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THE EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS LIBRARY
Over 1,200 Volumes
Collected From 1875 Through 1950
The surviving editions are held in trust in the archive of grandson Danton Burroughs
Collated and Researched by Bill Hillman
Shelf: H3
William Dean Howells 1837-1920
A Chance Acquaintance 1873 ~ J. R. Osgood & Co ~ 279 pages
A Chance Acquaintance (1873), more strictly a novel, for the first time showed that Howells could not only report customs and sketch characters felicitously but could also organize a plot with delicate skill. A young Bostonian, passionately in love with an intelligent but unsophisticated inland girl, who returns his love, is so little able to overcome his ingrained provincial snobbishness that he steadily condescends to her until in the end he suddenly sees, as she sees, that he has played an ignoble and vulgar part which convincingly separates them. Nothing could be more subtle than the turn by which their relative positions are reversed. The style of A Chance Acquaintance, while not more graceful than that of Howells’s earlier books, is more assured and crisp. The central idea is clearly conceived and the outlines sharp without being in any way cruel or cynical. The descriptions are exquisite, the dialogue both natural and revealing, and over and through all is a lambent mirth, an undeceived kindliness of wisdom, which was to remain his essential quality.
Online eText Edition: http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=wright2;idno=wright2-1287

Other:
A Traveller from Altruria - The text of A Traveller from Altruria, sections of which focus on the meaning of the Columbian Exposition. 
A Traveller from Altruria
The Rise of Silas Lapham
Six classic works
A Woman's Reason (James R. Osgood & Co., 1883)
The Quality of Mercy (Harper & Brothers 1892)
The Coast of Bohemia (Harper & Brothers, 1893)
The Story of a Play (Harper & Brothers, 1898)
The Rise of Silas Lapham (Harper & Brothers, 1912)
Through the Eye of the Needle (Harper & Brothers 1907).

W. D. Howells was a great novelist and friend and collaborator of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells. It is hard to   describe the impact Howells had on the 19th century. As an editor of important magazines, as a novelist and as a general taste maker, he was  incredibly influential. He produced many novels, stories, plays, and poems in his long life. He served as the editor of Atlantic Monthly and Harper's magazines, and as the "dean" of late 19th-century American literature introduced realism and naturalism, both by his own writings and by encouraging many others from Henry James to Bret Harte and Frank Norris to Mark Twain. He supported socialism and opposed American imperialism.
William. D. Howells and the Ridiculous Human Heart
Articles in the Cornell Library
William Dean Howells Society Website

 
W. H. Hudson 1841 -
Far Away and Long Ago 1918/1926  Dent or E.P. Dutton
Hudson remembered and celebrated in his childhood memoir and masterpiece Far Away and Long Ago. This extraordinary book is the result of a period of Proustian recall which was triggered by being confined to bed when he was already an old man. There is a memory of an adored mother and a childhood lost and hyper-sensitivity and the love of solitude mingle with a sense of permanent exile, as if he has been shut out of some original Eden. Fear of extinction drove Hudson's passionate recourse to memory as the only means of preserving the past and language becomes the vehicle of that memory and the only refuge against extinction. If we want to discover the uniqueness and originality of Hudson, however, we must return to his criollo work
 This book is about W.H Hudson’s early life. The first chapter gives the place where he was born along with his earliest memories. The second chapter he moves to the county, but he doesn’t like living on a farm. The third chapter, the young boy is exposed to death, and he doesn’t handle it very well. The last chapter, Chapter XXIV, his mother dies, his absent brother returns, and he introduces Hudson to Darwin’s works. 

Other:
Green Mansions
A Shepherd's Life

William Henry Hudson, the son of Anglo-American immigrants, was born in an estancia house – Los 25 Ombues, near the Chichitas river in the district of Quilmes, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina – on the 4th of August 1841. This was the house associated with his earliest and happiest memories. Naturalist, novelist, short story writer, Hudson is one of those writers whose work awaits rediscovery by each new generation. In 1885, W. H. Hudson published The Purple Land, a novel about the Banda Oriental, in present-day Uruguay. It is an account of a South American arcadia, a pleasant wilderness that might, if history had turned out differently, have become another British colony (the subtitle of the novel is The Purple Land that England Lost). There are passages in this work which extol the virtues of British colonial rule. The hero, Richard Lamb, bitterly condemns the generals who traded 200 British soldiers for the freedom of Uruguay, which thereupon fell, as he see it, into the hands of the local rabble. Hudson was a man with a dual allegiance – to England, the land of his ancestors, and Argentina, the land of his childhood.

A great part of Hudson's originality can be traced to his biculturalism. Hudson's South American romances are unique works of fiction, with their exotic subject matter and rambling Quixotic narratives written in elegant English prose. Hudson's reputation with the English-language public has declined since Virginia Woolf praised his work in the Common Reader. However, his novel Green Mansions (1904 ), with its romantic story of the pursuit of the bird girl, Rima, has never been out of print . His autobiographical memoir, Far Away and Long Ago (1917), gives an account of his childhood on the pampa. If he had written nothing else, Hudson would be remembered for this poignant memoir which also contains most of the autobiographical material available to the student or researcher. The Hudsons' attempt to settle on the pampa at Quilmes was a slow decline into something near ruin. William's father had to give up sheep farming, sell off his land and open a grocery store. This too failed, and eventually he had to eke a living from growing potatoes. The humiliation of this early family defeat marked Hudson for life, eventually driving him at the age of 32 into a kind of exile in London. Yet, for the child, there were compensations: the family house was full of books and it was possible to get some sort of an education from the travelling schoolteachers who would turn up from time to time and stay for a while. After catching rheumatic fever from a exposure to a hailstorm while out herding cattle, the adolescent Hudson was accorded some of the privileges of the invalid, wandering alone on the plains, observing animals and birds, but also taking careful note of the habits and idiosyncrasies of the human inhabitants. For Hudson, no distinction can be made between the world of humans and the world of animals. All life is endowed with a specific genetic history and adapts to the conditions in which it finds itself. Aware of Darwin's Origin of Species, Hudson believed that nature is not cruel, but merely indifferent to that fate of humans. It was thus in early life that Hudson developed the powers of observation and passion for wildlife that turned him into a naturalist. Before he turned to writing as a full-time profession , he was a professional ornithologist and bird collector, shipping specimens to museums in Britain and the USA. One of his biographers describes him as even looking like a bird, with his eagle's beak of a nose.

In 1874, he departed for England, the land of his grandfather and his American mother's ancestors. When his brother saw him off on his final journey to England he said: “Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don't know.” This statement still stands as a salutory warning to biographers ( see for example W. H. Hudson, Ruth Tomalin, Faber 1982). In London he met and married a decent older woman who owned a bare and gloomy London boarding house. His friend and first biographer, Morley Roberts, called it “a grim jail” which held “a prisoner of genius, whose only true home was under the open sky” (Morley Roberts, Eveleigh Nash and Grayson 1924). It was hardly a love match, and there were rumours of passionate love affairs. However, his wife's income from boarders and the free lodgings she provided enabled Hudson to develop his writing career during the difficult early years. All his work was written in English and first published in Britain between 1885 and 1922. Outwardly, his life during his English exile was uneventful, yet his writings give off a sense of painful regret for a lost Eden. As a writer of sketches and essays on nature themes for the London journals, he liked to explore the countryside of Southern England, staying in country inns or private lodgings from where he wrote letters to his friends. Books like Nature in Downland  (1910) and A Shepherd's Life (1910) caught the nostalgic mood of the Edwardian period, and link him with the gentleman naturalists of the English tradition such as White of Selborne and his Sussex-based contemporary, Richard Jefferies, who died while still young. He was more than a sentimental naturalist, however: he was an accurate and dispassionate observer of the whole dynamic pattern of the English countryside, people, animals, crops, trees and plants. For ornithologists, his Birds of the River Plate is an indispensable reference and valuable collectors' item. Hudson was a pioneer in the field of ecology. He was a dedicated conservationist, and was particularly concerned with the protection of living birds.

For the Argentine reader his work in Spanish translation (he wrote exclusively in English ) has made a unique contribution to criollo literature and has enabled the creation of the national myth of a gaucho nation. His South American romances, and his nature writings – especially A Naturalist in the River Plate (1892) and Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) – are required reading by Argentine school children in Spanish language translation. Despite Hudson's pro-British attitudes, he always saw himself as one of the poor and powerless, representative of a culture that is still politically unformed and vulnerable and of a continent in which democracy and the rule of law are still rare. It was that semi-barbarous life of the plains that Hudson remembered and celebrated in his childhood memoir and masterpiece Far Away and Long Ago. This extraordinary book is the result of a period of Proustian recall which was triggered by being confined to bed when he was already an old man. There is a memory of an adored mother and a childhood lost and hyper-sensitivity and the love of solitude mingle with a sense of permanent exile, as if he has been shut out of some original Eden. Fear of extinction drove Hudson's passionate recourse to memory as the only means of preserving the past and language becomes the vehicle of that memory and the only refuge against extinction. If we want to discover the uniqueness and originality of Hudson, however, we must return to his criollo work. Among Argentine critics, his reputation has been well served by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada whose book, El Mundo Maravilloso de Guillermo Enrique Hudson (1951), contains an interesting account of Hudson's metaphysical world. For Estrada, Hudson is the supreme interpreter of Argentine reality “Nuestras cosas no han tenido poeta, pintor ni interprete semejante a Hudson, no lo tendran nunca”. For Jorge Luis Borges Borges, The Purple Land bears comparison with Huckleberry Finn as a great novel of the Americas.
 


 
Thomas Hughes 1822-1896
Tom Brown's School Days ~ 1920 ~ Porter & Coates ~ 289 pages

Thomas Hughes, the son of a landowner from Uffington in Berkshire, was born in 1822. After being educated at Oriel College, Oxford, Hughes trained as a lawyer. While a student Hughes read The Kingdom of Christ (1838) by Frederick Denison Maurice. In the book Maurice argued that politics and religion are inseparable and that the church should be involved in addressing social questions. Hughes became a supporter of Chartism and after the decision by the House of Commons to reject the Chartist Petition in 1848, he joined with Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley to form the Christian Socialist movement. The men discussed how the Church could help to prevent revolution by tackling what they considered were the reasonable grievances of the working class. The Christian Socialists published two journals, Politics of the People (1848-1849) and The Christian Socialist (1850-51). The group also produced a series of pamphlets under the title Tracts on Christian Socialism. Other initiatives included a night school in Little Ormond Yard and helping to form eight Working Men's Associations. In 1854 the evening classes that the Christian Socialists had been involved in developed into the establishment of the Working Men's College. In 1856 Hughes wrote Tom Brown's Schooldays (1856) based on his school experiences at Rugby School. His follow-up novel, Tom Brown at Oxford was less successful. Hughes became a Liberal MP between 1865 and 1874 and principal of the Working Men's College from 1872 to 1883. Thomas Hughes died in 1896.
Biography, etc.

 
Victor Hugo 1802-1885
William Shakespeare ~ 1864 ~ Paris

Later edition
Others:
Les Miserables

Victor Marie Hugo (1802-85), the poet, novelist and dramatist was at the centre of the French Romantic movement and its most prolific writer. He was born in 1802 in Besançon, and during his childhood left for Italy (1808) and Spain (1811-12). His education took place in Paris where he became acquainted with the works of Virgil, which was to become a lifelong passion. He showed early signs of promise as a writer, writing his first play at fourteen, and being congratulated by the Académie Française only one year later (he was elected to it in 1841). His first novel, Bug-Jargal was published in 1819, and his first Odes (1822) were rewarded by Louis XVIII such that he was able to marry Adèle Foucher.  Hugo's great theme of liberty, especially in the form and theme of art, was apparent from the mid-1820s onwards, after the controversy surrounding his novel Han d'Islande and his Odes et ballades (both 1826). He attempted to free writers from the more restrictive of the classical unities but his own success in the theatre was delayed due to the censorship of his late 1820s plays including Cromwell (1827) whose preface was nonetheless taken to the hearts of members of the Romantic movement. Le Roi s'amuse (1832) and Ruy Blas (1838) were two further verse-dramas of some importance, but after his dramatic epic Les Burgraves (1843) failed to convince, Hugo stopped writing for the stage. Simultaneously with his dramatic writing, Hugo wrote the novel that would form the crux of his later reputation, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), often known as "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame". The 1830s, though, brought religious doubt and increasing pessimism after the July Monarchy destroyed the possibilities for liberty he had foreseen. This attitude can be seen in his four volumes of lyrical poetry published between 1831 and 1840, as well as the aforementioned novel. After his election to the Académie Française in 1841, his daughter and her husband died. Hugo, much affected, spent his time becoming more involved in politics, even becoming a candidate for the French presidency in 1848. However, after he had publicly denounced Napoleon III he was exiled in 1851 to Jersey. He moved on to Guernsey in 1855 where he lived until 1870. During this period he wrote Les Contemplations (1852-5) and Les Misérables (1862). His William Shakespeare (1864) redefined the purposes of poetry according to his own vision. Returning from exile, Hugo was seen as a national hero, although he played a much diminished role in public affairs compared with that which he had had previously. He continued to write his Legends des siècles (1877, 1883, 1885) to further acclaim right up until his death in 1885. His last words were reportedly, "I see a black light".

Web Ref of Interest: Digitized copies of Shakespeare's Works: Quarto - British Library
 


 
E. M. Hull (Edith Maude Winstanley) (18??-194??)
The Shadow of the East: 1922 Boston, Small, Mayanrd & Company
The Sheik 1921 A.L. Burt and 1923 George Newnes
Online eText Version of the Shiek: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/gaslight/sheikXA.htm
The Sheik
E.M. (Edith Maude) Hull, was so shy and retiring that no picture exists of her. Historians are not even sure of her date of birth or when she died. E.M. Hull was the wife of a gentleman pig farmer in Derbyshire. During World War I, she began to write to amuse herself and produced a book that is still in print and has influenced romances ever since. The Sheik is the story of a spoiled English girl, Diana Mayo, who will not listen to anyone. She refuses offers of marriage and wanders out on her own in the Egyptian desert. While she is out in the desert, Diana is kidnapped by Sheik Ali Ben Hassan and is ravished again and again and again and again (you get the picture). She puts up a token protest at first, but later learns to love her ravisher (who turns out to be the long-lost son of an English nobleman). Here's a passage from The Sheik:

The flaming light of desire burning in his eyes turned her sick and faint. Her body throbbed with the consciousness of a knowledge that appalled her. She understood his purpose with a horror that made each separate nerve in her system shrink against the understanding that had come to her under the consuming fire of his ardent gaze, and in the fierce embrace that was drawing her shaking limbs closer and closer to the man's own pulsating body.  "Oh you brute! You brute!", she wailed, until his kisses silenced her.

Talk about purple prose! Critic's jaws dropped and they quickly proclaimed the book pornography. Readers bought it by the cartload and Mrs. Hull went on to write several more books, all set in Egypt and all featuring masterful men and masochistic women. Some of her other titles were The Sons of the Sheik and The Desert Healer. The movie version of The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino was a world-wide smash and made the desert sheik the number one sex-symbol of the day. Sheiks have gone in out of favor ever since, but have never totally faded away. As a matter of fact, Johanna Lindsey's Captive Bride is essentially a re-telling of Hull's story with the same basic plot elements and more explicit sex scenes. 
Three of the most popular woman writers of the early twentieth century were Elinor Glyn, E.M. Hull and Ethel M. Dell
 


 
Clara Whitehill Hunt
About Harriet ~ 1916 ~ Boston: Houghton ~ Houghton Mifflin ~ Illustrator: Maginel Wright Enright

Other: 
Read WORK WITH CHILDREN IN THE SMALL LIBRARY  ~ Library Journal, 1903, P. C53.
Values in Library Work with Children. ~ A. L. A. Proceedings, 1913  275 pages

Clara Whitehill Hunt was born in Utica, N. Y., in 1871. She was graduated from the Utica Free Academy in 1889, and from the New York State Library School in 1898. From 1893 to 1896 she was a public school principal in Utica. She organized work with children in the Apprentices' Library, Philadelphia, in 1898, and had charge of it in the Newark, N. J., Free Public Library from 1898 to 1902.

 
Rockwell D. Hunt  1887-1966
California the Golden ~ 1911/1933 ~ Silver, Burdette and Co.~ California History Book for Grades 7-8-9, used in the 1930s. This is pre-WWII and there are two chapters entitled 'The Chinse Question' and 'The Japanese Question'

Other:
How California Came to be Admitted (to the Union) 

Rockwell Dennis Hunt Papers ~ 1887-1966 
University of the Pacific. Library. Holt-Atherton Department of Special Collections Stockton, CA 95211

 
Frank Hurley  1885 - 1962
Pearls and Savages (2 copies) Adventures in the Air, on Land and Sea--in New Guinea ~ 1924 , 414 pages, 80 photographs--almost all full-page-of the people, customs, rituals, and artifacts of western New Guinea
Hurley's yacht EurekaThe canoe that flew like a bird
Frank Hurley: At the age of 14, Frank Hurley ran away from home and went to work on the Sydney docks. At the age of 17 he bought his first camera, learnt the technical aspects of photography and set himself up in the postcard business. In 1910, Douglas Mawson planned an Antarctic expedition, and Frank Hurley was selected as the expedition photographer. In 1911 Hurley left to Antarctica for the first time. Hurley's photographic style was very creative, and he had the ability to make ordinary things look interesting. This ability lead to him soon becaming famous in Australia and the UK.Hurley also worked with movie cameras. Probably his most famous movie was "Home of the Blizzard", and it was this movie that got him hired by Shackleton for the famous Endurance expedition. During the Endurance expedition he is said to have gone to great lengths to get the image he wanted, even climbing masts, trekking across unstable ice etc. If it was not for the daring feat of diving into the icy waters to retrieve his film, the Endurance expedition photographs would have been lost to the sea when the ship sank.After the Endurance, Hurley served as a frontline photographer in World War I, having been awarded the honorary rank of captain in the Australian Imperial Force. Hurley took some of the war's only known colour photographs. Hurley died at home at the age of 76, on 16 January 1962.

 
Fannie Hurst  (1889-1968)
Just Around the Corner ~ Her first book, Just Around the Corner, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1914. She went on to write more than 40 novels and story collections.
Film 1921
Filmography
Fannie Hurst had a very active career that spanned over fifty years. She had written seventeen novels, nine volumes of short stories, three plays, many articles, speaking engagements, a television talk show and collaborated on a number of films. She was born on October 18, 1889, in Hamilton, Ohio. She was the only child of Rose and Samuel Hurst, who was a successful manufacturer of shoes. Her parents were Bavarian-Jews, who immigrated to the United States in 1860. Fannie Hurst was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, in a "middle-western world of assimilated Jews." After receiving her A.B. degree from Washington University in St. Louis, in 1909, she went to Columbia University for graduate courses. Despite the objections of her parents, she left for New York in 1910.

 She wanted to be a writer and for that she had to study people. She worked as a waitress and as a salesgirl. She also did bit acting roles in the theater, attended night court and studied people on the street. Hurst was neither a radical or intellectual, but she was preoccupied with many social issues: equal pay for equal work, the right of a woman to retain her name after marriage, relief of the oppressed Jews in Eastern Europe, the social and medical  problems of homosexuals, etc.

Her first story, "Ain't Life Wonderful," had been published in Reedy's Weekly, a St. Louis newspaper, while she was attending college. There followed a string of rejections until 1912, when a second story was accepted and she received thirty dollars. Her writing talent was quickly recognized and the Saturday Evening Post wanted all of her future stories. Her novels and stories were eagerly greeted by the publishing world so that by 1925, she and Booth Tarkington were the highest paid writers in the United States. She became a long-time friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and supported the New Deal and labor. She chaired a national housing commission, 1936-37; the committee on workmen's compensation in 1940, a member of the national advisory committee to the Works Progress Administration, 1940-41; and she was a member of the board of directors of New rk Urban League.

Hurst was very active in raising funds for the refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1940s, a staunch supporter of Israel in  the 50s, and donated $50,000 to the support of writers. When she died, she left one million dollars to Brandeis and Washington Universities to establish professorships in creative writing. In 1915, she had secretly married pianist Jacques Danielson and they each had their own residence. When their marriage  was revealed in 1920, a New York Times editorial took them to task for having separate residences when there was a housing shortage. Hurst retaliated by stating that a married woman had the right to retain her own name, her own special life and her own personal liberty. They remained happily married until his death in 1952.

She was very sharp and to the point in vocalizing her views on the rights of women. When Justice Arthur Goldberg declared in 1962, "that it is time that we evaluated Women on merit and fitness for a job," she snapped back, "Time sir! You are a half century too late." Fannie Hurst died in New York City, on February 23, 1968, at the age of seventy-eight. She left behind her writings to stimulate the mind to the social issues that she had raised.
This is one of the 150 illustrated true stories of American heroism included in Jewish Heroes & Heroines of America :150 True Stories of American Jewish Heroism, © 1996, written by Seymour "Sy" Brody of Delray Beach, Florida, illustrated by Art Seiden of Woodmere, New York, and published by Lifetime Books, Inc., Hollywood, FL.
By Seymour "Sy" Brody
 


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