Ella Rhoads Higginson

Ella Rhoads Higginson (b. 1862?–d. 1940) was born in Council Grove, Kansas, a launching point for westward movement of settler colonialists. When she was a child, her family moved to Oregon, traveling in a wagon train following the old Oregon Trail. The family eventually settled in Oregon City, where she was educated in private school. Ella’s strong interests in reading and writing began early. Her parents possessed a substantial library that included books by Irving, Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Tennyson. Ella began writing when she was eight. Her first publication, the poem “Dreams of the Past,” appeared in The Oregon City newspaper when she was fourteen. The following year she began work on The Oregon City Enterprise newspaper, learning typesetting and editorial writing. She also started publishing fiction. In 1885, she married Russell Carden Higginson, a businessman who was a cousin to New England author Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The couple moved north to Whatcom (later Bellingham), Washington, where Higginson lived for fifty-two years until her death. There she devoted herself to writing. She soon became the first influential Pacific Northwest author. People around the world were introduced to the region when they read Higginson’s award-winning writing. Her descriptions of majestic mountains, vast forests, and the scenic waters of the Puget Sound presented the then-remote, unfamiliar Pacific Northwest to eager readers. Her characterizations of white women and men who inhabited the region revealed what life was like in this part of the nation as opposed to regions such as New England. Higginson’s celebrated writings were the first to place the Pacific Northwest on the literary map. Her talent was widely recognized. The prestigious Macmillan Company, which became her publisher, approached her seeking to print her work. She was awarded prizes from magazines such as Collier’s and McClure’s. Her poems were set to music and performed internationally. She published over eight hundred works in her lifetime. However, World War I altered the means of production, resulting in books going out of print and diminishing reputations of well-known authors, especially writers of color and women. Most of Higginson’s books went out of print. After the war, new editors, mostly white men, managed US newspapers, periodicals, and publishing companies. Largely uninterested in prewar authors, they sought writing from nascent literary movements such as Modernism while also promoting works by overlooked white male authors such as Melville. Higginson’s reputation faded in the last decades of her life. By the time she was chosen first Poet Laureate of Washington State in 1931, she and her work were largely remembered only in the Pacific Northwest. When she died in 1940, she was almost completely forgotten. In the 21st century, Higginson and her writings are returning to literary distinction.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (b. 1875–d. 1935) was born in New Orleans and raised there by her mother, Patricia Moore, a freedwoman of African American and Native American descent. She attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, earned a teaching degree at Straight (now Dillard) University, and taught in New Orleans’s black schools from 1892 to 1896. During those same years Dunbar-Nelson (then Alice Ruth Moore) became active in the black women’s club movement, both locally and nationally, and began publishing in black periodicals. At twenty she published her first book, Violets and Other Tales (1895), a collection of stories, sketches, poems, and essays that brought her local celebrity. Leaving the city in 1896, Dunbar-Nelson continued to dedicate herself to teaching, activism, and writing—three areas of passionate commitment that shaped the rest of her life. She taught in Boston, then in Brooklyn where she also helped the writer and reformer Victoria Earle Matthews found the White Rose Mission, a settlement house for black women, while finishing her short story collection The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899). In 1898 she married the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, then at the height of his success. Their union advanced Alice’s literary career: she published Goodness with his press, Dodd, Mead and Company, and enjoyed positive reviews. But his fame also overshadowed her accomplishments; after her death she was remembered primarily as his wife until scholars R. Ora Williams and Akasha Hull recovered her from obscurity. Paul and Alice separated in 1902, partly because of his abuse. Nevertheless, she kept his name and, following his 1906 death, promoted his legacy with projects like her anthology, The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (1920). For the next thirty years Dunbar-Nelson lived in Wilmington, Delaware, teaching for eighteen of them at Howard High School. During this period she was briefly married to another teacher, Arthur Callis, and romantically involved with Edwina Kruse, an educator about whom she wrote an unpublished novel titled The Lofty Oak. She worked as a paid and unpaid organizer, writer, and speaker for myriad causes, including suffrage, the war effort, the peace movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), anti-lynching legislation, education reform, and electoral politics. Although she never published another book of her own work, Dunbar-Nelson was a recognized Harlem Renaissance writer whose poems, stories, plays, essays, and reviews appeared in Crisis, Opportunity, The Messenger, and The Book of American Negro Poetry, and she wrote nationally syndicated newspaper columns. In 1932 Dunbar-Nelson moved with third husband Robert Nelson to Philadelphia, where she died of heart disease in 1935.

Zoe Anderson Norris

Zoe Anderson Norris (b. 29 February 1860–d. 13 February 1914) was a Kentucky-born journalist, fiction writer, and poet who was also known for documenting immigrant poverty in her bimonthly magazine, the East Side. Norris was the eleventh of thirteen children of Henry and Henrietta Anderson. Her father served as a pastor and teacher in Kentucky who translated the New Testament from ancient Greek texts. Norris attended Daughters College, a girls’ high school in Harrodsburg, her hometown, and spent time with family members homesteading in Kansas. She was married at age eighteen to Spencer Norris, who ran a grocery store in Wichita, and they had two children. By 1898, Norris had divorced her unfaithful husband and begun writing journalism pieces (including a newspaper gossip column) and short stories. Her fiction drew on autobiographical material: deceived wives, struggling writers, gossipy neighbors, inhospitable farmland. Around 1900, Norris and her daughter Clarence traveled in Europe and then settled on New York City’s Lower East Side. In 1902, Norris married an illustrator, Jack Bryans (they soon separated when he refused to live with Clarence, who by then had a toddler son). Norris published two novels and a short-story collection while freelancing for publications, including the New York Times. Her interviewees ranged from chorus girls and wharf workers to prominent sculptors. In 1909, Norris launched the East Side, “to fight for the poor with my pen.” In her essays and poems, she raged against injustice: deadbeat fathers abandoning starving families, trash-strewn streets spreading disease, factory laborers trudging through toxic runoff, children killed by careless chauffeurs. She also wrote paeans to the beauty of the New York skyline and to industrious new arrivals from Italy and Russia, immigrants who could be seen sharpening scissors or sorting rags and who were determined to prosper. At times she dressed as a beggar, reporting undercover as policemen harassed her and wealthy passersby looked away. Meanwhile, she organized weekly dinners for a club she founded, the Ragged Edge Klub, and she became known as the “Queen of Bohemia.” Readers and members of her Ragged Edge Klub included the philosopher Elbert Hubbard, the photographer Jessie Tarbox Beals, the filmmaker Wray Physioc, and the activist Helen Hamilton Gardener. In early 1914, the East Side published Norris’s description of a recent dream that she had in which her mother appeared at her bedside and warned her of imminent death. Days later, Norris died of heart failure. She is buried in Harrodsburg. After her accurate premonition made headlines nationwide, she was largely forgotten, although some 21st-century books mention her fearless curbside reports on immigrants’ lives.

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass (b. 1818–d. 1895), one of the most eminent African Americans of the 19th century, defies categorization. Possessing a ranging intellect, he first rose to prominence as the self-emancipated slave who forcefully indicted the institution as an orator, writer, and newspaper editor. Not content simply to bear witness about his first twenty years under slavery, he exposed national hypocrisy on race where it appeared in religion, science, segregation, voter disfranchisement, and freedom of association. Through the rhetoric of his autobiographies, editorials, and lectures, he advanced to the forefront of the multifaceted antislavery movement as it became a driving force behind national politics in the 1850s. The 1860s and 1870s saw him demanding emancipation, goading President Abraham Lincoln on the subject, but also fighting for black citizenship and universal suffrage. In the latter half of his life, he worked through the political system that he once opposed in order to secure equal protections and opportunities for African Americans, usually to frustrating ends. He continued to absorb and explore the boundaries of race, condemning cant, protesting injustice, and using his fame to amplify disfranchised voices. After his death, his widow, Helen, preserved his papers and home, now the Frederick Douglass Papers in the Library of Congress and the Frederick Douglass National Historic Park, which have allowed his legacy to rise above those of his contemporaries. Douglass’s interests concentrated on questions of identity, justice, race, and national belonging that were both universal and specific to the 19th-century United States. Study of his work and life straddles multiple disciplines. Initially, he was remembered for his oratory while his autobiographies served as historical texts describing slavery and outlining his life. Toward the end of the 20th century, the expanding availability of documents at the Library of Congress and the University of Rochester, the publication of Philip Foner’s The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, John Blassingame’s Frederick Douglass Papers Project, and new methods of historical and literary study opened new avenues into his world. Scholars working in one field borrow from others, but distinctions still exist in which historians use multiple types of documents to understand Douglass in his time, literary scholars analyze his texts, and political scientists examine his work among American political traditions. All reveal many facets of a man of infinite curiosity and continuing relevance.

Nineteenth-Century American Magazines

Studying the literature, history, or culture of 19th-century America often requires one to read magazines from the time period. Even more so than today, 19th-century magazines were a place for readers of all kinds across the growing nation to consume news, literature, entertainment, advice, illustrations, and more. Therefore, they provide a valuable record of what the 19th century was like for various segments of society and make for a compelling topic of research in their own right. As printing machinery, distribution networks, and business practices advanced, magazines evolved from short-lived, largely local affairs in the 1830s to long-lasting, wide-reaching publications in the 1880s. Magazines grew in their reach, influence, and sometimes page count; improved in quality of contributor content, presentation, and illustrations; and became more numerous, stable, and enduring. Despite all the changes magazines underwent during the 19th century, one characteristic remained consistent: they were essential forums for 19th-century print culture. For the purposes of this bibliography, we rely on the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “magazine”: the term has been used since at least the early 18th century to describe “a periodical publication containing articles by various writers”—particularly ones that are prepared for a readership with a specialized interest. This definition is broad enough to capture other serialized print publications, and we embrace the inclusive interpretation. The line dividing newspapers from magazines is especially unclear because these media have elastic boundaries; the line has become even more muddied within modern magazine scholarship because studies treating marginalized groups often rely heavily on newspapers. Therefore, we have chosen to be expansive in our treatment of magazines, meaning our sources occasionally consider other serial forms of print because they were an integral part of the wider print landscape of the 19th century. We often use the term “periodical” to include these serialized publications that weren’t strictly magazines. In this bibliography, some studies make heavy use of newspapers oriented toward readers with specific cultural, racial, or ethnic identities. Similarly, scholarship about books is not the focus of this bibliography; however, magazines were often printed in the same shops as books by the same publishers and were distributed along the same routes. Therefore, information about the larger book market and distribution is frequently essential to the works included here. Finally, studying magazines usually requires a multidisciplinary approach that draws on the established fields of literature, history, book history, and cultural studies. It also can require several methodological lenses, including close reading of texts; consideration of historical contexts; biographies of writers and publishers; sensitivity to class, gender, and race; concern for material and economic constraints in production; an eye for audience; thought about distribution; and attention to both niche and mass cultures. This bibliography attempts to wrangle sources from disparate fields and approaches to provide a starting place for those curious about the many facets of 19th-century American magazines.

T. S. Eliot

Poet, dramatist, and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot (b. 1888–d. 1965) won fame for such poems as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and “The Hollow Men” (1925), which ushered in and helped define the modernist era of literature. His critical writings also shaped literary taste and study in the 20th century. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, by a Unitarian family with deep roots in American history, he was educated at Harvard and wrote his first significant poems during his year abroad in Paris, 1910–1911. After completing most of the work for a PhD in philosophy, he found himself abroad again during the outbreak of World War I, and he decided to marry an Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and put down roots in London. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), surprised readers with its modern vocabulary, free-verse rhythms, and compelling dramatic voices. While working as a teacher and then a banker, Eliot established himself as an authoritative new voice in literary criticism with essays including “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), “Hamlet” (1919), and “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). He introduced terms that shaped literary study throughout the 20th century: “impersonality,” “the objective correlative,” and “dissociation of sensibility.” In 1920 he collected his early essays in The Sacred Wood and published another volume of poems, including “Gerontion.” His personal life was not happy; he regretted having married a woman he did not love instead of the American girl he left behind in Massachusetts, Emily Hale (during his lifetime he wrote over one thousand letters to her). Considered his greatest work and probably the most significant poem of the 20th century, The Waste Land (1922) expresses his personal emotional conflict in terms of the larger historical currents of the immediate postwar period: the aftershocks of war, a crisis of faith, changing gender roles, urbanization, and a sense of deracination from the past. Erudite, multilingual, and difficult to read, but also highly charged with feeling, this poem captured the spirit of the interwar era, received more sustained attention than any other literary work in the 20th century, and is known and quoted across the globe. Eliot further distinguished himself by converting to the Anglican church in 1927 and becoming its leading poet and dramatist with his conversion poem Ash-Wednesday (1930), the play Murder in the Cathedral (first performed 1935), and the long lyric sequence Four Quartets (1936–1941). He also became a British citizen, so he can be considered both an American and an English writer. In the 1930s and 1940s he turned more toward drama and engaged with cultural and social debates in his criticism from a Christian perspective. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948.

Washington Irving

Washington Irving (b. 1783–d. 1859) had a long and diverse career as an author and public figure. Irving first published satirical essays (as “Jonathan Oldstyle”) for his brother Peter’s newspaper in 1802–1803. He collaborated with his brother William and James Kirke Paulding on the 1807–1808 satirical periodical Salmagundi, which was wildly popular in New York. A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809), narrated by the fictitious xenophobic historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, was at once an accurate history of New Amsterdam, a satire on Thomas Jefferson’s administration, and a meditation on the writing of history. Irving moved to Europe in 1815 as an agent for his brothers’ business, but after the business went bankrupt in 1818, Irving set about making a living through his writing. The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820) was published nearly simultaneously in installments in the United States and the United Kingdom to secure copyright in both; it was an immediate success and was lauded on both sides of the Atlantic. His attempts to follow up this initial success with similar collections of tales and sketches (Bracebridge Hall [1822] and Tales of a Traveller [1824]) met with considerably less commercial and critical success. Invited to Spain in 1824 to translate newly available documents from Columbus’ expeditions, Irving instead produced The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), which became the standard English-language account of Columbus and went through 175 editions in the United States and Europe. Irving’s subsequent travels in southern Spain produced A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) and the immensely popular “Spanish Sketch-Book,” The Alhambra (1832). During this period Irving also produced a biography of the Prophet Muhammad, which was eventually published in 1849 as Mahomet and His Successors. Irving finally returned to the United States in 1832, almost immediately participating in an expedition preparing for Indian removal, which was recounted in A Tour on the Prairies (1835). John Jacob Astor then commissioned him to write Astoria (1836), a history of the fur-trading colony, while he also collected materials for another Western narrative, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837). Apart from a period as American Minister to Spain (1842–1846), during which he mediated on behalf of Isabella II during the Carlist Wars, Irving spent much of the rest of his life building his Hudson Valley home called Sunnyside. His final work was the monumental five-volume Life of George Washington (1855–1859). Not only was Irving the first American writer to achieve international celebrity, but he served as a US ambassador; revived tourist interest in Andalusia; shaped the profession of authorship in America and Europe; produced the first comprehensive histories of New Amsterdam/New York, Columbus, and the founder of Islam in English; and wrote the first and perhaps best-known American short stories.

Saul Bellow

Over a career of six decades, Saul Bellow (1915–2005) published novels, short stories, essays, and plays that attracted immense attention from the public and the literary establishment. The value of his creative work was recognized with numerous awards, including three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The fourth child of Jewish parents who immigrated from Russia, Bellow spent the first years of his life in Lachine, Canada, before he and his family moved in 1924 to Chicago. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1937, he spent a semester at the University of Wisconsin studying anthropology but quit his graduate study to become a writer. In 1938 Bellow married the first of his five wives. In 1944 he published his first novel, Dangling Man, a novel of existential alienation. Three years later he published The Victim, a novel about anti-Semitism, but it was his next novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), that catapulted Bellow from relative obscurity to being regarded as one of the most important living American writers. This long picaresque novel was narrated by its larky eponymous hero in a vivid, colloquial style. Herzog (1964) secured his reputation as one of America’s foremost writers. With its complex style that captures the interior life, the novel was a surprising bestseller. The publication of Humboldt’s Gift (1975) was probably instrumental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize the following year. In this complicated novel with its inextricable blending of high and low culture and many flashbacks, the narrator ruminates on widely divergent subjects and describes his comic involvement with a variety of colorful people, especially the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, modeled on Delmore Schwartz, and the gangster Rinaldo Cantabile. Bellow continued to publish for the next twenty-five years, but like John Updike and some other white male writers of his generation, Bellow’s reputation was hurt to some extent by critics upset by his white masculine-centered orientation. His popularity with the public and with critics is less than it was at the high point of his career in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, but he is still regarded as one of the major 20th-century American writers. His fiction is known for its unique narrative voice, its ability to portray the intricacies of human consciousness, its metaphysical speculation, and its comedy.

Time Travel

Time travel is of interest in several academic research fields that overlap and communicate with one another to varying degrees. Primarily, of course, time travel comprises a literary subgenre of science fiction literature and popular film. As a motif or plot type, it is also a frequent element in romance fiction, nongeneric speculative literature, postmodern literature, and experimental cinema. As such, time travel is potentially a focus for practitioners in many branches of criticism and theory, including genre studies, cultural studies, critical theory, film theory, psychoanalytic criticism, and, especially, narrative theory and narratology. Nevertheless, literary and cultural theory on the topic of time travel has been surprisingly sparse, and only a handful of dedicated studies are available at either book or article length. By contrast, in research areas outside literature and popular culture, time travel has received something closer to its due. In analytic philosophy, time travel is a familiar topic of inquiry or debate, usually serving as a thought experiment for logicians and philosophers of language or history, and as a test case for constructing meaningful or consistent claims about objects and events (See the Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy article “Time Travel”). For physicists, time travel has played a similar role as a test for postulates of relativity and quantum mechanics, but it has also sporadically arisen as a real physical possibility within current theory, albeit a possibility that might require as-yet undiscovered theories or exotic materials. In particular, recent multiverse cosmologies and quantum computing models sometimes include time travel or multiple worlds as essential components or entailments. Finally, in historiographical theory, counterfactuals and possible-worlds models have been productive tools for theorizing historical events, creating a potentially rich area of overlap with literary and narrative theory.

Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers

Though political scientists and historians of the 19th-century United States have always turned to newspapers as an important source, there has in recent years been a growing interest in newspapers as a distinct object of study among historians, communications scholars, and literary critics. Newspapers were not only publishers and promoters of important literature but also central to the culture of literary production and consumption. All the scholarship, by various disciplines, produced on newspapers is relevant to the ongoing project to historicize, interpret, contextualize, and theorize 19th-century American literature in all its varied relations to its readership and to the nation generally. Though circulation grew rapidly over the century, the reach of newspapers was not limited to official subscription lists or, later, to street sales. As both scholars and contemporary observers have noted, various mechanisms—formal exchanges between newspapers hundreds of miles apart, reading rooms, coffee houses, and the general cultural practice of reusing and sharing newspapers—meant that the readership for newspapers extended beyond their paying subscribers throughout the century, but especially in the antebellum years. Although in some senses newspapers may in the 19th century have ceded to magazines their 18th-century function of presenting a miscellany of material, for all practical purposes throughout the 19th century many newspapers, most often only four pages long, continued to play that role—they included poems, reviews, serialized novels, orations and lectures, cultural laments, letters from abroad, and reports on scientific discoveries along with the more expected news, random reflections or anecdotes, and editorial opinion. Through most of the century, however, the majority of newspapers devoted at least a quarter of their space to advertising. In the first third of the 19th century, party organs and commercial papers for the mercantile class grew to the point where they came to be seen as representing the two primary functions of the American newspaper. From the 1830s to the Civil War, various developments, including the penny press, the reform press, the religious press, and the African-American press, changed the character of newspapers, even though their party functions remained uppermost. After the war, urban newspapers gradually grew in length and in the range of their coverage. Commercialization and the first steps toward professionalization began to change the mission of journalism, so that by the 1890s many urban papers more closely resembled newspapers of the next fifty years than they did newspapers of the previous generation.