-
Introduction
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction Julian Hawthorne would have been a public intellectual had he been an intellectual. Nevertheless, he led, if not a charmed life, a privileged and eventful one.“No other person still alive,” he wrote in his Memoirs,“could duplicate my story.”1 The only son and second of three children of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, he outlived his famous father by seventy years. He was born during the Mexican War in the same month Nathaniel published Mosses from an Old Manse, and he died eighty-seven years later at the nadir of the Great Depression, soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. While still in short pants, he was acquainted with such Concord, Massachusetts, neighbors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, as well as Herman Melville, his uncle Horace Mann, his aunt Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Franklin Pierce, his father’s college classmate and fourteenth president of the United States.“My father was one of the elect,” he allowed, “and caused me to become a sort of household intimate of those friends of his.”2 In 1871, at the age of twenty-four, he began to write for a living. Over the next sixty-three years he was one of the most prolific—or profligate— authors in the history of American letters and a barometer of change in the literary climate. Never a literary lion, he traded on his name, though he sometimes considered it less a blessing than a curse. On the one hand, he banked on its marquee value. “The name has been a great help to me,” he admitted. “It proves an open sesame nearly everywhere I go.”3 On the other hand, he complained that his father was his worst enemy. “It would not be so bad if I had chosen a different calling, but whatever I write must always be compared to what he wrote.”4 Still, he published almost nothing during his career without signature. In 1882 the literary historian John Nichol compared him favorably to Wilkie Collins; in 1884 he was ranked twenty-sixth among the “forty immortal” American writers listed by the x introduction New York Critic, along with Henry James, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and his father; and the next year the Critic pronounced him “the first of living romancers.”5 The cachet of his surname launched magazines much as the face of Helen of Troy launched ships. He was a founding contributor to half a dozen parlor magazines, including Cosmopolitan in 1886, Collier’s Once a Week (later Collier’s Weekly) in 1888, and the Smart Set in 1900. However, his nineteen novels, three dozen poems, and 150 tales and novellas comprise only a small fraction of his oeuvre. In all, he published several million words and more than 3,000 items, on average nearly one a week for nearly six decades, 90 percent of them hitherto unknown to scholarship.6 As he wrote shortly before his death,“What with fiction, biography, history, journalism, and poetry, I suppose that what I have put on paper during the last sixty-odd years might fill at least one hundred bound volumes.”7 He out-published his father by a ratio of more than twenty to one. A journeyman of letters, Julian was adept in a variety of genres: he was the author of true crime, mystery, and detective potboilers; of children’s stories and bodice rippers; of gothic and fantasy novels; of westerns and science fiction; of textbooks; and of travel, feature, and nature essays. He was also an advice and self-help columnist; a war and foreign correspondent ; a sports and political reporter; a literary and theater critic; a poet and playwright; an editor and historian; and a biographer and autobiographer. He was so versatile that in the single October 1900 issue of the Philadelphia North American three separate articles appeared under his byline: an interview with William Jennings Bryan, a review of Langdon Mitchell’s play The Adventures of Francois, and a column of book notices that included a puff of Lafcadio Hearn’s Shadowings. One of the first celebrity journalists, he interviewed such figures as the scientist Thomas Edison, the novelists Henry James and Jack London, and the jurist Louis Brandeis. A sports aficionado, he covered heavyweight title fights, Ivy League football, and major league baseball, and he even edited the sports pages of the New York American. In addition, he was the model for such characters as the child Peony in...