by Anne Fadiman
Ronholt, Sharon Uemura. Letter. New York Times Book Review, January 19, 1997.
Smiley, Jane. “Say It Ain’t So, Huck.” Harper’s Magazine, January 1996.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Weiss, Philip. “Herman-Neutics.” New York Times Magazine, December 15, 1996.
ON PROCRUSTES AND THESEUS
Apollodorus, The Library, vol. 2, trans. James George Frazer. Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1970.
Diodorus Siculus. Bibliotheca Historica. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1985–1991. Unpublished translation of Book 4, 59.2 by Adam Goodheart.
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths: Complete Edition. London: Penguin, 1992.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York: Mentor, 1962.
Hyginus. The Myths of Hyginus, trans. Mary Grant. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960.
Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. New York: Prometheus, 1959.
Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Plutarch. Lives: Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, Solon and Publicola, trans. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1993.
ON JAMES STOCKDALE AND EPICTETUS
Admiral Stockdale: The Official Site for Admiral James B. Stockdale, www.admiralstockdale.us.
Epictetus. The Enchiridion, trans. Elizabeth Carter. The Internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html.
Stockdale, James B. Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1993.
———. Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1995.
———. A Vietnam Experience: Ten Years of Reflection. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1984.
ON RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Chapman, John Jay. “Emerson, Sixty Years After.” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1897.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” In Selected Essays. New York: Penguin, 1985.
McAleer, John. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.
Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
ON THE QUARREL OF THE ANCIENTS AND THE MODERNS
Nelson, Robert J. “The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.” In A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Swift, Jonathan. “The Battle of the Books.” In A Tale of a Tub and Other Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
COLERIDGE THE RUNAWAY
This essay describes my journey through Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, and most of it is therefore drawn from those two magical volumes. I also admire Walter Jackson Bate’s brief but perceptive biography. Leigh Hunt’s autobiography, also mentioned in the sources for the Charles Lamb essay, includes a memorable portrait of Coleridge. The online Samuel Taylor Coleridge Archive contains many useful links.
Bate, Walter Jackson. Coleridge. New York: Macmillan, 1968.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
———. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 5: 1820–1825, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
———. Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, ed. Donald A. Stauffer. New York: Modern Library, 1951.
Forster, E. M. “Trooper Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke.” In Abinger Harvest. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1964.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834. New York: Pantheon, 1999.
———. Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804. New York: Viking, 1990.
Hunt, Leigh. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J. E. Morpurgo. London: Cresset, 1949.
Johnson, Edith Christina. “Lamb and Coleridge.” The American Scholar 6:2 (Spring 1937).
Perkins, David, ed. English Romantic Writers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967.
Saintsbury, George. “Lesser Poets, 1790–1837: Hartley Coleridge.” Cambridge History of English and American Literature, vol. 12. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–1921.
Tiefert, Marjorie A. The Samuel Taylor Coleridge Archive, etext .virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/stc.html.
Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. London: Penguin, 1999.
MAIL
I relied extensively on Christopher Browne’s lively history of British mail and Bernhard Siegert’s imaginative study of the connections between the postal system and literature.
The last name of Jean-Jacques Renouard de Villayer, the man who invented the paper wrapper that some historians view as a proto-stamp, is sometimes spelled “Vélayer.” I opted for “Villayer” because it’s the spelling used by most philatelic scholars as well as on a 1944 French commemorative stamp.
ON POSTAL AND EPISTOLARY HISTORY
Barker, G. E. “The ‘Billets de Port Payé’ of 1653.” Journal of the France and Colonies Philatelic Society 35:2 (June 1985).
Browne, Christopher. Getting the Message: The Story of the British Post Office. Phoenix Mill, U.K.: Alan Sutton, 1993.
Bruns, James H. Mail on the Move. Polo, Ill.: Transportation Trails, 1992.
Carroll, Andrew, ed. Letters of a Nation. New York: Broadway, 1999.
Pryor, Felix, ed. The Faber Book of Letters: Letters Written in the English Language, 1578–1939. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
Siegert, Bernhard. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Wood, Kenneth A. Post Dates: A Chronology of Intriguing Events in the Mails and Philately. Albany, Oreg.: Van Dahl, 1985.
ON E-MAIL
Ardell, Donald B. The Smileys and Acronyms Dictionary, www.seek wellness.com/wellness/smiley_file.htm.
Flynn, Nancy, and Tom Flynn. Writing Effective E-Mail. Menlo Park: Crisp, 1998.
Gil, Paul. Glossary of Internet Abbreviations: Email and Chat Shorthand!netforbeginners.about.com/cs/netiquette101/a/abbreviations.htm.
Gopnik, Adam. “The Return of the Word.” The New Yorker, December 6, 1999.
“Netiquette 101 for New Netizens,” www.microsoft.com/southafrica/ athome/security/online/netiquette.mspx.
The Unofficial Smiley Dictionary. In EFF’s (Extended) Guide to the Internet, www.eff.org/Net_culture/Net_info/EFF_Net_Guide/EEGTTI _HTML/eeg_286.html.
MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES
Barnett, George L. Charles Lamb. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976.
Crane, Hart. “My Grandmother’s Love Letters.” In The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1966.
Fadiman, Clifton. “Life’s Minor Pleasures.” In Any Number Can Play. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1957.
Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971.
Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady. London: Penguin Classics, 1986.
Sutherland, James, ed. The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes. New York: Touchstone, 1977.
Zaslaw, Neal, and William Cowdery, eds. The Compleat Mozart: A Guide to the Musical Works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
MOVING
Persuasion is the wittiest novel about moving I know, but A Little Princess remains the most poignant—as tear-inducing today as it was when I first read it at age seven—because of the unexpected changes it rings on the theme of attempting to make a home for oneself in an alien place.
Though family lore and some scholars hold that James Montgomery Whitmore was killed by Paiute Indians (an account supported by the fact that five Paiutes were captured with money and articles that had belonged to Whitmore and his companion), several sources suggest that Navajos may have been responsible.
ON MOVING
Brown, Patricia Leigh. “Fo
r Sale: Everything but the Props.” New York Times, February 10, 2000.
Jasper, James M. Restless Nation: Starting Over in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
“Setting the Stage.” Rock Talk: The Magazine for Prudential Real Estate Professionals, Spring 1998.
ON MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHERS
JAMES MONTGOMERY WHITMORE AND JOHN SHARP
Carter, Kate B., ed. Our Pioneer Heritage, vols. 1 and 9. Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1958.
Esshom, Frank. Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah. Salt Lake City: Utah Pioneers, 1913.
Jenson, Andrew. Latter-Day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, vol. 1. Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History, 1901.
Lavender, David. The History of Arizona’s Pipe Spring National Monument. Salt Lake City: Paragon, 1997.
Martin, Ruth J., ed. Twentieth Ward History, 1856–1979. Salt Lake City: Twentieth Ward History Committee, 1979.
“Public Workers: John Sharp.” The Improvement Era, February 1904.
Raynor, W. A. The Everlasting Spires: A Story of the Salt Lake Temple. Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1965.
Warrum, Noble, ed. Utah Since Statehood: Historical and Biographical, vol. 4. Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1919.
NOVELS
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. New York: Bantam, 1989.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932.
———. The Secret Garden. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962.
Dickens, Charles. Martin Chuzzlewit. London: Penguin, 1986.
Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street. New York: Signet Classics, 1998.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. The Little House series. New York: HarperTrophy, 1971.
A PIECE OF COTTON
The most helpful historical sources were Robert Justin Goldstein’s richly annotated collection of primary documents on flag desecration and Scot M. Guenter’s thought-provoking study of how the flag’s meaning has changed over time.
ON THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FLAG
Goldstein, Robert Justin, ed. Desecrating the American Flag: Key Documents of the Controversy from the Civil War to 1995. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Guenter, Scot M. The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990.
Hinrichs, Kit, and Delphine Hirasuna. Long May She Wave: A Graphic History of the American Flag. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2001.
Keenan, Marney Rich. “Stars & Stripes: Chicago Exhibit Attracts Unflagging Criticism.” Detroit News, March 19, 1989.
Loeffelbein, Robert L. The United States Flagbook: Everything about Old Glory. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 1996.
Sedeen, Margaret. Star-Spangled Banner: Our Nation and Its Flag. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1993.
West, Delno C., and Jean M. West. Uncle Sam and Old Glory: Symbols of America. New York: Atheneum, 2000.
ON THE FLAG AFTER 9/11
Dewan, Shaila K. “The Tattooed Badge of Courage.” New York Times, September 30, 2001.
Grimes, William. “On Menus Everywhere, a Big Slice of Patriotism.” New York Times, October 24, 2001.
Haberman, Clyde. “60’s Lessons on How Not to Wave Flag.” New York Times, September 19, 2001.
Marling, Karal Ann. “The Stars and Stripes, American Chameleon.” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 26, 2001.
Packer, George. “Recapturing the Flag.” New York Times Magazine, September 30, 2001.
Pollitt, Katha. “Put Out No Flags.” The Nation, October 8, 2001.
“Torn U.S. Flag from Trade Center Rubble Has New Life.” Reuters, November 1, 2001.
Welch, Liz. “Stamp Act.” New York Times Magazine, October 21, 2001.
THE ARCTIC HEDONIST
The biographies of Stefansson by Richard Diubaldo and William R. Hunt are the most complete and least biased. D. M. LeBourdais, a longtime Stefansson colleague, and Erick Berry, a writer for young adults, place Stefansson on a pedestal; Jennifer Niven knocks him off. Despite its one-sidedness, Niven’s book, from which I drew many particulars, provides the most detailed account of the Karluk disaster. The understandably angry memoir by McKinlay, a Karluk survivor, is also worth reading. In The Friendly Arctic, Stefansson gives his own fascinating, if self-serving, account of the ill-starred Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–1918 (his third arctic foray), of which the Karluk expedition was only one branch. In addition to the eleven Karluk men who died, five men in the expedition’s southern party were lost, two of them while attempting to rescue Stefansson, who had failed to return to Banks Island on schedule. (In fact, he was happily mapping and exploring the area and was in no need of rescue.)
BY VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
Stefansson, Vilhjalmur. Arctic Manual. New York: Macmillan, 1944.
———. Discovery: The Autobiography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
———. The Friendly Arctic. New York: Macmillan, 1922.
———. My Life with the Eskimo. New York: Collier, 1962.
———. The Northward Course of Empire. New York: Macmillan, 1924.
———. Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic. New York: Macmillan, 1938.
———. Writing on Ice: The Ethnographic Notebooks of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, ed. Gísli Pálsson. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001.
———, ed. Great Adventures and Explorations. New York: Dial, 1947.
ON VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON
Berry, Erick. Mr. Arctic. New York: David McKay, 1966.
Diubaldo, Richard. Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978.
Hunt, William R. Stef: A Biography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986.
LeBourdais, D. M. Stefansson, Ambassador of the North. Montreal: Harvest House, 1963.
McKinlay, William Laird. The Last Voyage of the Karluk. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1976.
Niven, Jennifer. The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk. New York: Hyperion, 2000.
ON THE HISTORY OF ARCTIC EXPLORATION
Berton, Pierre. The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909. New York: Penguin, 1989.
Holland, Clive, ed. Farthest North. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999.
Imbert, Bertrand. North Pole, South Pole. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992.
Mirsky, Jeannette. To the Arctic! The Story of Northern Exploration from Earliest Times to the Present. Intro. Vilhjalmur Stefansson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.
MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES
Fadiman, Clifton. “I Shook Hands with Shakespeare.” In Any Number Can Play. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1957.
Hahn, J. G. von. “How the Dragon Was Tricked.” In The Pink Fairy Book, ed. Andrew Lang. New York: Dover, 1967.
Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
COFFEE
The classic history is by Heinrich Eduard Jacob, who also happens to be an enormously enjoyable literary stylist. I drew much excellent material from Mark Pendergrast, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer (to whom I owe the London–New York coffeehouse extrapolation). By far the most entertaining author on my coffee shelf is Stewart Lee Allen; he is best appreciated in a highly caffeinated state.
Much good writing has been done on (and in) coffeehouses. My favorite sources are Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous passage on coffeehouses as a political institution in late-seventeenth-century London and Harold V. Routh’s seminal studies on the influence of coffeehouse conversation on English literature.
In case any readers have wondered how I could possibly remember what I ate for lunch more than three decades ago, my source for the menu of La Pyramide, Fernand Point’s legendary restaurant in Vienne, is a breathless si
x-page aerogramme I sent my parents on July 21, 1969. I found it in their files after their deaths.
ON COFFEE IN GENERAL
Allen, Stewart Lee. The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History. New York: Soho, 1999.
Barefoot, Kevin, ed. Higher Grounds: The Little Book of Coffee Culture. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1995.
Dicum, Gregory, and Nina Luttinger. The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop. New York: New Press, 1999.
Jacob, Heinrich Eduard. The Epic of a Commodity, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul [1935]. Intro. Lynn Alley. Short Hills, N.J.: Burford, 1998.
Pendergrast, Mark. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. New York: Basic, 1999.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
Weinberg, Bennett Alan, and Bonnie K. Bealer. The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Yates, Jill. Coffee Lover’s Bible. Santa Fe: Clear Light, 1998.
ON THE HISTORY OF COFFEEHOUSES
“The Character of a Coffee-House” (1673) and “Coffee-Houses Vindicated” (1675). In Charles W. Colby, ed. Selections from the Sources of English History, B.C. 55–A.D. 1832. London: Longmans, Green, 1920.
Ellis, Markman. “An Introduction to the Coffee-House: A Discursive Model.” In Kahve-Society, A Coffee-House Conversation on the International Art World and Its Exclusions. E-book published in 2002 by Kahve-Society in collaboration with Autograph and the Institute of Digital Art Technology, www.kahve-house.com/society/programme.
Heise, Ulla. Coffee and Coffee-Houses, trans. Paul Roper. West Chester, Pa.: Schiffer, 1987.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “The State of England in 1685: The Coffee Houses.” In The History of England from the Accession of James II, vol. 1. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856.
Pelzer, John, and Linda Pelzer. “The Coffee Houses of Augustan London.” History Today, October 1982.
Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Routh, Harold V. “The Advent of Modern Thought in Popular Literature: Coffee-houses.” In Cambridge History of English and American Literature, vol. 7. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–1921.