certain nostalgia, it is a personal nostalgia, and it does not color his interpretation of life. You feel that his quarrel is with the matter-of-fact rather than with civilization.
In this respect he is to be contrasted with Synge, though there is much resemblance in other ways between the two writers. TO Synge.
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(The masterful Lon Chaney stars in these two classic silen...)
The masterful Lon Chaney stars in these two classic silent films. "Outside the Law" (1920, 75 min.) - In this early collaboration with director Tod Browning (Dracula, Freaks), Chaney delivers a dual performance of dramatic intensity, starring as Ah Wing, a kind-hearted student of Confucian philosophy, and Black Mike Sylva, a murderous rake of the San Francisco underworld. Like night and day, Ah Wing and Sylva are physical representations of the opposing factions of light and dark that weigh upon the moral conscience of the film's protagonist, Molly Madden (Priscilla Dean), who must choose between lives of crime and domesticity. "Shadows" (1922, 68 min.) - In one of the most challenging performances of his illustrious career, Chaney stars as a Chinese laundryman caught in a web of small-town jealousy and extortion. Both films features new orchestral scores.
Wilbur Daniel Steele was an American author and playwright. Together with his wife actress Norma Mitchell he wrote the famous play The Post Road.
Background
Wilbur was born on March 17, 1886 in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States, the son of Wilbur Fletcher, a Methodist minister, and Rose Wood. His father was principal of Greensboro's Bennett Seminary, now Bennett College. In 1889, while his father studied at the University of Berlin, Steele attended kindergarten, taught by the niece of the German educator Friedrich Froebel.
In 1892 the family moved to Denver when Steele's father became professor of Bible at the University of Denver. In Colorado, Steele delighted in adventures, sports, and cartoons.
Education
He entered the University of Denver Preparatory School in 1900 and the University of Denver in 1903. After receiving his B. A. in 1907, he enrolled at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. As an art student in Paris (at the Academie Julien) and in Italy in 1908-1909, he wavered between painting and writing.
Career
At the Provincetown summer art colony he vacillated between a pictorial and a literary career. At the Art Students League in New York he devoted his days to drawing and his nights to writing. Success Magazine published Steele's first story, "On the Ebb Tide, " in 1910.
For a few months he worked in Boston as a reporter and illustrator for National Magazine but preferred to spend his winters in Greenwich Village and his summers in Provincetown. In April 1912 his story "White Horse Winter" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. That summer he shared a Provincetown shack with a volatile young writer named Sinclair Lewis.
During the summer of 1914 (the year Steele's first adventure novel, Storm, was published) his grim and intricate stories graced the pages of Scribner's Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine. To the budding Provincetown Players he contributed one-act dramas, Contemporaries in 1915 and Not Smart in 1916.
For two months in 1917, Steele sailed the Caribbean, writing articles for Harper's Magazine and gathering material for his monthly stories the following year. In 1918 he also described the war in Europe for Cosmopolitan magazine. Reviewers praised the uncanny dramatic economy of his first story collection, Land's End (1918).
From 1915 to 1926 nine Steele stories reappeared in Edward J. O'Brien's annual Best Stories volumes: "The Yellow Cat" (1915), "Down on Their Knees" (1916), "Ching, Ching, Chinaman" (1917), "The Dark Hour" (1918), "Out of Exile" (1920), "The Shame Dance" (1921), "From the Other Side of the South" (1922), "Six Dollars" (1925), and "Out of the Wind" (1926). Time and again the anthologist praised Steele's technical ingenuity.
By 1920, Steele had lived in Bermuda, North Africa, the French Riviera, and Nantucket, places graphically evoked in his second collection, The Shame Dance (1923). Wintering in Cannes in 1923-1924, he wrote stories for the Pictorial Review and worked on his second novel, Isles of the Blest (1924), exotica less successful than his one-act mystery The Giant's Stair.
Performed in Provincetown in 1924, this play appears with Ropes and the early Not Smart in his readable, actable volume The Terrible Woman and Other One-Act Plays (1925).
Steele's third novel, Taboo (1925), treats the theme of incest without the quiet solidity of "When Hell Froze, " a family story that deservedly won first prize in Harper's 1925 Short Story Contest. Convinced of his wife's infidelity, a farmer commands her to wash her hands in lye water. Not "till hell freezes over, " she declares and moves into town. But out of love for her family, she returns to the farmhouse and dips her hands into the lye water. The relaxed plot, luminous motivation, and clean prose make this story of rural mores seem closer to life than most of Steele's ingenious melodramas.
Depressed during his 1925-1926 winter in Switzerland, Steele recovered with the publication of Urkey Island (1926), eight improbable tales linked by an atmospheric New England fishing village. His best novel, Meat (1928), is about a mother's fanatical protection of her defective child at the expense of her other children.
The stories of his finest years as a writer appear in his next collection, the stunning Man Who Saw Through Heaven (1927). The title story, about the bizarre odyssey of a naive missionary in Africa after he peers through an enormous telescope, allegorizes the history of human evolution. In a tour de force of Euclidean plot, stylized histrionics, and ironic indirection, ontogeny assumes phylogeny. But by this time the reaction against jigsawpuzzle plots and heavy-handed chance had destroyed many literary reputations.
Still, the O. Henry Committee - O. Henry, too, had been born in Greensboro - favored Steele's jeweled shockers, but O'Brien now preferred stories less contrived, the realism of Anderson, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Forced to sell his summer home in Nantucket, Steele, low-spirited, wintered in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1928-1929. Critics rightly found Steele's sixth collection, Tower of Sand (1929), highly strained and only temporarily satisfying.
In 1929 he moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he and playwright Paul Green became friends.
With his wife, Steele wrote a hit Broadway mysterycomedy, Post Road (1935), but had less success with his and Anthony's Brown's three-act stage adaptation of "How Beautiful with Shoes. "
From 1938, when he published his psychological detective novel Sound of Rowlocks, to 1945, only a trickle of Steele's mechanical efforts sold to mass-market magazines. In 1945, Doubleday published That Girl from Memphis, the first of Steele's increasingly tedious quasi-romantic novels set in the American West. Capitalizing on Steele's early fame, Doubleday published the central collection, The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele (1945). Following the poor reception of Steele's second western novel, Diamond Wedding (1950), Doubleday anticlimactically published Full Cargo: More Stories by Wilbur Daniel Steele (1951).
After his third western novel, the involuted Their Town (1952), Steele had a nervous breakdown and wintered in 1953-1954 in Florida. Unable to complete his last novel to Doubleday's satisfaction, he resented editorial alterations in The Way to the Gold (1955) and refused even to see the film version. Retiring to Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1956, he underwent several operations and hospitalizations and died in 1970.
Achievements
Wilbur Daniel Steele was called "America's recognised master of the popular short story" between World War I and the Great Depression.
His short stories are set in American locations and are often highly dramatic. Famous collections of his stories include The Man Who Saw through Heaven (1927), Best Stories (1946), and Full Cargo (1951). He also wrote popular novels, including Taboo (1925), That Girl from Memphis (1945), and Their Town (1952).
At his youth he was romantic, athletic, and witty.
Connections
On February 17, 1913, in Brookline, Massachussets, Steele married Margaret Orinda Thurston, a painter whom he had first met at the Boston Museum School; they had two children.
In London, on January 14, 1932, Steele married his second wife, a family friend, actress Norma Mitchell, divorced from Hayden Talbot; they had no children. They settled in her home in Hamburg, Connecticut, but spent the winters working in Hollywood.
