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Vitamin A, like vitamin D, has a nuclear receptor. Vitamin A technically has two nuclear receptors: retinoic acid receptors (RARs) and retinoid X receptors (RXRs). Vitamin A, like polyunsaturated fatty acids, can be found in trans and cis forms, depending on the conformation of its double bonds. The ligand for RARs is all-trans-retinoic acid, and the ligand for RXRs is 9-cis retinoic acid. As shown in the figure below, all-trans retinol is brought to the cell by RBP and TTR. All-trans retinol is converted to all-trans-retinal, and then to all-trans-retinoic acid. RAR and RXR are paired, or dimerized, on the retinoic acid response element (RARE) in the promoter region of target genes. The binding of all-trans retinoic acid to RAR causes the transcription and ultimately the translation of target proteins. This is why retinoic acid is the active form of vitamin A because all-trans retinoic acid is the ligand for RARs, leading to many of the biologic effects attributed to vitamin A. RXR is primarily a partner receptor for other nuclear hormone receptors and can serve in this role even without its ligand. 9-cis retinoic acid is rarely found in physiologically notable concentrations, so it is role is not entirely clear.

Inside the retina are the photoreceptor cells, rods and cones. Cones are responsible for color vision, while rods are important for seeing black and white. Within the rods, 11-cis retinal combines with the protein, opsin, to form rhodopsin. When light strikes rhodopsin, the compound splits into opsin and all-trans retinal. This sends a signal to your brain for us to “see”. This process is illustrated in the figure below1.

stores, or continued intake, is required to provide the 11-cis retinal needed to continue to form rhodopsin. Normally, our eyes adapt to darkness by increasing the amount of rhodopsin available so we can see under reduced light conditions1. If a person does not have enough rhodopsin he/she will become night blind, meaning his/her eyes do not adjust, or adjust very slowly, preventing he/she from seeing under limited light conditions. The picture below is an example of what night blindness looks like.

References & Links Byrd-Bredbenner C, Moe G, Beshgetoor D, Berning J. (2009) Wardlaw's perspectives in nutrition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P360_Onderdendam_goed_nachtzicht_ns_nachtblind.jpg 3. 4000

Vitamin A deficiency is rare in North America, but is a huge problem in developing countries. In many developing countries, they do not have a stable dietary source of retinoids or provitamin A carotenoids. The figure below gives you an idea of countries where vitamin A deficiency is a problem.

Often the earliest symptom of vitamin A deficiency is night blindness, due to the insufficient production of rhodopsin. The reason that this is the earliest symptom, is that circulating vitamin A (primary form is retinol) concentrations are homeostatically-controlled, meaning that they do not change until after vitamin A stores are exhausted (because stores are used to maintain circulating concentrations). This means that blood, serum, plasma measurements are going to appear normal until all stores are exhausted. As a result, determining or diagnosing someone as vitamin A deficient can be challenging. It also means that someone can be right on the brink of deficiency and an assessment of the status they would appear the same as someone who has adequate stores. There are further progressively worsening changes to the eye that occur during vitamin A deficiency, collectively referred to as xerophthalmia, which are shown in the link below.

One way to counter vitamin A deficiency in developing countries is for staple crops, like rice and corn, to contain beta-carotene. In the case of rice, Golden Rice was genetically modified to produce beta-carotene. A second generation of golden rice, known as Golden Rice 2, has now been developed. However, politics and regulations have prevented either from being used. This is described in the first link. The second link is a nice figure that details the progress towards Golden Rice being used. The third link describes the issues with how some research with it was conducted. The fourth link is an opinion article that gives you a feel for the opposition to its use. There are also corn varieties that have been bred (not genetically modified) to produce high amounts of beta-carotene, as described in the top link below. The second link describes how it has now been launched in the US. Vitamin A can be very toxic and can cause serious symptoms, such as blurred vision, liver abnormalities, skin disorders, and joint pain2,3. In addition, research has suggested that people who consume high levels of vitamin A are more prone to bone fractures2. Toxic levels of vitamin A are also teratogenic, which means they could cause birth defects. This is important to keep in mind because a vitamin A derivative isotretinoin (13-cis retinoic acid) was the active ingredient in the oral acne medication, Accutane. Accutane was effective, as you can see in the video below.

Retin-A is a topical product of all-trans-retinoic acid. Women of childbearing age need to exercise caution when using these products due to the risk of birth defects, should they become pregnant3. People should not consume huge doses of vitamin A expecting to get the same effects seen from these 2 medications5. It is important to note that you cannot develop vitamin A toxicity from consuming too much beta-carotene or other provitamin A carotenoids. This is prevented because the enzyme cleavage of them is decreased in response to higher vitamin A status. Instead, a nontoxic condition known as carotenodermia occurs when large amounts of beta-carotene are consumed, where the accumulation of the carotenoid in the fat below the skin causes the skin to look orange, as shown in the link below. Excess lycopene consumption leads to a similar condition known as lycopenodermia, which appear more pink or orange. References & Links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vitamin_A_deficiency.PNG McGuire M, Beerman KA. (2011) Nutritional sciences: From fundamentals to food. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Byrd-Bredbenner C, Moe G, Beshgetoor D, Berning J. (2009) Wardlaw's perspectives in nutrition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Links The eye signs of vitamin A deficiency - Hyperkeratosis - *Pg7xe7WAS91frtrQFThTH2oDWcMvbUJ9Mlut d3B9tXk8hjbfmXkeZyJs-7Mi/follicularhyperkeratosis1.jpg Golden Rice - ‘Golden Rice’: A Dengvaxia fiasco waiting to happen- Golden Rice Project - New Yellow Corn Could Boost Vitamin A, Save Sight - More nutritious, natural flavor, non-GMO ‘orange corn’ launches in US markets - https://phys.org/news/2019-02-nutritious-natural-flavor-non-gmo-orange.html Carotenodermia - 7hHVSyD26Y/R8xxsFbRc0I/AAAAAAAAAEs/I73lzYHNE5k/s1600-h/carotenodermia.jpg

Most iron supplements use ferrous (Fe2+) iron, because this form is better absorbed, as discussed in the next section. The figure below shows the percent of elemental iron in different supplements. This is the percentage of elemental iron that is in each compound.

Iron chelates are marketed as being better absorbed than other forms of iron supplements, but this has not been proven5. It is recommended that supplements are not taken with meals, because they are better absorbed when not consumed with food2.

There are 2 transporters for iron, one for heme iron and one for non-heme iron. The non-heme transporter is the divalent mineral transporter 1 (DMT1), which transports Fe2+ into the enterocyte. Heme iron is taken up through heme carrier protein 1 (HCP-1), and then metabolized to Fe2+. Fe2+ may be used by enzymes and other proteins or stored in the enterocyte bound to ferritin, the iron storage protein. To reach circulation (and be absorbed), iron is transported through ferroportin1,2. This process is summarized in the figure below.

Since only the reduced form of non-heme iron (Fe2+) is taken up, Fe3+ must be reduced. There is a reductase enzyme on the brush border, duodenal cytochrome b (Dcytb), that catalyzes the reduction of Fe3+ to Fe2+, as shown below. Vitamin C enhances non-heme iron absorption because it is required by Dcytb for this reaction. Thus, if dietary non-heme iron is consumed with vitamin C, more non-heme iron will be reduced to Fe2+ and taken up into the enterocyte through DMT1. The exception is that vitamin C does not increase absorption of ferrous supplements because they are already in reduced form.

In addition to vitamin C, there is an unidentified factor in muscle that enhances non-heme iron absorption if consumed at the same meal3. This unidentified factor is referred to as meat protein factor (MPF). The table shows how MPF can increase non-heme iron absorption.

Albumin is a protein, so the egg albumin represents a non-meat protein standard for comparison. You can see that absorption is much higher with whole muscle. When only consuming muscle protein, there is a slight increase from muscle itself, and when they look at heme-free muscle iron, absorption is still higher than egg albumin3. Inhibitors of non-heme iron absorption typically chelate, or bind, the iron to prevent absorption. Phytates (phytic acid), which also inhibit calcium absorption, chelate non-heme iron decreasing its absorption.

Figure 12.715 Structure of calcium oxalate6 Calcium is also believed to inhibit iron uptake. References & Links Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Shils ME, Shike M, Ross AC, Caballero B, Cousins RJ, editors. (2006) Modern nutrition in health and disease. Baltimore, MD: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Hurrell R, Reddy M, Juillerat M, Cook J. (2006) Meat protein fractions enhance nonheme iron absorption in humans. J Nutr 136(11): 2808-2812. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phytic_acid.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gallic_acid.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Calcium_oxalate.png

Transferrin is the major iron transport protein (transports iron through blood). Fe3+ is the form of iron that binds to transferrin, so the Fe2+ transported through ferroportin must be oxidized to Fe3+. There are 2 copper-containing proteins that catalyze this oxidation of Fe2+: hephaestin and ceruloplasmin. Hephaestin is found in the membrane of enterocytes, while ceruloplasmin is the major copper transport protein in blood. Hephaestin is the primary protein that performs this function in a coupled manner (occur together) with transport through ferroportin. This means that the Fe2+ being transported through ferroportin is oxidized by hephaestin. Evidence suggests that ceruloplasmin is involved in oxidizing Fe2+ when iron status is low1. Once oxidized, Fe3+ binds to transferrin and is transported to a tissue cell that contains a transferrin receptor. Transferrin binds to the transferrin receptor and is endocytosed, as shown below2.

Once inside cells, the iron can be used for cellular purposes (cofactor for enzyme etc.) or it can be stored in the iron storage proteins ferritin or hemosiderin. Ferritin is the primary iron storage protein, but at higher concentrations, iron is also stored in hemosiderin2.

Hopefully you notice that the majority of iron is in the functional iron compartment. The figure below further reinforces this point, showing that most iron is found in red blood cells (hemoglobin) and tissues (myoglobin). Figure 12.723 Iron distribution in different compartments4 Also notice how small oral intake and excretion are compared to the amount found in the different compartments in the body. As a result, iron recycling is really important, because red blood cells only live for 120 days. Red blood cells are broken down in the liver, spleen, and bone marrow and the iron can be used for the same purposes as described earlier: cellular use, storage, or transported to another tissue on transferrin2. Most of this iron will be used for heme

Iron is unique among minerals in that our body has limited ability to excrete it. Thus, absorption is really the only way to regulate iron status. Absorption is controlled by the hormone hepcidin. The liver has an iron sensor so when iron concentrations get high, this sensor signals for the release of hepcidin. Hepcidin travels to the enterocytes where it causes degradation of ferroportin. Thus, the iron is not able to be transported into circulation (since ferroportin is the transporter through which this typically occurs)5.

The iron is now trapped in the enterocytes, which are eventually sloughed off and mostly excreted in feces (some may be digested for uptake by new enterocytes on the villi). Thus, iron absorption is decreased through the action of hepcidin.

References & Links Yehuda S, Mostofsky DI (2010) Iron Deficiency and Overload: From Basic Biology to Clinical Medicine. New York, NY. Humana Press. Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Stipanuk MH. (2006) Biochemical, physiological, & molecular aspects of human nutrition. St. Louis, MO: Saunders Elsevier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iron_metabolism.svg Nemeth E, Ganz T. (2006) Regulation of iron metabolism by hepcidin. Annu Rev Nutr 26: 323-342.

Myoglobin is similar to hemoglobin in that it can bind oxygen. However, instead of being found in blood, it is found in muscle. The color of meat products is a result of the state that myoglobin is in, as shown in the link below.

Iron is also a cofactor for proline and lysyl hydroxylases that are important in collagen cross-linking. This was discussed previously in the vitamin C section. The function of these enzymes is shown below.

The levels of iron in the different compartments is illustrated by the figure below. The red above the table is meant to represent the amount of iron in the different compartments. In early negative iron balance stage, iron stores are slightly depleted. Once the stores are almost completely exhausted, this state is referred to as iron depletion. In iron deficiency, stores are completely exhausted and the circulating and functional iron levels are also depleted. In iron anemia, the circulating and functional iron levels are further depleted from iron-deficiency. 1 Great measure, but invasive 2 Small amount are released from liver, bone, and spleen – proportional to body stores 3 Also referred to as total iron-binding capacity Figure 12.741 Measures of iron status1-3 The most common measures of iron status are hemoglobin concentrations and hematocrit (described below) levels. A decreased amount of either measure indicates iron deficiency, but these two measures are among the last to indicate that iron status is depressed. This is because, as you can see in the figure above, the functional iron compartment (which contains hemoglobin and is highly correlated to hematocrit values) are not altered until you reach iron deficiency. This is accomplished by using stores to maintain the circulating and functional iron compartments. It is important that you understand the limitations of these indicators so that you can interpret the meaning of their values1.

separated by a centrifuge. The red blood cells remain at the bottom of the tube. They can be quantified by measuring the packed cell volume (PCV) relative to the total whole blood volume. w Figure 12.742 Hematocrit figures4,5 One of the best measures of iron status is bone marrow iron, but this is an invasive measure, and is therefore not commonly used. Plasma ferritin, the iron storage protein, is also found in lower amounts in the blood (plasma) and is a good indicator of iron stores. Thus, it is a sensitive measure to determine if someone is in negative iron balance or iron depleted. It is not as useful of a measure beyond this stage because the iron stores have been exhausted for the most part. Transferrin iron binding capacity (aka total iron binding capacity), as it sounds, is a measure of how much iron transferrin can bind. An increase in transferrin iron binding capacity indicates deficiency (>400 indicates deficiency). But the best measure for deficiency or anemia is either percent serum transferrin saturation or plasma iron. A lower % saturation means that less of the transferrin are saturated or carrying the maximum amount of iron that they can handle. Plasma iron is easily understood as the amount of iron within the plasma1. Iron deficiency is the most common deficiency worldwide, estimated to affect 1.6 billion people. In the US, it is less common, but an estimated 10% of toddlers and women of childbearing age are deficient. Iron deficiency often results in a microcytic (small cell), hypochromic (low color) anemia, that is a result of decreased hemoglobin production. With decreased hemoglobin, the red blood cells cannot carry as much oxygen. Decreased oxygen leads to slower metabolism. Thus, a person with this anemia feels fatigued, weak, apathetic, and can experience headaches6. Other side effects include decreased immune function and delayed cognitive development in children7.

To put this in perspective, 3 oz of beef contains ~3 mg of iron. Thus, it can be a challenge for some women to meet the requirement. The RDA committee estimates the iron requirements to be 80% and 70% higher for vegans and endurance athletes, respectively. The increased requirement for endurance athletes is based on loss due to "foot strike hemolysis", or the increased rupture of red blood cells due to the striking of the foot on hard surfaces3.

50 out of 10,000 newborns in the United States are born with the genetic condition, hemochromatosis. In this condition, there is a mutation in a protein in the enterocyte that prevents the normal decrease of intestinal iron absorption. Without this protein these individuals cannot decrease iron absorption. Since the body cannot excrete iron, it accumulates in tissues, and ultimately can result in organ failure1. References & Links Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Stipanuk MH. (2006) Biochemical, physiological, & molecular aspects of human nutrition. St. Louis, MO: Saunders Elsevier. McGuire M, Beerman KA. (2011) Nutritional sciences: From fundamentals to food. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illu_blood_components.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Packed_cell_volume_diagram.svg Whitney E, Rolfes SR. (2011) Understanding nutrition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Byrd-Bredbenner C, Moe G, Beshgetoor D, Berning J. (2009) Wardlaw's perspectives in nutrition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Anonymous. (2001) Dietary reference intakes for vitamin A, vitamin K, arsenic, boron, chromium, copper, iodine, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, silicon, vanadium, and zinc. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press.

Many animal products are good sources of zinc and are estimated to account for 70% of the zinc North Americans’ consume1. An estimated 15-40% of consumed zinc is absorbed2. Zinc is taken up into the enterocyte through the Zir-and Irt-like protein 4 (ZIP4). Once inside the enterocyte, zinc can:

Bind to the cysteine-rich intestinal protein (CRIP) where it is shuttled to a zinc transporter (ZnT). After moving through the basolateral membrane, zinc primarily binds to the circulating protein albumin3.

The zinc attached to albumin is transported to the liver through the portal vein. There is not a major storage site of zinc, but there are pools of zinc in the liver, bone, pancreas, and kidney1. Zinc is primarily excreted in feces.

consumption results in increased thionein synthesis in the enterocyte. As a result, more zinc is bound to thionein (forming metallothionein) and not used for functional uses or transported into circulation, as represented by the thick and thin arrows in the figure below.

References & Links Byrd-Bredbenner C, Moe G, Beshgetoor D, Berning J. (2009) Wardlaw's perspectives in nutrition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Whitney E, Rolfes SR. (2011) Understanding nutrition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phytic_acid.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gallic_acid.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Calcium_oxalate.png Bowman BA, Russell RM, editors. (2006) Present knowledge in nutrition. Washington, DC: International Life Sciences Institute Press.

Zinc is also important for the formation of zinc fingers in proteins. Zinc fingers help proteins bind to DNA2. Figure 12.815 Structure of a zinc finger, zinc is the green atom bound in the center6 Zinc is also important for growth, immune function, and reproduction2. A recent Cochrane review concluded that when taken within 24 hours of the onset of symptoms, that zinc lozenges or syrup results in a significant decrease in the duration and severity of common cold symptoms7. Thus, commonly used zinc lozenges may be an effective way to combat the common cold. However, large amounts of zinc consumption can be problematic for copper and ultimately iron levels in the body, as described in the copper section.

Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ethanol_flat_structure.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde#/media/File:Acetaldehyde-2D-flat.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Heme_synthesis.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zinc_finger_rendered.png Singh M, Das RR. (2011) Zinc for the common cold (Review). The Cochrane Collaboration.

Another cause of zinc deficiency is mutation of ZIP4 that results in the condition acrodermatitis enteropathica. Without ZIP4, zinc cannot be taken up efficiently into the enterocyte. This condition is managed by administering very high levels of zinc, some of which is absorbed through other mechanisms3.

References & Links Wessells KR, Brown KH. (2012) Estimating the Global Prevalence of Zinc Deficiency: Results Based on Zinc Availability in National Food Supplies and the Prevalence of Stunting. PLoS ONE 7(11): e50568 Byrd-Bredbenner C, Moe G, Beshgetoor D, Berning J. (2009) Wardlaw's perspectives in nutrition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

Cu1+ is the form that is primarily absorbed, thus Cu2+ is reduced to Cu1+ in the lumen. It is believed that, like iron, enzymatic reduction of Cu2+ is stimulated by ascorbate. The exact transporter that takes up the copper into the enterocyte is not known. It may be DMT1 that takes up non-heme iron. Once inside the enterocyte, Cu1+ can1:

Like zinc, copper is transported through the portal vein to the liver bound to albumin, as shown below. Albumin has a high affinity for Cu2+, so Cu1+ is oxidized before transported to albumin through ATP7A, as illustrated below. Figure 12.91 Copper absorption Similar to zinc, there is not much storage of copper in the body. The liver is the primary site of storage, where copper is taken up through an unknown transporter. If it is going to be stored, it will bind with thionein to form metallothionein. Copper is transported through circulation by the copper transport protein ceruloplasmin, which can bind 6 coppers/protein as shown below1.

Legumes, whole grains, nuts, shellfish, and seeds are good sources of copper2. It is estimated that over 50% of copper consumed is absorbed1. Copper is primarily excreted in the feces. There are a number of different forms of copper used in supplements: Copper sulfate (25% copper) Cupric chloride (47% copper) Cupric acetate (35% copper) Copper carbonate (57% copper) Cupric oxide (80% copper)

References & Links Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Whitney E, Rolfes SR. (2011) Understanding nutrition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Baker DH. (1999) Cupric oxide should not be used as a copper supplement for either animals or humans. J Nutr 129(12): 2278-2279.

References & Links Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Catecholamines_biosynthesis.svg http://wikidoc.org/index.php/File:ETC.PNG

Menke's disease is a genetic disorder that results in copper deficiency. It is believed that individuals with this disease have a mutation in ATP7A that prevents copper from leaving the enterocyte, thus preventing absorption1.

Wilson's disease is a genetic disorder where a mutation in ATP7B prevents copper excretion, resulting in copper toxicity. One notable symptom is that individuals with this disease have golden to greenish-brown Kayser-Fleischer rings around the edges of the cornea, as shown in the link below1,2.

As you learned previously, thionein is the storage protein for zinc, but it more avidly binds copper. When it binds a mineral, it becomes metallothionein. High zinc intake results in increased thionein synthesis in the enterocyte. Thus, when an individual is consuming high zinc levels (most likely by supplementation, unlikely from dietary sources), the enterocyte will have high levels of thionein as shown below.

The high levels of thionein will bind any copper that is taken up into the enterocyte (as metallothionein), "trapping" the copper in the enterocyte and preventing it from being absorbed into circulation, as shown below.

Without adequate copper being transported to the liver, no ceruloplasmin is produced and released into circulation. The lack of copper further influences iron transport by decreasing ceruloplasmin in circulation and hephaestin (another copper-containing protein) on the membrane of the enterocyte. These 2 proteins normally convert Fe2+ to Fe3+ so that iron can bind to transferrin.

In summary, high zinc intake increases thionein production, which traps all copper; the lack of copper decreases circulating ceruloplasmin and hephaestin, which causes all iron to be trapped as well. This example illustrates the interconnectedness of zinc, copper, and iron.

In this chapter, electrolytes will be explained before learning more about the 4 electrolyte micronutrients. As a general rule deficiency and toxicity of these the electrolyte micronutrients are rare, so they are presented in a single subsection rather than multiple subsections like most of the micronutrients that you have learned about. Then, hypertension will be discussed, along with the impact of these micronutrients on the condition.

The following table summarizes the major intracellular and extracellular electrolytes by giving their milliequivalents (mEq)/L. Milliequivalents are a measure of charge. Thus, a higher value means that the cation or anion is accounting for more charge.

Figure 13.11 Major intracellular and extracellular cations (green) and anions (red)2 Electrolytes and proteins are important in fluid balance. Your body is 60% water by weight. Two-thirds of this water is intracellular, or within cells. One-third of the water is extracellular, or outside of cells. One-fourth of the extracellular fluid is plasma, while the other 3/4 is interstitial

References & Links Byrd-Bredbenner C, Moe G, Beshgetoor D, Berning J. (2009) Wardlaw's perspectives in nutrition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Whitney E, Rolfes SR. (2011) Understanding nutrition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Adapted from

Salt (NaCl) contributes almost all the sodium that we consume. 75-85% of the salt we consume is from processed foods, 10% is naturally in foods, and added salt contributes 10-15% of total salt intake1. 95-100% of consumed sodium is absorbed2. Sodium is taken up into the enterocyte through multiple mechanisms before being pumped out of the enterocyte by sodium-potassium (Na+/K+) ATPase. Sodium-potassium ATPase is an active carrier transporter that pumps 3 sodium ions out of the cell and 2 potassium ions into the cell, as shown below. It is the reason that sodium is the major extracellular cation and potassium is the major intracellular cation.

Sodium is the major cation in extracellular fluid. Sodium has 3 main functions1: Fluid balance Aids in monosaccharide and amino acid absorption Muscle contraction and nerve transmission (not discussed further below)

decrease in plasma volume and blood pressure signals the kidney to release the enzyme renin. Renin activates angiotensin that is converted to angiotensin II. Angiotensin II signals the adrenal glands to secrete the hormone aldosterone. Aldosterone increases sodium reabsorption in the kidney, thus decreasing sodium excretion. These actions cause plasma sodium concentrations to increase (these could also be increased by sodium intake), which is detected by the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus stimulates the pituitary gland to release antidiuretic hormone (ADH) that causes the kidneys to reabsorb water, decreasing water excretion. The net result is an increase in blood volume and blood pressure1.

Amino acids are taken up and transported into circulation through a variety of amino acid transporters. Some of these transporters are sodium-dependent (require sodium to transport amino acids). Figure 13.24 Protein absorption Sodium deficiency is rare, and is normally due to excessive sweating. Sweat loss must reach 2-3% of body weight before sodium losses are a concern1,2. Losses of this magnitude are uncommon, but can occur in marathon runners and ultra-marathon runners who sweat for many hours straight (without proper liquid intake). But in general some practices like consuming salt pills to replace loss from sweating are not needed. Low blood sodium levels (hyponatremia) can result in1:

Sodium is not toxic because we can readily excrete it, but higher sodium intake increases the risk of developing high blood pressure. High sodium intake also increases calcium excretion, but studies have not found an increased risk of osteoporosis. High sodium intake may also increase the risk of developing kidney stones (by increasing calcium excretion), because calcium oxalate is the most common form of kidney stone1. References & Links Byrd-Bredbenner C, Moe G, Beshgetoor D, Berning J. (2009) Wardlaw's perspectives in nutrition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPase#/media/File:Scheme_sodium-potassium_pump-en.svg

References & Links Byrd-Bredbenner C, Moe G, Beshgetoor D, Berning J. (2009) Wardlaw's perspectives in nutrition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

Potassium is the major intracellular cation. Good sources of potassium include beans, potatoes (with skin), milk products, orange juice, tomato juice, and bananas1,2. Potassium, like sodium and chloride, is well absorbed. Greater than 85% of consumed potassium is absorbed. Potassium is primarily excreted in urine (~90%)3. As you will learn in a later section, this is an electrolyte that we should try to consume more of rather than limiting like sodium and chloride.

Toxicity is also extremely rare, only occurring if there is a problem with kidney function that prevents it from being excreted normally. Symptoms of toxicity are irregular heartbeat and even cardiac arrest (likely need to be potassium provided into circulation rather than consumed in some way)1. References & Links Byrd-Bredbenner C, Moe G, Beshgetoor D, Berning J. (2009) Wardlaw's perspectives in nutrition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Whitney E, Rolfes SR. (2011) Understanding nutrition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

Magnesium is an electrolyte, but that is not considered its major function in the body. Green leafy vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, and whole grains are good sources of magnesium1,2. 40-60% of consumed magnesium is absorbed at normal levels of intake. Magnesium is excreted primarily in urine3. Like potassium, this is an electrolyte that it is beneficial to consume more of. 55-60% of magnesium in the body is found in bone3. Some (30%) of this bone magnesium is believed to be exchangeable, or can be used to maintain blood concentrations, similar to how calcium in bones can be used to maintain blood concentrations. Magnesium helps to stabilize ATP and nucleotides by binding to phosphate groups. Magnesium plays a role in over 300 enzymes in the body. Here is a list of some of the physiological processes that magnesium participates in3:

References & Links Byrd-Bredbenner C, Moe G, Beshgetoor D, Berning J. (2009) Wardlaw's perspectives in nutrition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. McGuire M, Beerman KA. (2011) Nutritional sciences: From fundamentals to food. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Gropper SS, Smith JL, Groff JL. (2008) Advanced nutrition and human metabolism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

Approximately 27% of American adults have hypertension (high blood pressure), which increases their risk of developing cardiovascular disease1. Salt and/or sodium intake is believed to be a major causative factor in the development of hypertension. However, it is now known that not everyone is salt-sensitive. Salt-sensitive means that a person’s blood pressure increases with increased salt intake and decreases with decreased salt intake. Approximately 25% of normotensive (normal blood pressure) individuals and 50% of hypertensive individuals are salt-sensitive2. Most others are salt-insensitive, and in a small portion of individuals, low salt consumption actually increases blood pressure1. Unfortunately, there is not a readily employable clinical method to determine whether a person is salt-sensitive. There are some known characteristics that increase the likelihood of an individual being salt-sensitive. They are1:

There is some evidence now suggesting that there may be negative effects in some people who restrict their sodium intakes to the levels recommended by some organizations as described in the first link below. The second link describes a couple of studies that had conflicting outcomes as it relates to the importance of salt reduction in decreasing blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. The third link is to a study that found that higher potassium consumption, not lower sodium consumption, was associated with decreased blood pressure in adolescent teenage girls. This has led to debate because it is quite possible that is a very real issue whether salt-sensitive individuals can decrease their sodium intake (to concomitantly reduce their blood pressure) in a food environment where there are extremely limited options that do not contain meaningful sodium levels. Thus, the push has been to reduce sodium levels in the food supply overall to provide more options to those who are salts-sensitive. However, this is a push that benefits a minority of the population. Also, further adding to this is the fact that almost no one how he/she responds to sodium/salt and there is disagreement over ideal/optimal intake levels.

The DASH diet has been shown to be remarkably effective in decreasing blood pressure in those with hypertension. Nevertheless, most people with hypertension are not following the DASH diet. In fact, evidence from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that significantly fewer hypertensive individuals were following the DASH diet in 1999-2004 than during 1988-1994, as shown in the table below4.

The main components that contributed to the decrease in DASH diet accordance (how well the recommendations are being met) were total fat, fiber, and magnesium, as indicated by their high negative absolute changes. References & Links McGuire M, Beerman KA. (2011) Nutritional sciences: From fundamentals to food. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Whitney E, Rolfes SR. (2011) Understanding nutrition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Welcome to American Literatures After 1865! This anthology was created with selected materials from and beyond. Berke, Amy; Bleil, Robert; Cofer, Jordan; and Davis, Doug, “Writing the Nation: A Concise Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present” (2015). English Open Textbooks. 5. This Open Educational Resource (OER) is designed to provide college students with an introduction to the major works of American literatures from 1865 to the present day. You’ll find rich and diverse stories and voices that have shaped the American experience. In this collection, and linked beyond it, you can read the works of iconic authors who made their mark on the American literary scene and stories that reflect and challenge the American identity. You will explore themes of race, gender, class, and sexuality. You will gain insight into the struggles and aspirations of the American people. By the end of this OER, you will have a better understanding of the history of American literature and how it has shaped and been shaped by American culture. You will gain a deeper appreciation for the complexity of the American experience and a greater appreciation for the power of literature. We hope that your journey through this anthology of American literatures will inspire and challenge you. We are excited to share this experience with you! In this collection, you will find some of the most iconic works of American literature, both new and old. Many of the works featured in this anthology are available in the public domain, meaning that they are free from copyright restrictions. As such, you are free to read, share, and use them for any purpose. Much of this work is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, just as the Writing the Nation work this anthology has. This OER provides links to many works which are under copyright and cannot be collected within this text. Some explanatory sections of this anthology (such as this section) were generated with the assistance of OpenAI, a technology that employs machine learning and natural language processing to generate text. We have also included links to works that are protected by copyright. In many cases, these works can be checked out from the Internet Archive with a free account. We hope you enjoy this collection of American literatures. If you are looking for an anthology of American literatures prior to 1865, do check out the companion work which can be found at . This image indicates that the selected reading is linked and available outside of this resource. Works that are not in the public domain are not shared within this OER as the legal permissions do not allow it.

The influence of Leslie Maron Silko and William Faulkner on contemporary fiction is undeniable. From the depths of Native American culture to the Southern United States, both writers have left their mark on the literary landscape. Silko, of Laguna Pueblo descent, is celebrated for her lyrical, experimental works that explore the complexities of identity and self-expression through a fusion of Native American beliefs, stories, and traditions. Her novels, such as Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, have become foundational texts for many indigenous studies departments and have endured as some of the most important works of Native American literature. William Faulkner, a Nobel Prize-winning author from Mississippi, is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His novels, such as As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, are renowned for their experimental narrative styles, their exploration of the psychological and moral underpinnings of the human experience, and their powerful evocation of the South. The contributions of these two authors to the world of fiction have been invaluable, and their works continue to shape and influence contemporary literature. Metamodernism is a cultural philosophy that encourages us to have hope and be creative. It suggests that we can find ways to move forward even when we face crises, and that we can be both serious and funny, sincere and ironic. It’s a way of thinking that helps us to make sense of the confusing world we live in and encourages us to come up with creative solutions to the problems that we face.

Leslie Marmon Silko (1948 – ) Leslie Marmon Silko was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but raised in the outskirts of Old Laguna, a Pueblo village. Silko describes a lively childhood spent outdoors, one which included riding horses and hunting deer. Although Silko enjoys one-fourth Pueblo ancestry, she also shares Mexican ancestry; Silko did not live on the Laguna Pueblo reservation, and Silko was not allowed to participate in many Pueblo rituals. Through the fourth grade, she attended a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school, only to later commute to Manzano Day School, a Catholic private school in Albuquerque. After high school, Silko enrolled at the University of New Mexico, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English. After college, Silko taught creative writing courses at the University of New Mexico before enrolling in their American Indian law program. As her literary career blossomed, Silko dropped out to focus on her writing. Silko would later spend severa l years as a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she currently resides. Silko’s first published short story, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” (1969), was originally written for a class in college and was based around a similar auto biographic event. The story earned Silko an National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant and, as Silko continued to publish, her literary reputation grew. In 1974, her first book, Laguna Woman, featured a selection of Silko’s poems and short fiction; however, it was the emergence of her debut novel, Ceremony (1977), which brought her national recognition and established her as a prominent Native American writer. Since then, Silko has remained one of the most respected contemporary American writers: her short story collection, Storyteller (1981), was well received and, in the same year, Silko was awarded the famed MacArthur Genius Grant. Her other novels include Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Gardens in the Dunes (1999). In 1996, Silko published Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, a collection of essays on Native American life; these essays discuss many contemporary issues relevant to Native Americans as well as her own reflections on her storytelling background and writing process. Silko’s Native American heritage, especially her Pueblo upbringing, is a major thematic element which emerges within her writing regardless of its genre, albeit poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. In “Yellow Woman,” a part of her Storyteller collection, Silko is able to merge traditional Pueblo legends with a contemporary tale. Part action/adventure story and part mythology, “Yellow Woman” seamlessly tells the tale of a narrator who may or may not be caught up in Laguna ancestral lore.

William Faulkner is the most important writer of the Southern Renaissance. Flannery O’Connor once compared the overpowering force of his influence to a thundering train, remarking that “nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Faulkner was born in Mississippi and raised on tales of his legendary great-great grandfather—the “Old Colonel,” who led a group of raiders in the civil war, built his own railroad, served in the state legislature, and was murdered by a political rival—and prominent great-grandfather, the “Young Colonel,” who was an assistant United States attorney and banker. Dropping out of high school, Faulkner left Mississippi to pursue his interests in drawing and poetry. During World War I, Faulkner pretended to be English and enlisted in the Royal Air Force, although he never saw combat. He picked up his poetic career after the war, ultimately publishing his first book in 1924, a collection of poetry called The Marble Faun. Turning his attention to fiction writing, Faulkner then wrote two timely novels. His first novel, Soldier’s Pay (1926), explores the states of mind of those who did and did not fight in World War I. His second novel, Mosquitos (1927), exposes the triviality of the New Orleans art community of which Faulkner was briefly a part. However, it is with his third novel, Sartoris (1929), that Faulkner made what he called his “great discovery”: the fictional possibilities contained within his home state of Mississippi. Returning to Oxford, MI, with his new wife, Faulkner moved into an antebellum mansion and began turning the tales he heard growing up about his hometown and surrounding area into one of the greatest inventions in American literary history: Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner eventually wrote thirteen novels set in Yoknapatawpha County. Be- ginning with his fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), Faulkner began to incorporate modernist literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration and non-linear plotting into his already lofty style. The Sound and the Fury describes the fall of the Compson family through four distinct psychological points of view, one of which is that of a young man who commits suicide, and another belonging to an illiterate who is severely mentally handicapped. As I Lay Dying (1930) describes the death and burial of a matriarch from the perspective of fifteen different characters in fifty-seven sections of often stream-of-consciousness prose. In Absalom, Absalom! (1936), four narrators relate the same story yet also change it to arrive at four very different meanings. Modernist techniques such as these enabled Faulkner to show how the particulars of everyday life in the rural Ameri- can South dramatize what he saw as the universal truths of humanity as a whole. While stylistically modernist, Faulkner’s collective epic of Yoknapatawpha County ultimately explores not so much the future of narrative as the human condition itself as lensed through generation-spanning histories of great and low families. Two of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stories are included here: “Barn Burning,” an early story of the Snopes family about whom Faulkner would eventually write a trilogy of novels; and “A Rose for Emily,” one of his many tales about the decline of formerly-great Southern families. These short stories are good representatives of both the range of Faulkner’s style and his ambition as a storyteller. In deeply regional tales that are at once grotesque, tragic, brilliant, profound, loving, and hilarious, Faulkner leads us to the source, as he once put it, from which drama flows: “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

Writing answers to these questions can be a great way to dive deeper into the works of the authors in each section. There are reading and review questions provided at the end of each part to help you gain a better understanding of the author’s style, structure, and themes. As you consider these questions, it’s important to remember that there’s no right or wrong answer; the main goal is to get you thinking more critically about the texts. As you explore the works of each author, you may discover new insights, interpretations, and ideas. Engaging with the questions can help you cultivate a more meaningful and complete understanding of the authors and their works. So, take the time to read, review, and answer question about each of the authors in this section to get the most out of your studies.

What elements seem out of time? What effect on readers do these anachronistic elements have? Is this a story of alienation or community? How does the narrator use the Kachina yellow woman story to connect with her community? Is this a story about humanity or the mystical? Faulkner – Reading and Review Questions: Why is the discovery of the single grey hair at the end of “A Rose for Emily” significant? Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. In his award speech, he lamented that many of America’s young authors had forgotten “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.” Discuss how “A Rose for Emily” show the human heart in conflict with itself.

What is significant about the rivers—the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi—that Hughes names in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”? Jesus Christ is often represented as being white in Western art. What does Hughes’s identification of Christ as “a nigger” say about the Christians of the segregated American South of the early twentieth century? The semi-autobiographical poem “Theme for English B” was first published in 1946, decades after Hughes attended his one year of college at Columbia “on the hill above Harlem.” However, Hughes writes the poem not in the past tense but in the present tense. How does Hughes’s use of the present tense affect the meaning of the poem? Walker – Reading and Review Questions: Why does Dee take Polaroids? Why does she change her name? What does this signify? What does the quilt represent? Dee and Magee are both interested in the quilt for different reasons. Why is each sister interested in the quilt? Who does Mama side with in this conflict? Why?

Image | Langston Hughes, 1936 Photographer | Carl Van Vechten source | Wikimedia Commons license | Public Domain “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” Langston Hughes writes in his 1926 manifesto for the younger generation of Harlem Renaissance artists, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” He continues, “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful.” Celebrated as “the poet laureate of Harlem,” Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and traveled extensively before settling in the neighborhood he came to call home. When growing up, Hughes lived variously with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, his father in Mexico, and his mother in Washington, D.C. After just one year at Columbia University, Hughes left college to explore the world, working as a cabin boy on ships bound for Africa and as a cook in a Paris kitchen. Throughout these early years, Hughes published poems in the African-American magazines The Crisis and Opportunity; these poems soon earned him recognition as a rising star of the Harlem Renaissance who excelled at the lyrical use of the music, speech, and experiences of urban, working-class African-Americans. Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, at the age of twenty-four while still a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Over the course of his long and influential literary career, Hughes worked extensively in all areas of African-American literature, writing novels, short stories, plays, essays, and works of history; translating work by black authors; and editing numerous anthologies of African- American history and culture, such as The First Book of Jazz (1955) and The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers (1969). Hughes’s poems embody one of the major projects of the Harlem Renaissance: to create distinctively African-American art. By the turn of the twentieth century, African-Americans had awakened to the realization that two hundred years of slavery had simultaneously erased their connections to their African heritage and created, in its wake, new, vital forms of distinctively African-American culture. Accordingly, politicians, authors, and artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance reconstructed that lost history and championed art rooted in the black American experience. Hughes’s poems from the 1920s are particularly notable for celebrating black culture while also honestly representing the deprivations of working-class African-American life. In “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes connects African-American culture to the birth of civilization in Africa and the Middle East. In “Mother to Son,” Hughes draws upon the music of the blues and black dialect to celebrate the indomitable heart of working black America. Hughes grew increasingly radicalized in the 1930s following such high-profile examples of American racism as the 1931 Scottsboro trial in Alabama. He traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 to work on an unfinished film about race in the American South and published in leftist publications associated with the American Communist Party, the only political party at the time to oppose segregation. “Christ in Alabama” is a good example of Hughes’s more pointed political style, in which the poet criticizes the immorality of racism by equating the suffering of African-Americans in Alabama with the suffering of Christ. Poems such as “I, too,” and “Theme for English B,” in turn, combine Hughes’s provocative politics with his cultural lyricism to articulate a theme that runs throughout his life’s work: that the American experience is as black as it is white.

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Image | Alice Walker Photographer | Virginia DeBolt source | Wikimedia Commons license | CC BY-SA 2.0 Born in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Walker grew up in rural middle Georgia. Her father was a sharecropper, and her mother was a maid. Although they lived under Jim Crow laws in Georgia, in which African-Americans were discouraged from education, Walker’s parents turned her away from working in the fields, espousing instead the importance of education and enrolling her in school at an early age. Walker describes writing at the age of eight years old, largely as a result of growing up in what was a strong oral culture. In 1952, Walker injured her eye after her brother accidently shot her with a BB gun. Since the family did not have a car, it was a week before Walker received medical attention. By this time, she was blind in that eye, with scar tissue forming. As a result, Walker became shy and withdrawn, yet, years later, after the scar tissue healed, she be- came more confident and gregarious, graduating high school as the valedictorian, Walker writes about this in her essay, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self.” Walker left Eatonton for Atlanta, attending Spelman College, a prestigious Historically Black College for women, and later receiving a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Walker considers her time in New York as critical for her development. While there, Walker became involved in the Black Arts movement be- fore her work in the Civil Rights movement brought her back to the South. In 1969, Walker took a teaching position as Writer-in-Residence at Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi before accepting the same position at Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi. While there, she published her debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970). However, Walker soon returned to New York to join the editorial staff of Ms. magazine. Her second novel, Meridian (1976), received positive reviews, but her third novel, The Color Purple (1982), perhaps best show- cases her writing talents. This novel draws on some of Walker’s personal experiences as well as demonstrates Walker’s own creativity. For it, she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. This novel was later adapted as a popular film. In addition to her engagement as an activist in many key issues, Walker has continued to write, publishing the famous book of essays, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983), as well as several other novels, such as Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). One theme that emerges in Walker’s work is acknowledging the con- tributions of, often under- appreciated, African-American writers, such writers as Zora Neale Hurston. Furthermore, Walker’s writing calls attention to the discrepancies in America’s treatment of African-Americans, while also acknowledging the importance of all Americans’ shared past. In “Everyday Use,” we see many of these themes coalesce in the conflict between sisters Dee and Magee. Although they are sisters, these two have very different lives, which leads to the central tension of the story—their argument over the quilt.

Wilella Sibert Cather, better known as Willa Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I. Willa Cather and her family moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, when she was nine years old. The family later settled in the town of Red Cloud. Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Cather moved to Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33, she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She spent the last 39 years of her life with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis, before being diagnosed with breast cancer and dying of a cerebral hemorrhage. She is buried beside Lewis in a Jaffrey, New Hampshire plot. Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience. She wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile. A sense of place is an important element in Cather’s fiction: physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community.

How does Whitman’s use of free verse challenge readers? What features and/or elements of Whitman’s poetry help us to understand how to read it? How does Whitman’s use of natural elements compare to his use of manmade or urban elements in his poetry? How would you describe the voice of Whitman’s poetry? How does Whitman’s poetry engage with the Civil War?

Many of Dickinson’s poems are rhythmically similar to popular nineteenth-century songs. How do those similarities help us to understand Dickinson’s poetry? Death and isolation are common themes in Dickinson’s poetry, yet her poems rarely seem melancholy. What elements prevent her poems from becoming too solemn? How do Dickinson’s poems support or challenge what we think we know about gender roles in the nineteenth century? Compare and contrast Dickinson’s isolation with Whitman’s aggressively public persona.

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, the authors whose works appear in this chapter, are unlikely protagonists—or leading characters—for a literary movement. Each was an outsider: Dickinson, an unmarried woman who lived a life of quiet seclusion in western Massachusetts, and Whitman, a vagabond who lived a life in search of community. Dickinson and Whitman promoted a spirit of exploration and inventiveness that matched the geographical, industrial, political, and social growth of the United States. From their works, we gain not so much a literary renaissance as we do a sense of artistic innovation that developed alongside these other areas of American life and commerce. As literary historians like William Charvat have noted, the development of an American literary tradition owes as much to the development of the American publishing industry in the middle decades of the nineteenth century as it does to the prominence of individual authors like Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sales of these authors’ works were dwarfed by the sales of pirated editions of novels by British authors like Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. Nonetheless, the success of these British imports convinced American publishers that the American market was sufficiently robust to demand new works; this demand created an opportunity for American writers to expand their audience, and a flourishing literary culture began to prosper. American authors still faced steep odds in seeing their works into print, and American literary publishing did not flourish until the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 allowed the reliably consistent shipment of individuals and goods across the country. Additional technological improvements, including the widespread adoption of steam-powered machinery and gas-fueled lights, also provide the necessary conditions for the rapid production of printed materials and the means by which these materials could be enjoyed at the conclusion of a day of laboring. Thus, only when the Industrial Age expands the definition of leisure do Americans begin to embrace the culture of print and expand the boundaries of American literature. The first attempts to define the literary culture of the mid-nineteenth century began in the 1930s and early 1940s as the United States took on a larger role in global politics, and the need for definition gained sharper focus with the publication of F. O. Matthiessen’s The American Renaissance in 1941. Matthiessen argued that writers like Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau represented the expansion of a uniquely American style of writing that interacted with, and embraced, the North American landscape in new ways. What Matthiessen called a renaissance, however, was less of a cultural flourishing than the limited success of a few male authors from New England. Despite the real impact of Matthiessen’s work in recognizing the presence of significant male American writers, his catalogue still neglected writing of women, African-Americans, and Native Americans whose works would not be widely recognized until the 1970s. In order to describe the work of these authors, Matthiessen and others turned to literary labels popularized in reference to British authors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Romanticism, a literary movement emphasizing the freedom and originality of self-expression that began in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, also seemed to capture the spirit of nineteenth- century America and was frequently applied to authors of both prose and poetry. In the hands of these authors, the meadows of western Massachusetts replaced the Lake District as the source of inspiration, and the rejection of Puritan morality continued the American emphasis on freedom of expression. When Whitman and Dickinson began writing poetry in the 1850s, the thriving Abolitionist movement added urgency to the need for new voices and rapid change. When we refer to Whitman and Dickinson as late Romantics, we place them at the end of a period that begins in the 1820s, and we suggest that their works are merely derivative from those that preceded them chronologically. Yet Whitman’s and Dickinson’s poetry is contemporary with these other works, and it seems more fruitful to consider the differences in genre than the differences in chronology. Whitman and Dickinson achieved their fame by changing American poetry from patriotic and historical ballads to free verse—poetry that lacks both rhyme and regular meter— and musically inspired celebrations of the individual in the American landscape. Whitman and Dickinson are the most famous of the Late Romantics, and their work inspired successive generations of American authors. From these poets, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Charles Chesnutt found the freedom to use a variety of American dialects in their work, the realists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discovered the richness of the American landscape, and the Modernist poets located a source of new poetical forms to meet the needs of the adolescent Republic that came of age in the decades immediately following the Civil War. That national coming of age, in the years of Reconstruction, Western Expansion, Manifest Destiny, industrial might, and rapid immigration, also marks the traditional beginning of courses like this one. The Civil War, while not a precise dividing line, is regarded as the most reliable current method for marking the split between the first and second half of the literary history of the United States. Teachers and critics quickly realized, however, that the continued growth of the literary and cultural productions of the United States required more precise divisions than the chronological division into pre-bellum and post-bellum periods can provide. This collection of readings follows those new divisions, with chapters on Late Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Pre-Modernism, Modernism, and post-1945 American Literature, but the boundaries between these divisions remain fluid. The readings that follow are arranged loosely by chronology, and the author- editors of this collection have tried to provide useful headnotes to the sections and the individual authors, but do not be afraid to draw connections beyond the loose boundaries and invent new terms that better describe these works. As American literature continues to grow, we create new categories that better describe our shared experience.

The second of nine children and born in 1819 to a Long Island farmer and carpenter, Walt Whitman is both the journeyman poet of American-ness and its champion. A journalist and newspaper editor throughout his life, Whitman worked as a law clerk, a schoolteacher, a printer, a civil servant, and a hospital aide, but he was always writing; from his teenage years until his death, his byline was on constant view. Contemporary reports suggest that Whitman was an industrious worker but that he was often accused of idleness because his habit of long midday walks contrasted sharply with nineteenth-century attitudes toward work. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman addressed these critics directly by writing, “I loafe and invite my soul,/ I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass” (4- 5). For Whitman, too much industry dulled the ability to celebrate the ordinary. In the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman expounds on his love for the common: “Other states indicate themselves in their deputies…but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislators, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors…but always most in the common people.”1 Whitman’s love for the common people that he encountered and observed in the urban centers of the north is expressed in all of his poetry; if his British contemporary Alfred Lord Tennyson is the national poet of mourning, then Whitman is the national poet of celebration. Many readers feel confused and disoriented when reading Whitman for the first time. Without using the aid of rhyme and meter as a guide, Whitman’s poetry may initially appear disjointed and meandering, but at the same time readers often take great comfort in the simplicity of the language, the clarity of the images, and the deep cadences, or rhythms, of the verse. Such contradictions are at the heart of Whitman’s work. Much of Whitman’s success and endurance as a poet comes from his ability to marry embedded cultural forms to the needs of a growing and rapidly modernizing nation. Whitman first came to wide public attention with the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 when he was just twenty- five years old. Grand in scope if not in size, the first edition established Whitman as a poet who loved wordplay and common images; by the time of his death in 1892, Whitman had expanded the initial collection of just twelve poems over the course of six editions to one that ultimately included more than 400 poems. The selection included here largely samples Whitman’s early poetry up through the Civil War. In the selections from Song of Myself and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” we see Whitman at his most iconic: sweeping views of everyday life that freely mingle high and low culture. Yet the poet of the common man did not spend all of his days gazing at his fellow Americans. In the final selection from Whitman, we see Whitman rising as a national poet with “O Captain! My Captain!” one of two poems on the death of Abraham Lincoln. An urban poet who lived almost his entire life in New York, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, the enduring appeal of his works testifies to his ability to connect the great and the common through language. You can hear (probably) Walt Whitman reading some of his poetry, because there are recording of who is thought to be Whitman, reading his poetry, found online at The Walt Whitman Archive () and recently someone worked to remove the digital noise from one of those recording while retaining voice quality – to hear that visit youtube at .

1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. 2 Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me. The smoke of my own breath, Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine, My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs, The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn, The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind, A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms, The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag, The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides, The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun. Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much? Have you practis’d so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. 3 I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world. Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn. Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age, Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself. Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing; As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, Leaving me baskets cover’d with white towels swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead? 4 Trippers and askers surround me, People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead. My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

Born into an influential and socially prominent New England family in 1830, Emily Dickinson benefited from a level of education and mobility that most of her contemporaries, female and male, could not comprehend. The middle child of Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross, Dickinson, along with her older brother Austin and younger sister Lavinia, received both an extensive formal education and the informal education that came by way of countless visitors to the family homestead during Edward Dickinson’s political career. Contrary to popular depictions of her life, Dickinson did travel outside of Amherst but ultimately chose to remain at home in the close company of family and friends. An intensely private person, Dickinson exerted almost singular control over the distribution of her poetry during her lifetime. That control, coupled with early portrayals of her as reclusive, has led many readers to assume that Dickinson was a fragile and timid figure whose formal, mysterious, concise, and clever poetry revealed the mind of a writer trapped in the rigid gender confines of the nineteenth century. More recent scholarship demonstrates not only the fallacy of Dickinson’s depiction as the ghostly “Belle of Amherst,” but also reveals the technical complexity of her poetry that predates the Modernism of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore by almost three-quarters of a century. In the selections that follow, Dickinson’s poetry displays both her technical proficiency and her embrace of techniques that were new to the nineteenth century. Like her contemporary Walt Whitman, Dickinson used poetry to show her readers familiar landscapes from a fresh perspective. The selections that follow, from Dickinson’s most prolific years (1861-1865), illustrate the poet’s mastery of the lyric—a short poem that often expresses a single theme such as the speaker’s mood or feeling. “I taste a liquor never brewed –,” our first selection, celebrates the poet’s relationship to the natural world in both its wordplay (note the use of liquor in line one to indicate both an alcoholic beverage in the first stanza and a rich nectar in the third) and its natural imagery. Here, as in many of her poems, Dickinson’s vibrant language demonstrates a vital spark in contrast to her reclusive image. Our second selection, “The Soul selects her own Society –,” shows Dickinson using well-known images of power and authority to celebrate the independence of the soul in the face of expectations. In both of these first two poems, readers will note the celebrations of the individual will that engages fully with life without becoming either intoxicated or enslaved. The third selection, “Because I could not stop for Death –,” one of the most famous poems in the Dickinson canon, forms an important bookend to our second selection in that both poems show Dickinson’s precise control over the speaker’s relationship to not only the natural world but also the divine. While death cannot be avoided, neither is it to be feared; the speaker of this poem reminds readers that the omnipresence of death does not mean that death is immanent. This idea of death as always present and potential comes full circle in the final selection in this unit, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –.” Here Dickinson plays with our preconceptions not only of death, but also of energy which appears always to be waiting for someone to unleash it. Considered carefully, these four poems demonstrate the range of Dickinson’s reach as a poet. In these lyrics, mortality and desire combine in precise lyrics that awaken both our imagination and our awareness of the natural world.

The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door — To her divine Majority — Present no more — Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing — At her low Gate — Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling Upon her Mat — I’ve known her — from an ample nation — Choose One — Then — close the Valves of her attention — Like Stone —

My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun – In Corners – till a Day The Owner passed – identified – And carried Me away – And now We roam in Sovreign Woods – And now We hunt the Doe – And every time I speak for Him The Mountains straight reply – And do I smile, such cordial light Opon the Valley glow – It is as a Vesuvian face Had let it’s pleasure through – And when at Night – Our good Day done – I guard My Master’s Head – ’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s Deep Pillow – to have shared – To foe of His – I’m deadly foe – None stir the second time – On whom I lay a Yellow Eye – Or an emphatic Thumb – Though I than He – may longer live He longer must – than I – For I have but the power to kill, Without – the power to die –

Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality. We slowly drove – He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility – We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess – in the Ring – We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – We passed the Setting Sun – Or rather – He passed Us – The Dews drew quivering and Chill – For only Gossamer, my Gown – My Tippet – only Tulle – We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground – The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground – Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses’ Heads Were toward Eternity –

In “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” what is Jim Smiley’s talent? Why does he lose it? Would you consider Mark Twain an experimental writer? How are his stories different from other authors of his time period? In Twain’s “War Prayer,” how do the town’s people react to the prophet? Is his message clear? How is this a controversial story?

Examine the tension between the “ideal” and the “real” in “Editha.” Which mode of representation is depicted as superior to the other? Why? What strategies does Editha use to convince George to go to war? Why does she use these particular strategies? Are the principles she espouses truly hers? Or is she manipulating him using catch phrases from the time period? What motivates George to finally enlist? Characterize Editha’s feelings about George’s death. Contrast Editha with George’s mother. At the end of “Editha,” how does the word “vulgar” expressed by the artist help Editha return to living again in the ideal?

After the Civil War and toward the end of the nineteenth century, America experienced significant change. With the closing of the Western frontier and increasing urbanization and industrialization, and with the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad and the advent of new communication technologies such as the telegraph, America began to emerge as a more unified nation as it moved into the Industrial Age. As immigration from both Europe and Asia peaked during the last half of the nineteenth century, immigrants provided cheap labor to rising urban centers in the Northeast and eventually in the Midwest. There was a subsequent rise in the middle class for the first time in America, as the economic landscape of the country began to change. The country’s social, political, and cultural landscape began to change as well. Women argued for the right to vote, to own property, and to earn their own living, and, as African-Americans began to rise to social and political prominence, they called for social equality and the right to vote as well. Workers in factories and businesses began to lobby for better working conditions, organizing to create unions. Free public schools opened throughout the nation, and, by the turn of the century, the majority of children in the United States attended school. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, activists and reformers worked to battle injustice and social ills. Within this heady mix of political, economic, social, and cultural change, American writers began to look more to contemporary society and social issues for their writing material, rather than to the distant or fictional past. The first members of the new generation of writers sought to create a new American literature, one that distinctly reflected American life and values and did not mimic British literary customs. At the same time, these writers turned to the past, toward writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper, and reacted against their predecessors’ allegiance to the Romantic style of writing which favored the ideal over the real representation of life in fiction. William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James wrote prolifically about the Realistic method, where writers created characters and plot based on average people experiencing the common concerns of everyday life, and they also produced their own literary masterpieces using this style. All writers in the Realistic mode shared a commitment to referential narrative. Their readers expected to meet characters that resembled ordinary people, often of the middle class, living in ordinary circumstances, who experienced plausible real-life struggles and who often, as in life, were unable to find resolution to their conflicts. Realists developed these characters by using ordinary speech in dialogue, commensurate to the character’s social class. Often in Realistic stories, characterization and plot became intertwined, as the plot was formed from the exploration of a character working through or reacting to a particular issue or struggle. In other words, character often drove the plot of the story. Characters in Realistic fiction were three-dimensional, and their inner lives were often revealed through an objective, omniscient narrator. Realists set their fiction in places that actually existed, and they were interested in recent or contemporary life, not in history or legend. Setting in Realistic fiction was important but was not limited to a particular place or region. Realists believed in the accuracy of detail, and, for them, accuracy helped build the “truth” conveyed in the work. The implied assumption for these writers is that “reality” is verifiable, is separate from human perception of it, and can be agreed upon collectively. Finally, Realistic writers believed that the function of the author is to show, not simply tell. The story should be allowed to tell itself with a decided lack of authorial intrusion. Realistic writers attempted to avoid sentimentality or any kind of forced or heavy-handed emotional appeal. The three most prominent theorists and practitioners of American Literary Realism are Mark Twain, often called the comic Realist; William Dean Howells, often termed the social Realist; and Henry James, often characterized as the psychological Realist. Two earlier literary styles contributed to the emergence of Realism: Local Color and Regionalism. These two sub-movements cannot be completely separated from one another or from Realism itself, since all three styles have intersecting points. However, there are distinct features of each style that bear comparison. LOCAL COLOR (1865-1885) After the Civil War, as the country became more unified, regions of the country that were previously “closed” politically or isolated geographically became interesting to the populace at large. Readers craved stories about eccentric, peculiar characters living in isolated locales. Local Color writing therefore involves a detailed setting forth of the characteristics of a particular locality, enabling the reader to “see” the setting. The writer typically is concerned with habits, customs, religious practices, dress, fashion, favorite foods, language, dialect, common expressions, peculiarities, and surrounding flora and fauna of a particular locale. Local Color pieces were sometimes told from the perspective of an outsider (such as travelers or journalists) looking into a particular rural, isolated locale that had been generally closed off from the contemporary world. In some stories, the local inhabitants would examine their own environments, nostalgically trying to preserve in writing the “ways things were” in the “good old days.” The Local Color story often involved a worldly “stranger” coming into a rather closed off locale populated with common folk. From there the story took a variety of turns, but often the stranger, who believed he was superior to the country bumpkins, was fooled or tricked in some way. Nostalgia and sentimentality, and even elements of the Romantic style of the earlier part of the century, may infuse a Local Color story. Often, the story is humorous, with a local trickster figure outwitting the more urbane outsider or interloper. In Local Color stories about the Old South, for example, nostalgia for a bygone era may be prevalent. The “plantation myth” popularized by Thomas Nelson Page, for instance, might offer a highly filtered and altered view of plantation life as idyllic, for both master and slave. Local Color stories about the West, such as Mark Twain’s “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” might offer raucous stories with stock characters of gamblers or miners who outwit the interloper from the city, who flaunts his intellectual superiority over the locals. An early African-American writer, Charles Chesnutt, used the Local Color style of writing to deconstruct the plantation myth by showing the innate dignity, intelligence, and power of slaves or former slaves who outwit the white racist landowners. Local Color writing can be seen as a transitional type of writing that took American literature away from the Romantic style and more firmly into the Realistic style. The characters are more realistically drawn, with very human, sometimes ignoble, traits: they swear, speak in regional dialect, swat flies away from their faces, and make mistakes; they are both comic and pitiable. The setting is realistically drawn as well: a real-life location, with accurate depictions of setting, people, and local customs. Local Color writing, however, does not reach the more stylistically and thematically complicated dimensions of Realistic writing. Local Color works tend to be somewhat sentimental stories with happy endings or at least endings where good prevails over evil. Characters are often flat or two-dimensional who are either good or bad. Outlandish and improbable events often happen during the course of the story, and characters sometimes undergo dramatic and unbelievable changes in characterization. Local Color did, however, begin a trend in American literature that allowed for a more authentic American style and storyline about characters who speak like Americans, not the British aristocracy, real-life American places, and more down-to-earth, recognizably human characters. REGIONALISM (1875-1895) Regionalism can be seen as a more sophisticated form of Local Color, with the author using one main character (the protagonist) to offer a specific point of view in the story. Regionalist writers often employ Local Color elements in their fiction. After all, they are concerned with the characteristics of a particular locale or region. However, regionalist writers tell the story empathetically, from the protagonist’s perspective. That is, the Regional writer attempts to render a convincing surface of a particular time and place, but investigates the psychological character traits from a more universal perspective. Characters tend to be more three-dimensional and the plot less formulaic or predictable. Often what prevents Regional writers from squarely falling into the category of “Realist” is their tendency toward nostalgia, sentimentality, authorial intrusion, or a rather contrived or happy ending. In Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron,” for example, the story has a number of features of Local Color stories: characters speak in a New England dialect, the landscape is described in detail, the customs and rituals of farming class families are described, and an outsider—the young male ornithologist—comes to this secluded region with a sense of superiority and is thwarted in his endeavors by young Sylvy who refuses to give up the secret location of the heron. However, the story is told from the perspective of Sylvy, and readers gain insight into her inner conflict as she attempts to make a difficult decision. We gain awareness of Sylvy’s complexity as a character, a young girl who is faced with making an adult decision, a choice that will force her to grow up and face the world from a more mature stance. Jewett does, at times, allow the narrator to intrude in order to encourage readers to feel sympathy for Sylvy. Therefore, the story does not exhibit the narrative objectivity of a Realistic story. Regionalism has often been used as a term to describe many works by women writers during the late nineteenth century; however, it is a term which, unfortunately, has confined these women writers’ contribution to American literature to a particular style. Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, for example, certainly wrote about the New England region, but their larger focus was on ordinary women in domestic spaces who seek self-agency in a male-dominated culture. Kate Chopin set most of her works among the Creole and Acadian social classes of the Louisiana Bayou region, yet the larger themes of her works offer examinations of women who long for passionate and personal fulfillment and for the ability to live authentic, self-directed lives. Like the established theorists of Realism—Howells, Twain, and James—women writers of the time, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Ellen Glasgow, who are generally not thought of as Regional writers, produced work which often defied strict labeling and which contributed to the beginning of a feminist tradition in American literature. While literary labels help frame the style and method of stories written in the late nineteenth century, most literary works—especially those that have withstood the test of time—defy reductionism.

Image | Mark Twain, 1907 Photographer | A. F. Bradley Source | Wikimedia Commons License | Public Domain Mark Twain is the pen name of author Samuel Langhorne Clemmons. Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, but grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, near the banks of the Mississippi River. This location was a major influence on his work and severed as the setting for many of his stories. Although Twain originally apprenticed as a printer, he spent eighteen months on the Mississippi River training as a riverboat pilot (the name Mark Twain is a reference to a nautical term). By the start of the Civil War (1861), traffic on the Mississippi River had slowed considerably, which led Twain to abandon his dreams of piloting a riverboat. Twain claims to have spent two weeks in the Marion Rangers, a poorly organized local confederate militia, after leaving his job on a riverboat. In 1861, Twain’s brother Orion was appointed by President Lincoln to serve as the Secretary of Nevada, and Twain initially accompanied him out West, serving as the Assistant Secretary of Nevada. Twain’s adventures out West would become the material for his successful book, Roughing It!, published in 1872, following on the heels of the success of his international travelogue, Innocents Abroad (1869). While living out West, Twain made a name for himself as a journalist, eventually serving as the editor of the Virginia City Daily Territorial Enterprise. The multi-talented Twain rose to prominence as a writer, journalist, humorist, memoirist, novelist, and public speaker. Twain was one of the most influential and important figures of American Literary Realism, achieving fame during his lifetime. Twain was hailed as America’s most famous writer, and is the author of several classic books such as The Adventure of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Roughing It!, Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi (1883), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Twain is known for his use of dialect, regional humor, and satire, as well as the repeated theme of having jokes at the expense of an outsider (or work featuring an outsider who comes to fleece locals). In his famous “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which has also been published under its original title “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” and “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Twain experiments with early versions of meta-fiction, embedding a story within a story. Furthermore, the story relies on local color humor and regional dialect (“Why blame my cats”) as well as featuring an outsider entering a new place, a staple in Twain’s work. In Roughing It!, which details Twain’s travels out West from 1861-1867, Twain details many adventures visiting with outlaws and other strange characters, as well as encounters with notable figures of the age, such as Brigham Young and Horace Greeley. Furthermore, Roughing It! provided descriptions of the frontier from Nevada to San Francisco to Hawaii to an audience largely unfamiliar with the area. Although he claimed it to be a work of non-fiction, Roughing It! features many fantastic stories of Twain’s travels in the West, several of which were exaggerated or untrue. In “The War Prayer,” a satire of the Spanish- American War (1898), Twain proves to be a master of irony. The story, which was originally rejected during Twain’s lifetime, begins as a prayer for American soldiers and, as it continues, highlights many of the horrors of war.

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good- natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend’s friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as reques.ted to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as long and as tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design it succeeded. I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the barroom stove of the dilapidated tavern in the decayed mining camp of Engel’s, and noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up and gave me good- day. I told him a friend of mine had commissioned me to make some inquires about a cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas W. Smiley Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, a young minister of the Gospel, who be had heard was at one time a resident of Angel’s Camp. I added that if Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, I would feel under many obligations to him. Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair, and then sat down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned his initial sentence, be never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly, that, so far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendant genius in finesse. I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once. “Rev. Leonidas W. H’m, Reverend Le well, there was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of ‘49 or maybe it was the spring of ‘5o I don’t recollect exactly, somehow, though what makes me think it was one or the other is because remember the big flume warn’t finished when he first come to the camp; but any way he was the curiosest man about always betting on anything that turned up you ever see, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side; and if he couldn’t he’d change sides. Any way that suited the other man would suit him any way just so’s he got a bet, he was satisfied. But still he was lucky, uncommon lucky; he most always come out winner. He was always ready and laying for a chance; there couldn’t be no solit’ry thing mentioned but that feller’d offer to bet on it, and take any side you please as I was just telling you. If there was a horse-race, you’d find him flush or you’d find him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he’d bet on it; if there was a cat- fight he’d bet on it; if there was a chicken-fight he’d bet on it; why, if there was two birds sitting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a camp meeting, he would be there reg’lar to bet on Parson Walker, which ·he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was too, and a good man. If he even see a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to to wherever he was going to, and if you took him up he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road. Lots of the boys here has seen that Smiley, and can tell you about him. Why, it never made no difference to him he’d bet on any thing the dangdest feller. Parson Walker’s wife laid very sick once, for a good while, and it seemed as if they warn’t going to save her; but one morning he come in, and Smiley up and asked him how she was, and he said. she was considerable better thank the Lord for his inf’nit mercy and coming on so smart that with the blessing of Prov’dence she’d get well yet; and Smiley, before he thought, says, “Well, I’ll resk two and a half she don’t anyway.’’ Thish-yer Smiley had a mare the boys called her· the fifteen minute nag, but that was only in fun, you know, because of course she was faster than that and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards’ start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag end of the race she’d get excited and desperate-like, and come cavorting and straddling up and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up more dust and raising more racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher it down. And he had a little small bull-pup that to look at him you’d think he warn’t worth a cent but to set around and look ornery and lay for a chance to steal something. But as soon as money was up on him he was a different dog; his under jaw began to stick out like the fo’castle of a steamboat, and his teeth would uncover and shine like the furnaces. And a dog might tackle him and bullyrag him, and bite him, and throw him over his shoulder two or three times, and Andrew Jackson which was the name of the pup Andrew Jackson would never let on but what he was satisfied, and hadn’t expected nothing else and the bets being doubled and doubled on the other side all the time, till the money was all up; and then all of a sudden he would grab that other dog jest by the j’int of his hind leg and freeze to it not chaw, you understand, but only just grip and hang on till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year. Smiley always come out winner on that pup, till he harnessed a dog once that did’nt have no hind legs, because they’d been sawed off in a circular saw, and when the thing had gone along far enough, and the money was all up, and he come to make a snatch for his pet holt, he see in a minute how he’d been imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the door, so to speak, and he ‘peared surprised, and then he looked sorter discouraged-like, and didn’t try no more to win the fight, and so he got shucked out bad. He give Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it was his fault, for putting up a dog that hadn’t no hind legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight, and then he limped off a piece and laid down and died. It was a good pup was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if he’d lived, for the stuff was in him and he had genius I know it, because he hadn’t no opportunities to speak of, and it don’t stand to reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them circumstances if he hadn’t no talent. It always makes me feel sorry when I think of that last fight of his’n, and the way it turned out. Well, thishyer Smiley had rattarriers, and chicken cocks, and tomcats and all them kind of things, till you couldn’t rest, and you couldn’t fetch nothing f or him to bet on but he’d match you. He ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said be cal’lated to educate him; and so he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he did learn him, too. He’d give him a little punch behind, and the next minute you’d see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut-see him turn one summerset, or maybe a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got him up so in the matter of catching flies, and kep’ him in practice so constant, that he’d nail a fly every time as fur as he could see him. Smiley said all a frog wanted was education and he could do ‘most anything and I believe him. Why, I’ve seen him set Dan’l Webster down here on this floor Dan’l Webster was the name of the frog and sing out, “Flies Dan’l, flies!” and quicker’n you could wink he’d spring straight up and snake a fly off’n the counter there, and flop down on the floor ag’in as solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of his head with his hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn’t no idea he’d been doin’ any more’nany frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straightfor’ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand; and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had travelled and been everywhere, all said he laid over any frog that ever they see. Well, Smiley kep’ the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to fetch him down town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day, a feller a stranger in the camp, he was come acrost him with his box, and says: “What might it be that you’ve got in the box?” And Smiley says, sorter indifferent-like, “It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary, maybe, but it ain’t it’s only just a frog.” “Well,” Smiley, says, easy and careless, “he’s good enough for one thing, I should judge he can out jump any frog in Calaveras county.” The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and gave it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, “Well,’’ he says, “I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.” “Maybe you don’t,” Smiley says. “Maybe you understand frogs and maybe you don’t understand ‘em; maybe you’ve had experience, and maybe you ain’t only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I’ve got my opinion and I’ll resk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.” And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, ‘’Well, I’m only a stranger here, and I aint got no frog; but if I had a frog, I’d bet you.” And then Smiley says, “That’s all right that’s all right if you’ll hold my box a minute, I’ll go and get you a frog.’’ And so the feller took the box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley’s, and set down to wait. So he sat there a good while thinking and thinking to hisself, and then he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shot filled him pretty near up to his chin and set him on the floor. Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in the mud for along time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him in, and gave him to this feller and says: “Now, if you’re ready, set him alongside of Dan’l, with his fore-paws just even with Dan’l’s, and I’ll give the word.” Then he says, “One two three git !” and him and the feller touched up the frogs from behind, and the new frog hopped off lively, but Dan’l gave a heave, and hysted up his shoulders so like a Frenchman, but it warn’t no use he couldn’t budge; he was planted as solid as a church, and he couldn’t no more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley was a good deal surprised, and he was disgusted too, but he didn’t have no idea what the matter was, of course. The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulder so at Dan’l, and says again, very deliberate, “Well,” he says, “I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.” Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan’l a long time, and at last he says, “I do wonder what in the nation that frog throw’d off for I wonder if there ain’t something the matter with him he ‘pears to look mighty _baggy, somehow.” And he ketched Dan’l by the nap of the neck, and hefted him, and says, “Why, blame my cats if he don’t weigh five pound!” and turned him upside down and he belched out a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was the maddest man he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never ketched him. And ” [Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up to see what was wanted.] And turning to me as he moved away, he said: “Just set where yon are, stranger, and rest easy I ain’t going to be gone a second.” But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to afford me much information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started away. At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he button-holed me and re-commenced: “Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn’t have no tail, only jest a short stump like a bannanner, and “ However, lacking both time and inclination, I did not wait to hear about the afflicted cow, but took my leave.

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way. Sunday morning came next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword! Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!” The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside which the startled minister did and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said: “I come from the Throne bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of except he pause and think. “God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it. “You have heard your servant’s prayer the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it that part which the pastor and also you in your hearts fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen! “O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle be Thou near them! With them in spirit we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever- faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. (After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!” It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

for his short stories about the California Gold Rush, and for his poem “The Heathen Chinese”. He was also an editor of several magazines and newspapers. Bret Harte was born in New York and grew up in California, and his stories often draw on his experiences there. He wrote tales of the Western United States, with a focus on the mining camps, and he was known for his use of local dialect and colorful characters. He wrote the stories “The Luck of Roaring Camp”, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”, and “The Idyl of Red Gulch”, among others. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” is a short story by Bret Harte, first published in 1869. It tells the story of four people exiled from a western mining town, and follows them as they try to survive in the wilderness. The story offers a unique insight into the lawless and often violent world of the American West. It is a powerful and timeless tale of courage, loyalty, and hope in the face of adversity.

THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT As Mr. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker Flat on the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850, he was conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. Two or three men, conversing earnestly together, ceased as he approached, and exchanged significant glances. There was a Sabbath lull in the air which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous. Mr. Oakhurst’s calm, handsome face betrayed small concern in these indications. Whether he was conscious of any predisposing cause was another question. “I reckon they’re after somebody,” he reflected; “likely it’s me.” He returned to his pocket the handkerchief with which he had been whipping away the red dust of Poker Flat from his neat boots, and quietly discharged his mind of any further conjecture. In point of fact, Poker Flat was “after somebody.” It had lately suffered the loss of several thousand dollars, two valuable horses, and a prominent citizen. It was experiencing a spasm of virtuous reaction, quite as lawless and ungovernable as any of the acts that had provoked it. A secret committee had determined to rid the town of all improper persons. This was done permanently in regard of two men who were then hanging from the boughs of a sycamore in the gulch, and temporarily in the banishment of certain other objectionable characters. I regret to say that some of these were ladies. It is but due to the sex, however, to state that their impropriety was professional, and it was only in such easily established standards of evil that Poker Flat ventured to sit in judgment. Mr. Oakhurst was right in supposing that he was included in this category. A few of the committee had urged hanging him as a possible example, and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets of the sums he had won from them. “It’s agin justice,” said Jim Wheeler, “to let this yer young man from Roaring Camp—an entire stranger—carry away our money.” But a crude sentiment of equity residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough to win from Mr. Oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice. Mr. Oakhurst received his sentence with philosophic calmness, none the less coolly that he was aware of the hesitation of his judges. He was too much of a gambler not to accept Fate. With him life was at best an uncertain game, and he recognized the usual percentage in favor of the dealer. A body of armed men accompanied the deported wickedness of Poker Flat to the outskirts of the settlement. Besides Mr. Oakhurst, who was known to be a coolly desperate man, and for whose intimidation the armed escort was intended, the expatriated party consisted of a young woman familiarly known as the “Duchess”; another, who had won the title of “Mother Shipton”; and “Uncle Billy,” a suspected sluice-robber and confirmed drunkard. The cavalcade provoked no comments from the spectators, nor was any word uttered by the escort. Only, when the gulch which marked the uttermost limit of Poker Flat was reached, the leader spoke briefly and to the point. The exiles were forbidden to return at the peril of their lives. As the escort disappeared, their pent-up feelings found vent in a few hysterical tears from the Duchess, some bad language from Mother Shipton, and a Parthian volley of expletives from Uncle Billy. The philosophic Oakhurst alone remained silent. He listened calmly to Mother Shipton’s desire to cut somebody’s heart out, to the repeated statements of the Duchess that she would die in the road, and to the alarming oaths that seemed to be bumped out of Uncle Billy as he rode forward. With the easy good humor characteristic of his class, he insisted upon exchanging his own riding horse, “Five Spot,” for the sorry mule which the Duchess rode. But even this act did not draw the party into any closer sympathy. The young woman readjusted her somewhat draggled plumes with a feeble, faded coquetry; Mother Shipton eyed the possessor of “Five Spot” with malevolence, and Uncle Billy included the whole party in one sweeping anathema. The road to Sandy Bar—a camp that, not having as yet experienced the regenerating influences of Poker Flat, consequently seemed to offer some invitation to the emigrants—lay over a steep mountain range. It was distant a day’s severe travel. In that advanced season, the party soon passed out of the moist, temperate regions of the foothills into the dry, cold, bracing air of the Sierras. The trail was narrow and difficult. At noon the Duchess, rolling out of her saddle upon the ground, declared her intention of going no farther, and the party halted. The spot was singularly wild and impressive. A wooded amphitheater, surrounded on three sides by precipitous cliffs of naked granite, sloped gently toward the crest of another precipice that overlooked the valley. It was, undoubtedly, the most suitable spot for a camp, had camping been advisable. But Mr. Oakhurst knew that scarcely half the journey to Sandy Bar was accomplished, and the party were not equipped or provisioned for delay. This fact he pointed out to his companions curtly, with a philosophic commentary on the folly of “throwing up their hand before the game was played out.” But they were furnished with liquor, which in this emergency stood them in place of food, fuel, rest, and prescience. In spite of his remonstrances, it was not long before they were more or less under its influence. Uncle Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose state into one of stupor, the Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton snored. Mr. Oakhurst alone remained erect, leaning against a rock, calmly surveying them. Mr. Oakhurst did not drink. It interfered with a profession which required coolness, impassiveness, and presence of mind, and, in his own language, he “couldn’t afford it.” As he gazed at his recumbent fellow exiles, the loneliness begotten of his pariah trade, his habits of life, his very vices, for the first time seriously oppressed him. He bestirred himself in dusting his black clothes, washing his hands and face, and other acts characteristic of his studiously neat habits, and for a moment forgot his annoyance. The thought of deserting his weaker and more pitiable companions never perhaps occurred to him. Yet he could not help feeling the want of that excitement which, singularly enough, was most conducive to that calm equanimity for which he was notorious. He looked at the gloomy walls that rose a thousand feet sheer above the circling pines around him; at the sky, ominously clouded; at the valley below, already deepening into shadow. And, doing so, suddenly he heard his own name called. A horseman slowly ascended the trail. In the fresh, open face of the newcomer Mr. Oakhurst recognized Tom Simson, otherwise known as the “Innocent” of Sandy Bar. He had met him some months before over a “little game,” and had, with perfect equanimity, won the entire fortune—amounting to some forty dollars—of that guileless youth. After the game was finished, Mr. Oakhurst drew the youthful speculator behind the door and thus addressed him: “Tommy, you’re a good little man, but you can’t gamble worth a cent. Don’t try it over again.” He then handed him his money back, pushed him gently from the room, and so made a devoted slave of Tom Simson. There was a remembrance of this in his boyish and enthusiastic greeting of Mr. Oakhurst. He had started, he said, to go to Poker Flat to seek his fortune. “Alone?” No, not exactly alone; in fact (a giggle), he had run away with Piney Woods. Didn’t Mr. Oakhurst remember Piney? She that used to wait on the table at the Temperance House? They had been engaged a long time, but old Jake Woods had objected, and so they had run away, and were going to Poker Flat to be married, and here they were. And they were tired out, and how lucky it was they had found a place to camp and company. All this the Innocent delivered rapidly, while Piney, a stout, comely damsel of fifteen, emerged from behind the pine tree, where she had been blushing unseen, and rode to the side of her lover. Mr. Oakhurst seldom troubled himself with sentiment, still less with propriety; but he had a vague idea that the situation was not fortunate. He retained, however, his presence of mind sufficiently to kick Uncle Billy, who was about to say something, and Uncle Billy was sober enough to recognize in Mr. Oakhurst’s kick a superior power that would not bear trifling. He then endeavored to dissuade Tom Simson from delaying further, but in vain. He even pointed out the fact that there was no provision, nor means of making a camp. But, unluckily, the Innocent met this objection by assuring the party that he was provided with an extra mule loaded with provisions and by the discovery of a rude attempt at a log house near the trail. “Piney can stay with Mrs. Oakhurst,” said the Innocent, pointing to the Duchess, “and I can shift for myself.” Nothing but Mr. Oakhurst’s admonishing foot saved Uncle Billy from bursting into a roar of laughter. As it was, he felt compelled to retire up the canyon until he could recover his gravity. There he confided the joke to the tall pine trees, with many slaps of his leg, contortions of his face, and the usual profanity. But when he returned to the party, he found them seated by a fire—for the air had grown strangely chill and the sky overcast—in apparently amicable conversation. Piney was actually talking in an impulsive, girlish fashion to the Duchess, who was listening with an interest and animation she had not shown for many days. The Innocent was holding forth, apparently with equal effect, to Mr. Oakhurst and Mother Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. “Is this yer a damned picnic?” said Uncle Billy with inward scorn as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing firelight, and the tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he felt impelled to slap his leg again and cram his fist into his mouth. As the shadows crept slowly up the mountain, a slight breeze rocked the tops of the pine trees, and moaned through their long and gloomy aisles. The ruined cabin, patched and covered with pine boughs, was set apart for the ladies. As the lovers parted, they unaffectedly exchanged a kiss, so honest and sincere that it might have been heard above the swaying pines. The frail Duchess and the malevolent Mother Shipton were probably too stunned to remark upon this last evidence of simplicity, and so turned without a word to the hut. The fire was replenished, the men lay down before the door, and in a few minutes were asleep. Mr. Oakhurst was a light sleeper. Toward morning he awoke benumbed and cold. As he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood to leave it—snow! He started to his feet with the intention of awakening the sleepers, for there was no time to lose. But turning to where Uncle Billy had been lying, he found him gone. A suspicion leaped to his brain and a curse to his lips. He ran to the spot where the mules had been tethered; they were no longer there. The tracks were already rapidly disappearing in the snow. The momentary excitement brought Mr. Oakhurst back to the fire with his usual calm. He did not waken the sleepers. The Innocent slumbered peacefully, with a smile on his good-humored, freckled face; the virgin Piney slept beside her frailer sisters as sweetly as though attended by celestial guardians; and Mr. Oakhurst, drawing his blanket over his shoulders, stroked his mustaches and waited for the dawn. It came slowly in a whirling mist of snowflakes that dazzled and confused the eye. What could be seen of the landscape appeared magically changed. He looked over the valley, and summed up the present and future in two words—“snowed in!” A careful inventory of the provisions, which, fortunately for the party, had been stored within the hut and so escaped the felonious fingers of Uncle Billy, disclosed the fact that with care and prudence they might last ten days longer. “That is,” said Mr. Oakhurst, sotto voce to the Innocent, “if you’re willing to board us. If you ain’t—and perhaps you’d better not—you can wait till Uncle Billy gets back with provisions.” For some occult reason, Mr. Oakhurst could not bring himself to disclose Uncle Billy’s rascality, and so offered the hypothesis that he had wandered from the camp and had accidentally stampeded the animals. He dropped a warning to the Duchess and Mother Shipton, who of course knew the facts of their associate’s defection. “They’ll find out the truth about us all when they find out anything,” he added, significantly, “and there’s no good frightening them now.” Tom Simson not only put all his worldly store at the disposal of Mr. Oakhurst, but seemed to enjoy the prospect of their enforced seclusion. “We’ll have a good camp for a week, and then the snow’ll melt, and we’ll all go back together.” The cheerful gaiety of the young man, and Mr. Oakhurst’s calm, infected the others. The Innocent with the aid of pine boughs extemporized a thatch for the roofless cabin, and the Duchess directed Piney in the rearrangement of the interior with a taste and tact that opened the blue eyes of that provincial maiden to their fullest extent. “I reckon now you’re used to fine things at Poker Flat,” said Piney. The Duchess turned away sharply to conceal something that reddened her cheeks through its professional tint, and Mother Shipton requested Piney not to “chatter.” But when Mr. Oakhurst returned from a weary search for the trail, he heard the sound of happy laughter echoed from the rocks. He stopped in some alarm, and his thoughts first naturally reverted to the whisky, which he had prudently cached. “And yet it don’t somehow sound like whisky,” said the gambler. It was not until he caught sight of the blazing fire through the still-blinding storm and the group around it that he settled to the conviction that it was “square fun.” Whether Mr. Oakhurst had cached his cards with the whisky as something debarred the free access of the community, I cannot say. It was certain that, in Mother Shipton’s words, he “didn’t say cards once” during that evening. Haply the time was beguiled by an accordion, produced somewhat ostentatiously by Tom Simson from his pack. Notwithstanding some difficulties attending the manipulation of this instrument, Piney Woods managed to pluck several reluctant melodies from its keys, to an accompaniment by the Innocent on a pair of bone castanets. But the crowning festivity of the evening was reached in a rude camp-meeting hymn, which the lovers, joining hands, sang with great earnestness and vociferation. I fear that a certain defiant tone and Covenanter’s swing to its chorus, rather than any devotional quality, caused it speedily to infect the others, who at last joined in the refrain: “I’m proud to live in the service of the Lord, And I’m bound to die in His army.” The pines rocked, the storm eddied and whirled above the miserable group, and the flames of their altar leaped heavenward as if in token of the vow. At midnight the storm abated, the rolling clouds parted, and the stars glittered keenly above the sleeping camp. Mr. Oakhurst, whose professional habits had enabled him to live on the smallest possible amount of sleep, in dividing the watch with Tom Simson somehow managed to take upon himself the greater part of that duty. He excused himself to the Innocent by saying that he had “often been a week without sleep.” “Doing what?” asked Tom. “Poker!” replied Oakhurst, sententiously; “when a man gets a streak of luck,—nigger luck—he don’t get tired. The luck gives in first. Luck,” continued the gambler, reflectively, “is a mighty queer thing. All you know about it for certain is that it’s bound to change. And it’s finding out when it’s going to change that makes you. We’ve had a streak of bad luck since we left Poker Flat—you come along, and slap you get into it, too. If you can hold your cards right along you’re all right. For,” added the gambler, with cheerful irrelevance, “’I’m proud to live in the service of the Lord, And I’m bound to die in His army.’” The third day came, and the sun, looking through the white-curtained valley, saw the outcasts divide their slowly decreasing store of provisions for the morning meal. It was one of the peculiarities of that mountain climate that its rays diffused a kindly warmth over the wintry landscape, as if in regretful commiseration of the past. But it revealed drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut—a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvelously clear air the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a certain degree of sublimity. It did her good, she privately informed the Duchess. “Just you go out there and cuss, and see.” She then set herself to the task of amusing “the child,” as she and the Duchess were pleased to call Piney. Piney was no chicken, but it was a soothing and original theory of the pair thus to account for the fact that she didn’t swear and wasn’t improper. When night crept up again through the gorges, the reedy notes of the accordion rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the flickering campfire. But music failed to fill entirely the aching void left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by Piney—storytelling. Neither Mr. Oakhurst nor his female companions caring to relate their personal experiences, this plan would have failed too but for the Innocent. Some months before he had chanced upon a stray copy of Mr. Pope’s ingenious translation of the ILIAD. He now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem—having thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words—in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that night the Homeric demigods again walked the earth. Trojan bully and wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the canyon seemed to bow to the wrath of the son of Peleus. Mr. Oakhurst listened with quiet satisfaction. Most especially was he interested in the fate of “Ash-heels,” as the Innocent persisted in denominating the “swift- footed Achilles.” So with small food and much of Homer and the accordion, a week passed over the heads of the outcasts. The sun again forsook them, and again from leaden skies the snowflakes were sifted over the land. Day by day closer around them drew the snowy circle, until at last they looked from their prison over drifted walls of dazzling white that towered twenty feet above their heads. It became more and more difficult to replenish their fires, even from the fallen trees beside them, now half- hidden in the drifts. And yet no one complained. The lovers turned from the dreary prospect and looked into each other’s eyes, and were happy. Mr. Oakhurst settled himself coolly to the losing game before him. The Duchess, more cheerful than she had been, assumed the care of Piney. Only Mother Shipton—once the strongest of the party—seemed to sicken and fade. At midnight on the tenth day she called Oakhurst to her side. “I’m going,” she said, in a voice of querulous weakness, “but don’t say anything about it. Don’t waken the kids. Take the bundle from under my head and open it.” Mr. Oakhurst did so. It contained Mother Shipton’s rations for the last week, untouched. “Give ’em to the child,” she said, pointing to the sleeping Piney. “You’ve starved yourself,” said the gambler. “That’s what they call it,” said the woman, querulously, as she lay down again and, turning her face to the wall, passed quietly away. The accordion and the bones were put aside that day, and Homer was forgotten. When the body of Mother Shipton had been committed to the snow, Mr. Oakhurst took the Innocent aside, and showed him a pair of snowshoes, which he had fashioned from the old pack saddle. “There’s one chance in a hundred to save her yet,” he said, pointing to Piney; “but it’s there,” he added, pointing toward Poker Flat. “If you can reach there in two days she’s safe.” “And you?” asked Tom Simson. “I’ll stay here,” was the curt reply. The lovers parted with a long embrace. “You are not going, too?” said the Duchess as she saw Mr. Oakhurst apparently waiting to accompany him. “As far as the canyon,” he replied. He turned suddenly, and kissed the Duchess, leaving her pallid face aflame and her trembling limbs rigid with amazement. Night came, but not Mr. Oakhurst. It brought the storm again and the whirling snow. Then the Duchess, feeding the fire, found that someone had quietly piled beside the hut enough fuel to last a few days longer. The tears rose to her eyes, but she hid them from Piney. The women slept but little. In the morning, looking into each other’s faces, they read their fate. Neither spoke; but Piney, accepting the position of the stronger, drew near and placed her arm around the Duchess’s waist. They kept this attitude for the rest of the day. That night the storm reached its greatest fury, and, rending asunder the protecting pines, invaded the very hut. Toward morning they found themselves unable to feed the fire, which gradually died away. As the embers slowly blackened, the Duchess crept closer to Piney, and broke the silence of many hours: “Piney, can you pray?” “No, dear,” said Piney, simply. The Duchess, without knowing exactly why, felt relieved, and, putting her head upon Piney’s shoulder, spoke no more. And so reclining, the younger and purer pillowing the head of her soiled sister upon her virgin breast, they fell asleep. The wind lulled as if it feared to waken them. Feathery drifts of snow, shaken from the long pine boughs, flew like white-winged birds, and settled about them as they slept. The moon through the rifted clouds looked down upon what had been the camp. But all human stain, all trace of earthly travail, was hidden beneath the spotless mantle mercifully flung from above. They slept all that day and the next, nor did they waken when voices and footsteps broke the silence of the camp. And when pitying fingers brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told from the equal peace that dwelt upon them which was she that had sinned. Even the law of Poker Flat recognized this, and turned away, leaving them still locked in each other’s arms. But at the head of the gulch, on one of the largest pine trees, they found the deuce of clubs pinned to the bark with a bowie knife. It bore the following, written in pencil, in a firm hand:

William Dean Howells, 1906 : Photographer Van der Weyde | Wikimedia Commons, License Public Domain William Dean Howells was born in Martinsville, Ohio, in 1837. Howells’s father was a newspaper editor, and Howells learned the skills of a writer and editor under his father’s guidance. Howells continued to work in publishing until he secured a position with The Atlantic Monthly in Massachusetts in 1866, where he served as Assistant Editor. In 1871, Howells was promoted to Editor of the magazine, and he continued working in that position until 1881. Howells, along with Mark Twain and Henry James, became one of the main advocates and theorists of American Literary Realism, a style of writing that reacted against the previous Romantic era’s perceived literary excesses. Instead, the Realists praised the American novel that presented characters, setting, and action as “true to life.” Howells’s scope of influence on a generation of American writers can be seen in his endorsement of Henry James, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charles Chesnutt, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane, to name but a few. Howells eventually became known as the “Dean of American Letters” and today is considered the father of American Literary Realism. Howells produced his own creative work during his lifetime and is best remembered for two fine novels in the Realist tradition: A Modern Instance (1882) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), as well as a host of short stories and theoretical works on Realism. Howells lived a long, productive life, dying in 1920 at the age of 83. With Mark Twain and Henry James, Howells wrote and spoke prolifically about Realism and its superiority over the earlier Romantic style practiced by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper. In Criticism and Fiction (1891), Howells set forth his views on Realism, arguing that fiction should be “life-like” and “true to human experience.” Howells, along with Twain in particular, rejected the idealistic, the fantastic, the heroic, and the exaggerated, preferring instead simplicity and honesty in fiction writing. Although there were some elements of reality that Howells preferred authors avoid, particularly the salacious and the sensational, Howells consistently privileged realism over idealism in his theory of writing fiction. Howells’s own literary work espoused these principles. A Modern Instance (1882) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), two of his most famous novels, both deal with ordinary middle class people facing plausible personal conflicts in a contemporary setting. The characters are multi-faceted and dimensional, and the resolutions for the main characters are left open, as is often the case in “real life.” In his famous short story “Editha,” Howells explores a young woman’s patriotic impulses in contrast to the reality of war. He sets the story on the eve of the Spanish-American War, when nationalism was soaring and the desire for war with Spain was strong. Editha, a young woman who lives in the “ideal,” is caught up in the patriotic fervor, taking her understanding of the heroic from Romantic ideas that glorify war. She insists her fiancé George enlist in the army, imagining him as a heroic warrior leaving to fight for her. The story contrasts Editha’s naïve understanding of war with the grim reality of what war means for George.

The air was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a storm which had not yet burst. Editha sat looking out into the hot spring afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity of the question whether she could let him go. She had decided that she could not let him stay, when she saw him at the end of the still leafless avenue, making slowly up towards the house, with his head down and his figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the edge of the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with her will before she called him aloud to him: “George!” He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence, before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, “Well?” “It’s war,” he said. and he pulled her up to him and kissed her. She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion, and uttered from deep in her throat. “How glorious!” “It’s war,” he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she did not know just what to think at first. She never knew what to think of him; that made his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship, which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it. He seemed to despise it even more than he abhorred it. She could have understood his abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed and took up the law. But making light of a cause so high and noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the miracle was already wrought in him. In the presence of the tremendous fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her question of the origin and authenticity of his news. All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He was very nearly perfect as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself. But he was peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity. Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature pulling upon his nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means she was using to the end she was willing. She had always supposed that the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him, without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could do something worthy to have won her be a hero, her hero it would be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be grander. Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning. “But don’t you see, dearest,” she said, “that it wouldn’t have come to this if it hadn’t been in the order of Providence? And I call any war glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling for years against the cruelest oppression. Don’t you think so, too?” “I suppose so,” he returned, languidly. “But war! Is it glorious to break the peace of the world?” “That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame at our very gates.” She was conscious of parroting the current phrases of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax: “But now it doesn’t matter about the how or why. Since the war has come, all that is gone. There are no two sides any more. There is nothing now but our country.” He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda, and he remarked, with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, “Our country right or wrong.” “Yes, right or wrong!” she returned, fervidly. “I’ll go and get you some lemonade.” She rose rustling, and whisked away; when she came back with two tall glasses of clouded liquid on a tray, and the ice clucking in them, he still sat as she had left him, and she said, as if there had been no interruption: “But there is no question of wrong in this case. I call it a sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever there was one. And I know you will see it just as I do, yet.” He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he answered as he set the glass down: “I know you always have the highest ideal. When I differ from you I ought to doubt myself.” A generous sob rose in Editha’s throat for the humility of a man, so very nearly perfect, who was willing to put himself below her. Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was never so near slipping through her fingers as when he took that meek way. “You shall not say that! Only, for once I happen to be right.” She seized his hand in her two hands, and poured her soul from her eyes into his. “Don’t you think so?” she entreated him. He released his hand and drank the rest of his lemonade, and she added, “Have mine, too,” but he shook his head in answering, “I’ve no business to think so, unless I act so, too.” Her heart stopped a beat before it pulsed on with leaps that she felt in her neck. She had noticed that strange thing in men: they seemed to feel bound to do what they believed, and not think a thing was finished when they said it, as girls did. She knew what was in his mind, but she pretended not, and she said, “Oh, I am not sure,” and then faltered. He went on as if to himself, without apparently heeding her: “There’s only one way of proving one’s faith in a thing like this.” She could not say that she understood, but she did understand. He went on again. “If I believed if I felt as you do about this war Do you wish me to feel as you do?” Now she was really not sure; so she said: “George, I don’t know what you mean.” He seemed to muse away from her as before. “There is a sort of fascination in it. I suppose that at the bottom of his heart every man would like at times to have his courage tested, to see how he would act.” “How can you talk in that ghastly way?” “It is rather morbid. Still, that’s what it comes to, unless you’re swept away by ambition or driven by conviction. I haven’t the conviction or the ambition, and the other thing is what it comes to with me. I ought to have been a preacher, after all; then I couldn’t have asked it of myself, as I must, now I’m a lawyer. And you believe it’s a holy war, Editha?” he suddenly addressed her. “Oh, I know you do! But you wish me to believe so, too?” She hardly knew whether he was mocking or not, in the ironical way he always had with her plainer mind. But the only thing was to be outspoken with him. “George, I wish you to believe whatever you think is true, at any and every cost. If I’ve tried to talk you into anything, I take it all back.” “Oh, I know that, Editha. I know how sincere you are, and how I wish I had your undoubting spirit! I’ll think it over; I’d like to believe as you do. But I don’t, now; I don’t, indeed. It isn’t this war alone; though this seems peculiarly wanton and needless; but it’s every war so stupid; it makes me sick. Why shouldn’t this thing have been settled reasonably?” “Because,” she said, very throatily again, “God meant it to be war.” “You think it was God? Yes, I suppose that is what people will say.” “Do you suppose it would have been war if God hadn’t meant it?” “I don’t know. Sometimes it seems as if God had put this world into men’s keeping to work it as they pleased.” “Now, George, that is blasphemy.” “Well, I won’t blaspheme. I’ll try to believe in your pocket Providence,” he said, and then he rose to go. “Why don’t you stay to dinner?” Dinner at Balcom’s Works was at one o’clock. “I’ll come back to supper, if you’ll let me. Perhaps I shall bring you a convert.” “Well, you may come back, on that condition.” “All right. If I don’t come, you’ll understand.” He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a suspension of their engagement. It all interested her intensely; she was undergoing a tremendous experience, and she was being equal to it. While she stood looking after him, her mother came out through one of the long windows onto the veranda, with a catlike softness and vagueness. “Why didn’t he stay to dinner?” “Because because war has been declared,” Editha pronounced, without turning. Her mother said, “Oh, my!” and then said nothing more until she had sat down in one of the large Shaker chairs and rocked herself for some time. Then she closed whatever tacit passage of thought there had been in her mind with the spoken words: “Well, I hope he won’t go.” “And I hope he will,” the girl said, and confronted her mother with a stormy exaltation that would have frightened any creature less unimpressionable than a cat. Her mother rocked herself again for an interval of cogitation. What she arrived at in speech was: “Well, I guess you’ve done a wicked thing, Editha Balcom.” The girl said, as she passed indoors through the same window her mother had come out by: “I haven’t done anything yet.” In her room, she put together all her letters and gifts from Gearson, down to the withered petals of the first flower he had offered, with that timidity of his veiled in that irony of his. In the heart of the packet she enshrined her engagement ring which she had restored to the pretty box he had brought it her in. Then she sat down, if not calmly yet strongly, and wrote: “George: I understood when you left me. But I think we had better emphasize your meaning that if we cannot be one in everything we had better be one in nothing. So I am sending these things for your keeping till you have made up your mind. “I shall always love you, and therefore I shall never marry any one else. But the man I marry must love his country first of all, and be able to say to me, “’I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more.’ “There is no honor above America with me. In this great hour there is no other honor. “Your heart will make my words clear to you. I had never expected to say so much, but it has come upon me that I must say the utmost. Editha.” She thought she had worded her letter well, worded it in a way that could not be bettered; all had been implied and nothing expressed. She had it ready to send with the packet she had tied with red, white, and blue ribbon, when it occurred to her that she was not just to him, that she was not giving him a fair chance. He had said he would go and think it over, and she was not waiting. She was pushing, threatening, compelling. That was not a woman’s part. She must leave him free, free, free. She could not accept for her country or herself a forced sacrifice. In writing her letter she had satisfied the impulse from which it sprang; she could well afford to wait till he had thought it over. She put the packet and the letter by, and rested serene in the consciousness of having done what was laid upon her by her love itself to do, and yet used patience, mercy, justice. She had her reward. Gearson did not come to tea, but she had given him till morning, when, late at night there came up from the village the sound of a fife and drum, with a tumult of voices, in shouting, singing, and laughing. The noise drew nearer and nearer; it reached the street end of the avenue; there it silenced itself, and one voice, the voice she knew best, rose over the silence. It fell; the air was filled with cheers; the fife and drum struck up, with the shouting, singing, and laughing again, but now retreating; and a single figure came hurrying up the avenue. She ran down to meet her lover and clung to him. He was very gay, and he put his arm round her with a boisterous laugh. “Well, you must call me Captain now; or Cap, if you prefer; that’s what the boys call me. Yes, we’ve had a meeting at the town-hall, and everybody has volunteered; and they selected me for captain, and I’m going to the war, the big war, the glorious war, the holy war ordained by the pocket Providence that blesses butchery. Come along; let’s tell the whole family about it. Call them from their downy beds, father, mother, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks!” But when they mounted the veranda steps he did not wait for a larger audience; he poured the story out upon Editha alone. “There was a lot of speaking, and then some of the fools set up a shout for me. It was all going one way, and I thought it would be a good joke to sprinkle a little cold water on them. But you can’t do that with a crowd that adores you. The first thing I knew I was sprinkling hell-fire on them. ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.’ That was the style. Now that it had come to the fight, there were no two parties; there was one country, and the thing was to fight to a finish as quick as possible. I suggested volunteering then and there, and I wrote my name first of all on the roster. Then they elected me that’s all. I wish I had some ice-water.” She left him walking up and down the veranda, while she ran for the ice-pitcher and a goblet, and when she came back he was still walking up and down, shouting the story he had told her to her father and mother, who had come out more sketchily dressed than they commonly were by day. He drank goblet after goblet of the ice-water without noticing who was giving it, and kept on talking, and laughing through his talk wildly. “It’s astonishing,” he said, “how well the worse reason looks when you try to make it appear the better. Why, I believe I was the first convert to the war in that crowd to- night! I never thought I should like to kill a man; but now I shouldn’t care; and the smokeless powder lets you see the man drop that you kill. It’s all for the country! What a thing it is to have a country that can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!” Editha had a great, vital thought, an inspiration. She set down the ice-pitcher on the veranda floor, and ran up-stairs and got the letter she had written him. When at last he noisily bade her father and mother, “Well, good-night. I forgot I woke you up; I sha’n’t want any sleep myself,” she followed him down the avenue to the gate. There, after the whirling words that seemed to fly away from her thoughts and refuse to serve them, she made a last effort to solemnize the moment that seemed so crazy, and pressed the letter she had written upon him. “What’s this?” he said. “Want me to mail it?” “No, no. It’s for you. I wrote it after you went this morning. Keep it keep it and read it sometime ” She thought, and then her inspiration came: “Read it if ever you doubt what you’ve done, or fear that I regret your having done it. Read it after you’ve started.” They strained each other in embraces that seemed as ineffective as their words, and he kissed her face with quick, hot breaths that were so unlike him, that made her feel as if she had lost her old lover and found a stranger in his place. The stranger said: “What a gorgeous flower you are, with your red hair, and your blue eyes that look black now, and your face with the color painted out by the white moonshine! Let me hold you under the chin, to see whether I love blood, you tiger-lily!” Then he laughed Gearson’s laugh, and released her, scared and giddy. Within her wilfulness she had been frightened by a sense of subtler force in him, and mystically mastered as she had never been before. She ran all the way back to the house, and mounted the steps panting. Her mother and father were talking of the great affair. Her mother said: “Wa’n’t Mr. Gearson in rather of an excited state of mind? Didn’t you think he acted curious?” “Well, not for a man who’d just been elected captain and had set ‘em up for the whole of Company A,” her father chuckled back. “What in the world do you mean, Mr. Balcom? Oh! There’s Editha!” She offered to follow the girl indoors. “Don’t come, mother!” Editha called, vanishing. Mrs. Balcom remained to reproach her husband. “I don’t see much of anything to laugh at.” “Well, it’s catching. Caught it from Gearson. I guess it won’t be much of a war, and I guess Gearson don’t think so either. The other fellows will back down as soon as they see we mean it. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. I’m going back to bed, myself.” Gearson came again next afternoon, looking pale and rather sick, but quite himself, even to his languid irony. “I guess I’d better tell you, Editha, that I consecrated myself to your god of battles last night by pouring too many libations to him down my own throat. But I’m all right now. One has to carry off the excitement, somehow.” “Promise me,” she commanded, “that you’ll never touch it again!” “What! Not let the cannikin clink? Not let the soldier drink? Well, I promise.” “You don’t belong to yourself now; you don’t even belong to me. You belong to your country, and you have a sacred charge to keep yourself strong and well for your country’s sake. I have been thinking, thinking all night and all day long.” “You look as if you had been crying a little, too,” he said, with his queer smile. “That’s all past. I’ve been thinking, and worshipping you. Don’t you suppose I know all that you’ve been through, to come to this? I’ve followed you every step from your old theories and opinions.” “Well, you’ve had a long row to hoe.” “And I know you’ve done this from the highest motives ” “Oh, there won’t be much pettifogging to do till this cruel war is ” “And you haven’t simply done it for my sake. I couldn’t respect you if you had.” “Well, then we’ll say I haven’t. A man that hasn’t got his own respect intact wants the respect of all the other people he can corner. But we won’t go into that. I’m in for the thing now, and we’ve got to face our future. My idea is that this isn’t going to be a very protracted struggle; we shall just scare the enemy to death before it comes to a fight at all. But we must provide for contingencies, Editha. If anything happens to me ” “Oh, George!” She clung to him, sobbing. “I don’t want you to feel foolishly bound to my memory. I should hate that, wherever I happened to be.” “I am yours, for time and eternity time and eternity.” She liked the words; they satisfied her famine for phrases. “Well, say eternity; that’s all right; but time’s another thing; and I’m talking about time. But there is something! My mother! If anything happens ” She winced, and he laughed. “You’re not the bold soldier-girl of yesterday!” Then he sobered. “If anything happens, I want you to help my mother out. She won’t like my doing this thing. She brought me up to think war a fool thing as well as a bad thing. My father was in the Civil War; all through it; lost his arm in it.” She thrilled with the sense of the arm round her; what if that should be lost? He laughed as if divining her: “Oh, it doesn’t run in the family, as far as I know!” Then he added gravely: “He came home with misgivings about war, and they grew on him. I guess he and mother agreed between them that I was to be brought up in his final mind about it; but that was before my time. I only knew him from my mother’s report of him and his opinions; I don’t know whether they were hers first; but they were hers last. This will be a blow to her. I shall have to write and tell her ” He stopped, and she asked: “Would you like me to write, too, George?” “I don’t believe that would do. No, I’ll do the writing. She’ll understand a little if I say that I thought the way to minimize it was to make war on the largest possible scale at once that I felt I must have been helping on the war somehow if I hadn’t helped keep it from coming, and I knew I hadn’t; when it came, I had no right to stay out of it.” Whether his sophistries satisfied him or not, they satisfied her. She clung to his breast, and whispered, with closed eyes and quivering lips: “Yes, yes, yes!” “But if anything should happen, you might go to her and see what you could do for her. You know? It’s rather far off; she can’t leave her chair ” “Oh, I’ll go, if it’s the ends of the earth! But nothing will happen! Nothing can! I ” She felt her lifted with his rising, and Gearson was saying, with his arm still round her, to her father: “Well, we’re off at once, Mr. Balcom. We’re to be formally accepted at the capital, and then bunched up with the rest somehow, and sent into camp somewhere, and got to the front as soon as possible. We all want to be in the van, of course; we’re the first company to report to the Governor. I came to tell Editha, but I hadn’t got round to it.” She saw him again for a moment at the capital, in the station, just before the train started southward with his regiment. He looked well, in his uniform, and very soldierly, but somehow girlish, too, with his clean-shaven face and slim figure. The manly eyes and the strong voice satisfied her, and his preoccupation with some unexpected details of duty flattered her. Other girls were weeping and bemoaning themselves, but she felt a sort of noble distinction in the abstraction, the almost unconsciousness, with which they parted. Only at the last moment he said: “Don’t forget my mother. It mayn’t be such a walk-over as I supposed,” and he laughed at the notion. He waved his hand to her as the train moved off she knew it among a score of hands that were waved to other girls from the platform of the car, for it held a letter which she knew was hers. Then he went inside the car to read it, doubtless, and she did not see him again. But she felt safe for him through the strength of what she called her love. What she called her God, always speaking the name in a deep voice and with the implication of a mutual understanding, would watch over him and keep him and bring him back to her. If with an empty sleeve, then he should have three arms instead of two, for both of hers should be his for life. She did not see, though, why she should always be thinking of the arm his father had lost. There were not many letters from him, but they were such as she could have wished, and she put her whole strength into making hers such as she imagined he could have wished, glorifying and supporting him. She wrote to his mother glorifying him as their hero, but the brief answer she got was merely to the effect that Mrs. Gearson was not well enough to write herself, and thanking her for her letter by the hand of someone who called herself “Yrs truly, Mrs. W. J. Andrews.” Editha determined not to be hurt, but to write again quite as if the answer had been all she expected. Before it seemed as if she could have written, there came news of the first skirmish, and in the list of the killed, which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our side, was Gearson’s name. There was a frantic time of trying to make out that it might be, must be, some other Gearson; but the name and the company and the regiment and the State were too definitely given. Then there was a lapse into depths out of which it seemed as if she never could rise again; then a lift into clouds far above all grief, black clouds, that blotted out the sun, but where she soared with him, with George George! She had the fever that she expected of herself, but she did not die in it; she was not even delirious, and it did not last long. When she was well enough to leave her bed, her one thought was of George’s mother, of his strangely worded wish that she should go to her and see what she could do for her. In the exaltation of the duty laid upon her it buoyed her up instead of burdening her she rapidly recovered. Her father went with her on the long railroad journey from northern New York to western Iowa; he had business out at Davenport, and he said he could just as well go then as any other time; and he went with her to the little country town where George’s mother lived in a little house on the edge of the illimitable cornfields, under trees pushed to a top of the rolling prairie. George’s father had settled there after the Civil War, as so many other old soldiers had done; but they were Eastern people, and Editha fancied touches of the East in the June rose overhanging the front door, and the garden with early summer flowers stretching from the gate of the paling fence. It was very low inside the house, and so dim, with the closed blinds, that they could scarcely see one another: Editha tall and black in her crapes which filled the air with the smell of their dyes; her father standing decorously apart with his hat on his forearm, as at funerals; a woman rested in a deep arm- chair, and the woman who had let the strangers in stood behind the chair. The seated woman turned her head round and up, and asked the woman behind her chair: “Who did you say?” Editha, if she had done what she expected of herself, would have gone down on her knees at the feet of the seated figure and said, “I am George’s Editha,” for answer. But instead of her own voice she heard that other woman’s voice, saying: “Well, I don’t know as I did get the name just right. I guess I’ll have to make a little more light in here,” and she went and pushed two of the shutters ajar. Then Editha’s father said, in his public will-now-address-a-few-remarks tone: “My name is Balcom, ma’am Junius H. Balcom, of Balcom’s Works, New York; my daughter ” “Oh!” the seated woman broke in, with a powerful voice, the voice that always surprised Editha from Gearson’s slender frame. “Let me see you. Stand round where the light can strike on your face,” and Editha dumbly obeyed. “So, you’re Editha Balcom,” she sighed. “Yes,” Editha said, more like a culprit than a comforter. “What did you come for?” Mrs. Gearson asked. Editha’s face quivered and her knees shook. “I came because because George ” She could go no further. “Yes,” the mother said, “he told me he had asked you to come if he got killed. You didn’t expect that, I suppose, when you sent him.” “I would rather have died myself than done it!” Editha said, with more truth in her deep voice than she ordinarily found in it. “I tried to leave him free ” “Yes, that letter of yours, that came back with his other things, left him free.” Editha saw now where George’s irony came from. “It was not to be read before unless until I told him so,” she faltered. “Of course, he wouldn’t read a letter of yours, under the circumstances, till he thought you wanted him to. Been sick?” the woman abruptly demanded. “Very sick,” Editha said, with self-pity. “Daughter’s life,” her father interposed, “was almost despaired of, at one time.” Mrs. Gearson gave him no heed. “I suppose you would have been glad to die, such a brave person as you! I don’t believe he was glad to die. He was always a timid boy, that way; he was afraid of a good many things; but if he was afraid he did what he made up his mind to. I suppose he made up his mind to go, but I knew what it cost him by what it cost me when I heard of it. I had been through one war before. When you sent him you didn’t expect he would get killed.” The voice seemed to compassionate Editha, and it was time. “No,” she huskily murmured. “No, girls don’t; women don’t, when they give their men up to their country. They think they’ll come marching back, somehow, just as gay as they went, or if it’s an empty sleeve, or even an empty pantaloon, it’s all the more glory, and they’re so much the prouder of them, poor things!” The tears began to run down Editha’s face; she had not wept till then; but it was now such a relief to be understood that the tears came. “No, you didn’t expect him to get killed,” Mrs. Gearson repeated, in a voice which was startlingly like George’s again. “You just expected him to kill some one else, some of those foreigners, that weren’t there because they had any say about it, but because they had to be there, poor wretches conscripts, or whatever they call ‘em. You thought it would be all right for my George, your George, to kill the sons of those miserable mothers and the husbands of those girls that you would never see the faces of.” The woman lifted her powerful voice in a psalmlike note. “I thank my God he didn’t live to do it! I thank my God they killed him first, and that he ain’t livin’ with their blood on his hands!” She dropped her eyes, which she had raised with her voice, and glared at Editha. “What you got that black on for?” She lifted herself by her powerful arms so high that her helpless body seemed to hang limp its full length. “Take it off, take it off, before I tear it from your back!” The lady who was passing the summer near Balcom’s Works was sketching Editha’s beauty, which lent itself wonderfully to the effects of a colorist. It had come to that confidence which is rather apt to grow between artist and sitter, and Editha had told her everything. “To think of your having such a tragedy in your life!” the lady said. She added: “I suppose there are people who feel that way about war. But when you consider the good this war has done how much it has done for the country! I can’t understand such people, for my part. And when you had come all the way out there to console her got up out of a sick-bed! Well!” “I think,” Editha said, magnanimously, “she wasn’t quite in her right mind; and so did papa.” “Yes,” the lady said, looking at Editha’s lips in nature and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. “But how dreadful of her! How perfectly excuse me how vulgar!” A light broke upon Editha in the darkness which she felt had been without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months. The mystery that had bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again in the ideal.

Ambrose Bierce was born in a rural area of Meigs County, Ohio, in 1842. Although poor, Bierce’s father owned a collection of books and instilled in his son an appreciation for the written word. Bierce left home in his teens, eager to make his way in the world, living with relatives and attempting formal education. He eventually joined the Union Army at the onset of the Civil War, serving in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment, eventually as a lieutenant. He survived some of the most brutal battles of the Civil War, including Shiloh and Chickamauga. After the war, Bierce settled out West in San Francisco, married, and had three children. Bierce began to write and publish a number of short stories while working at several well-known West Coast literary magazines. In 1892, he published Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, a collection of his war stories, many of which are considered his best works today. After suffering a number of personal losses, including the death of two of his children and a divorce from his wife, who died soon thereafter, Bierce left the States to travel to Mexico. While many fictitious stories relaying the events of his last days persist, there is no conclusive proof of his fate. He was never heard from again after late 1913. Bierce was an iconoclast, a writer who was fiercely independent and who, using the power of his pen, cynically derided current trends in literature. He was sometimes referred to as “Bitter Bierce,” and his Devil’s Dictionary (1911), compiled during most of his writing career, offered dark, satiric definitions of common words. While Bierce was praised by William Dean Howells as an important new writer on the literary scene in the 1890s, Bierce in his journalistic pieces for West Coast literary magazines could be brutal in his assessment of Howells and James, mocking them for their views on Realism, a mode which he considered too tame to tackle the breadth and depth of human experience. Not surprisingly, it is difficult to categorize Bierce’s work, particularly his war stories. His fiction is aligned, at least in principle, with Realist features such as the depiction of life-like characters and authentic details of setting. However, in Bierce’s war stories, the landscape often transforms beyond the objectively realistic, as Bierce probes the subjective reality of those who experience the nightmarish events most traumatically; the result is that the story moves into the realm of the fantastic or the grotesque, particularly in two of his most famous war stories, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga,” where Bierce lays bare the human cost of war. In “Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga,” the central civilian characters, a Southern planter and a young Southern boy, respectively, both seem to believe that they can participate in or “play” at war and remain unscathed. Whether as a result of impaired senses, naïvete, inexperience, or cultural conditioning, the characters are unable to read accurately the horror of war or to comprehend their own personal peril in “playing” war until, that is, the horror of the moment is brought home to them: facing their own imminent death or the brutal death of a loved one.

I A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as “support,” that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the centre of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it. Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground a gentle acclivity topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loop-holed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Mid-way of the slope between bridge and fort were the spectators a single company of infantry in line, at “parade rest,” the butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group of four at the centre of the bridge, not a man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference. The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock-coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded. The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgment as simple and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his “unsteadfast footing,” then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream! He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and he knew not why apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch. He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. “If I could free my hands,” he thought, “I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader’s farthest advance.” As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man’s brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside. II Peyton Farquhar was a well-to-do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with the gallant army that had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in war time. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to perform in aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war. One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water. Mrs. Farquhar was only too happy to serve him with her own white hands. While she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired eagerly for news from the front. “The Yanks are repairing the railroads,” said the man, “and are getting ready for another advance. They have reached the Owl Creek bridge, put it in order and built a stockade on the north bank. The commandant has issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order.” “How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?” Farquhar asked. “About thirty miles.” “Is there no force on this side the creek?” “Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of the bridge.” “Suppose a man a civilian and student of hanging should elude the picket post and perhaps get the better of the sentinel,” said Farquhar, smiling, “what could he accomplish?” The soldier reflected. “I was there a month ago,” he replied. “I observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier at this end of the bridge. It is now dry and would burn like tow.” The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he repassed the plantation, going northward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federal scout. III As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened ages later, it seemed to him by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fibre of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well-defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of fulness of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud plash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river! the idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was rising toward the surface knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable. “To be hanged and drowned,” he thought, “that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No; I will not be shot; that is not fair.” He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wrist apprised him that he was trying to free his hands. He gave the struggle his attention, as an idler might observe the feat of a juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort! what magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor! Bravo! The cord fell away; his arms parted and floated upward, the hands dimly seen on each side in the growing light. He watched them with a new interest as first one and then the other pounced upon the noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside, its undulations resembling those of a water-snake. “Put it back, put it back!” He thought he shouted these words to his hands, for the undoing of the noose had been succeeded by the direst pang that he had yet experienced. His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire; his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to force itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish! But his disobedient hands gave no heed to the command. They beat the water vigorously with quick, downward strokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek! He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant- bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon-flies’ wings, the strokes of the water-spiders’ legs, like oars which had lifted their boat all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water. He had come to the surface facing down the stream; in a moment the visible world seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point, and he saw the bridge, the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain, the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They were in silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated, pointing at him. The captain had drawn his pistol, but did not fire; the others were unarmed. Their movements were grotesque and horrible, their forms gigantic. Suddenly he heard a sharp report and something struck the water smartly within a few inches of his head, spattering his face with spray. He heard a second report, and saw one of the sentinels with his rifle at his shoulder, a light cloud of blue smoke rising from the muzzle. The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a gray eye and remembered having read that gray eyes were keenest, and that all famous markmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed. A counter-swirl had caught Farquhar and turned him half round; he was again looking into the forest on the bank opposite the fort. The sound of a clear, high voice in a monotonous singsong now rang out behind him and came across the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears. Although no soldier, he had frequented camps enough to know the dread significance of that deliberate, drawling, aspirated chant; the lieutenant on shore was taking a part in the morning’s work. How coldly and pitilessly with what an even, calm intonation, presaging, and enforcing tranquillity in the men with what accurately measured intervals fell those cruel words: “Attention, company! . . . Shoulder arms! . . . Ready! . . . Aim! . . . Fire!” Farquhar dived dived as deeply as he could. The water roared in his ears like the voice of Niagara, yet he heard the dulled thunder of the volley and, rising again toward the surface, met shining bits of metal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some of them touched him on the face and hands, then fell away, continuing their descent. One lodged between his collar and neck; it was uncomfortably warm and he snatched it out. As he rose to the surface, gasping for breath, he saw that he had been a long time under water; he was perceptibly farther down stream nearer to safety. The soldiers had almost finished reloading; the metal ramrods flashed all at once in the sunshine as they were drawn from the barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into their sockets. The two sentinels fired again, independently and ineffectually. The hunted man saw all this over his shoulder; he was now swimming vigorously with the current. His brain was as energetic as his arms and legs; he thought with the rapidity of lightning. “The officer,” he reasoned, “will not make that martinet’s error a second time. It is as easy to dodge a volley as a single shot. He has probably already given the command to fire at will. God help me, I cannot dodge them all!” An appalling plash within two yards of him was followed by a loud, rushing sound, diminuendo, which seemed to travel back through the air to the fort and died in an explosion which stirred the very river to its deeps! A rising sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon him, blinded him, strangled him! The cannon had taken a hand in the game. As he shook his head free from the commotion of the smitten water he heard the deflected shot humming through the air ahead, and in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond. “They will not do that again,” he thought; “the next time they will use a charge of grape. I must keep my eye upon the gun; the smoke will apprise me the report arrives too late; it lags behind the missile. That is a good gun.” Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round spinning like a top. The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men all were commingled and blurred. Objects were represented by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color that was all he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In a few moments he was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of the stream the southern bank and behind a projecting point which concealed him from his enemies. The sudden arrest of his motion, the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms. A strange, roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of æolian harps. He had no wish to perfect his escape was content to remain in that enchanting spot until retaken. A whiz and rattle of grapeshot among the branches high above his head roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him a random farewell. He sprang to his feet, rushed up the sloping bank, and plunged into the forest. All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman’s road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation. By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famishing. The thought of his wife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led him in what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Over-head, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great golden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which once, twice, and again he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue. His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it he found it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting it forward from between his teeth into the cold air. How softly the turf had carpeted the untraveled avenue he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet! Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forward with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon then all is darkness and silence! Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

James – Reading and Review Questions: What features of Realism do you see in Daisy Miller? How does James use point of view in the novella? For example, who is the narrator in the story? What effect does the narrative voice have in conveying the story as gossip? Is Daisy Miller truly an innocent? Is she a victim of a cynical, hypocritical culture? Or does she bring about her own fate? How is Winterbourne, also an American abroad, different from Daisy? Through what lens does he view Daisy? Why does Winterbourne obsess over whether Daisy is “innocent” or not? What is Winterbourne seeking in Daisy? What does the expression “Roman fever” mean in the context of the story? While the expression refers literally to malaria, what other figurative associations might the expression convey?