Charles Dudley Warner
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"But should a work of art, above all of dramatic art, be set upon any pedestal at all?"--Library of the World's Best Literature (1897) edited by Charles Dudley Warner |
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Charles Dudley Warner (1829 – 1900) was an American writer and friend of Mark Twain, with whom he co-authored the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
He also edited a large Library of the World's Best Literature.
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Biography
Warner was born of Puritan descent in Plainfield, Massachusetts. From the ages of six to fourteen he lived in Charlemont, Massachusetts, the scene of the experiences pictured in his study of childhood, Being a Boy (1877). He then moved to Cazenovia, New York, and in 1851 graduated from Hamilton College, Clinton, NY.
He worked with a surveying party in Missouri; studied law at the University of Pennsylvania; practiced in Chicago (1856–1860); was assistant editor (1860) and editor (1861–1867) of The Hartford Press, and after The Press was merged into The Hartford Courant, was co-editor with Joseph R Hawley; in 1884 he joined the editorial staff of Harper's Magazine, for which he conducted The Editors Drawer until 1892, when he took charge of The Editor's Study. He died in Hartford on October 20, 1900, and was interred at Cedar Hill Cemetery, with Mark Twain as a pall bearer and Joseph Twichell officiating.
Warner travelled widely, lectured frequently, and was actively interested in prison reform, city park supervision, and other movements for the public good. He was the first president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and, at the time of his death, was president of the American Social Science Association. He first attracted attention by the reflective sketches entitled My Summer in a Garden (1870; first published in The Hartford Courant), popular for their abounding and refined humour and mellow personal charm, their wholesome love of outdoor things, their suggestive comment on life and affairs, and their delicately finished style, qualities that suggest the work of Washington Irving. Charles Dudley Warner is known for making the famous remark "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it". This was quoted by Mark Twain in a lecture, and is still commonly misattributed to Twain.
Selected list of works
- Saunterings (descriptions of travel in eastern Europe, 1872)
- BackLog Studies (1872)
- Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing (1874), travels in Nova Scotia and elsewhere
- My Winter on the Nile (1876)
- In the Levant (1876)
- In the Wilderness (1878)
- A Roundabout Journey, in Europe (1883)
- On Horseback, in the Southern States (1888)
- Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada (1889)
- Our Italy, southern California (1891)
- The Relation of Literature to Life (1896)
- The People for Whom Shakespeare Wrote (1897)
- Fashions in Literature (1902)
He also edited The American Men of Letters series, to which he contributed an excellent biography of Washington Irving (1881), and edited a large Library of the World's Best Literature.
Warner's other works include his essays:
- As We Were Saying (1891)
- As We Go (1893)
And novels:
- The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (in collaboration with Mark Twain, 1873)
- Their Pilgrimage (1886)
- A Little Journey in the World (1889)
- The Golden House (1894)
- That Fortune (1889).
Other publications
- Annie A. Fields, Charles Dudley Warner (Garden City, New York, 1904)
- passim, A. B. Paine, Mark Twain (three volumes, New York, 1912)
- Brander Matthews, Aspects of Fiction (new edition, New York, 1902)
- Nook Farm: Mark Twain's Hartford Circle, by Kenneth R. Andrews. 288 pgs. Harvard UP, 1950. Has a lot on Warner, including a complete bib of his works.
- Biographical Sketch of Warner by T. R. Lounsbury, in the 15th volume of the 15-volume Collected Writings of Warner; Hartford, Conn: American Publishing Co., 1904.
Pages linking in in 2024
Andrew Johnson's drunk vice-presidential inaugural address, Annie Adams Fields, Annie Eliot Trumbull, Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing, Caucus, Cedar Hill Cemetery (Hartford, Connecticut), Clifton Johnson bibliography, Critic, Culture of England, Dora Knowlton Ranous, Dora Wheeler Keith, Edmund H. Garrett, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, Elinor Mead Howells, England, Garden writing, George Escol Sellers, Gilded Age, Giordano Bruno, Grace King, Harper (publisher), Hartford Public Library, Helen Rex Keller, Henry Louis Stephens, History of Baddeck, History of the United States (1865–1917), Horse-Shoe Robinson, House at 36 Forest Street, Hristo Botev, Hugh Bolton Jones, In the Wilderness, Ivan Vazov, James Russell Lowell, James Whitcomb Riley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johan Cajan, Johann Jakob Bodmer, Johanna Ambrosius, John Hooker (abolitionist), John Smith (explorer), Joseph Berg Esenwein, Juliana Berners, Julie M. Lippmann, Juliusz Słowacki, Laura Fair, Life on the Lagoons, List of American novelists, Lucia Runkle, Mark Twain, Mark Twain bibliography, Martin Conway, 1st Baron Conway of Allington, Mary Mapes Dodge, Mary Tappan Wright, Neighborhoods of Hartford, Connecticut, Nook Farm (Connecticut), Octave Uzanne, Olana State Historic Site, Orestes Brownson, Orson Schofield Phelps, Patawomeck, Plainfield, Massachusetts, Pocahontas, Political fiction, Powhatan (Native American leader), Redtop (Belmont, Massachusetts), Rustication (academia), Samuel C. Pomeroy, Scandals of the Ulysses S. Grant administration, September 12, Simon C. Hitchcock, Telegraph House, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, The Story of a Bad Boy, Thomas Lounsbury, Ticknor and Fields, Tom Grogan, Virginia Dare, Warner (surname), William Cranston Lawton, William Faxon, William Gill (dramatist), William Gillette, William Hamilton Gibson
