- Title:
- A Fortnight of Folly
- Author:
- Thompson, Maurice, 1844-1901
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THOMPSON, JAMES MAURICE: 1844-1901.
James Maurice Thompson (the name had become simply Maurice Thompson long before his signature was important to anyone but himself) was the possessor of a wide variety of talent which he employed in the shaping of careers in six widely separate fields–most successful of which was literature.
He was born in the small eastern Indiana community of Fairfield on Sept. 9, 1844, to the Rev. Mathew Grigg and Diantha Jaeggar Thompson. The senior Thompson was a Southerner by birth and, at the time of the birth of Maurice, pastor of the Baptist church in Fairfield; in the pursuit of his calling he was soon called upon to remove, first to Missouri and shortly thereafter to Kentucky.
Something occurred shortly before 1854 to bring about a radical change in Mathew Grigg Thompson's career: whether he experienced some profound spiritual upheaval or merely inherited some land and some slaves, he had deserted the pulpit by that year and was established as a planter in the Coosawattee valley of upper Georgia.
Mathew Grigg Thompson must have either inherited upon a rather generous scale or have found his years in the pulpit a good apprenticeship for the profitable management of slaves and good red soil, for he was able to hire competent tutors to educate his sons (the younger, Will Henry Thompson, had been born in Missouri in 1846) in the classical languages, literature, French and mathematics. Quiet, thoughtful young Maurice was given an extra measure of the latter, since his youthful fancy lit upon civil engineering as a career.
In addition to formal education there was also learning in woodcraft, still pleasingly and painlessly obtainable in north Georgia. Those remarkable people, the Cherokees, had been driven from the country only a generation before and there were still plenty of men about, white and black, who had learned their peculiar way in the woods and who liked nothing better than to pass it on.
Maurice and Will Thompson took full advantage of both academic and extra-curricular opportunities and acquired both an abiding love for the outdoors and a sound scientific knowledge of its components. Eventually this love would furnish ample subject matter for the best of the writing which made Maurice a prominent literary figure of the last quarter of the Nineteenth century.
The Civil War interrupted this pleasant life and both young men enlisted in the Confederate army, Maurice in 1862, before his eighteenth birthday, and Will shortly after.
The brothers served the Confederacy well but the end of the war saw most Georgia planters only a cut above penniless, with the Thompson family no exception. After being mustered out, Maurice went to Calhoun, Ga., to continue his studies in surveying and engineering and, as further insurance of a future livelihood, to read law. Little is known of his supposed two years of residence in that town except that he is believed to have done his first serious writing there: contributions of verse to some of those ephemeral Southern "literary journals" which had survived the war or were endeavoring to temper the gloomy days of Reconstruction by beginning publication.
In 1867, his studies either completed or forsaken as unpromising, Maurice Thompson began a botanical, zoological and ornithological survey of Lake Okeechobee, in Florida, of the Okeefinokee Swamp and of some other regions of similar interest in the deep South.
While natural history surveys may have been good rehabilitation measures for a young man recently fresh from the wars, they could not have been very remunerative; and neither, apparently, was any other pursuit likely to appeal to educated young Georgians of the day. The Thompson brothers rightly guessed that they would probably be elderly Georgians before conditions improved. Finally they decided upon a course which must have appeared singular indeed to most of their fellow veterans: the South was certainly overrun with undesired and undesirable Northerners; why should not this be an auspicious time for a few Southerners to go North? Packing their belongings in knapsacks and cutting a couple of walking sticks, they set out.
Some weeks later they arrived in Crawfordsville, Ind., a town as rabidly Union as might be found in the Midwest and the sanctuary of four recently retired Union generals. The Thompsons had no purpose in view, no acquaintance in the town.
Almost immediately it became evident that their unlikely choice was wise. A railroad was being built through the country. John Lee, in charge of construction, could use young engineers and Maurice and Will Thompson soon had jobs. The people of Crawfordsville must have been more tolerant of recent enemies than might have been anticipated (although Maurice Thompson was as agreeable and as urbane an enemy as one might meet) for within a year Alice, daughter of John Lee, had married him and he had settled as a permanent resident of the town. A few years later Will Thompson married Ida, sister of Alice.
In 1871, as soon as he had his feet on the ground financially, Thompson gave up engineering and opened a law office in partnership with his brother. The firm was never remarkably successful but both men were reasonably competent and their practice earned them comfortable livings. More important, law practice allowed Maurice time to resume his writing. As an evidence of the popular acceptance of the Thompson brothers in their new home, it must be noted that Maurice was elected to the Indiana State Legislature in 1879—certainly an honor not visited upon many in the Midwest who had borne hostile arms only fifteen years earlier.
In 1873 the ATLANTIC MONTHLY published one of his contributions and, encouraged, he redoubled his efforts. An early result was a series of articles on the then-neglected subject of archery which brought about his general recognition as a writer and also created a nation-wlde craze for the sport. The knowledge of archery which both Maurice and Will Thompson possessed was a product of the plantation days and had been acquired, according to Meredith Nicholson'sThe Hoosiers, "from a hermit who lived in the midst of a pine forest near his home."
In 1875Thompson's first book appeared. It was Hoosier Mosaics, a collection of charming sketches of incidents in the Indiana small town scene. Thompson drew the backgrounds of Colfax and Jamestown sharply and accurately and the incidents reported in at least two of the sketches are as readable as the current and reminiscent examples in which the NEW YORKER specializes. Two novels, His Second Campaign and A Tallahassee Girl, were published in 1882; and the latter, enjoying a fair sale in both the Northern and Southern states, encouraged him to give up the law. With the exception of serving as Indiana state geologist and chief of the department of natural history between 1885 and 1889 (the duties of which office were not particularly exacting at the time) he continued until his death as a prosperous literary man and lecturer.
Thompson's novels continued to appear with some regularity but with no great success until, in 1885, his first work in the field of nature study made its appearance. It was By-Ways and Bird Notes and the writing of it was probably inspired by the ready acceptance which periodicals gave to his contributions on the subject. It was followed, at intervals of one or two novels, by The Boys" Book of Sports, 1886; Sylvan Secrets, in Bird Sonys and Books, 1887; Stories of the Cherokee Hills, 1889; and My Winter Garden, 1900. These, with the early Witchery of Archery and Alice of Old Vincennes, are the chief basis of his fame as a writer of books. His place as a critic and a poet is yet to be finally evaluated and will be based chiefly upon his voluminous contribution to the periodical press of the Eighties and Nineties, but it was undoubtedly as an essayist, and more specifically as an essayist on the subject of the outdoors, that he excelled.
It is logical to give Maurice Thompson a considerable share of credit for arousing, through his books and his writing for periodicals, the interest of his literate fellow citizens in nature study and the outdoor life.
Thompson is remembered by his neighbors as rather diffident and self-effacing, but as an unfailingly pleasant and hospitable man. His wife, Alice Lee Thompson, was a woman of great charm and their beautiful home, Sherwood Place, on the east edge of Crawfordsville, was always open to their friends, and those of their three children–and to anyone at all who might be interested in nature, literature, the classics or, particularly, in archery. The family always wintered in their beloved South.
In this pleasant life Thompson grew in stature in the contemporary world of letters. After 1888 he served as non-resident literary editor of the INDEPENDENT, read papers and spoke widely. Finally, in 1900, he achieved his life-long ambition–he wrote a tremendously successful novel.
The book is Alice Of Old Vincennes. Its scene is the old French village on the lower Wabash and its plot concerns the capture of the town by hard-bitten young Gen. George Rogers Clark and the manner in which he used it to control the Old Northwest. It is an excellent historical novel of the days before the formula for the historical novel had been standardized with a ratio of at least four conquests in the boudoir to one on the battlefield. The incidental characters are real, and their activities are historically authentic. Even Alice, the heroine, is a character not entirely of his own imagining, according to Thompson's foreword. Her "romantic life, as brokenly sketched in Mr. Roussillon's letter" written in 1788 and preserved by a Louisiana Creole family, was authenticated by the author's research.
Throughout his writing career, Thompson had always returned hopefully to the novel at intervals in his more successful efforts at the essay, criticism and verse. He had published at least nine novels, only two or three of which were even moderately successful. Perhaps his recurrent efforts were inspired by the fact that Lew Wallace, a neighbor only two blocks down Pike Street, had produced a record American best seller in 1880 with a book called Ben Hut. Modest as he was, Thompson must have recognized that his own literary touch was both lighter and surer than that of his friend Gen. Wallace and that he lacked only a bit of good fortune and equally appealing subject matter in order to create a Ben Hur of his own. In the matter of appealing subject matter he could have had no great hope of a permanent triumph–Wallace had already appropriated the Christ and his early followers–but the career of Gen. George Rogers Clark and the town of Vincennes had lately attracted considerable notice through the publication of Capt. William H. English'sConquest of the Country Northwest of the Ohio River 1778-1783 and Life of Gen. George Rogers Clark. Thompson wrote by far his most workmanlike novel and the good fortune took care of itself.
Alice Of Old Vincennes was a best seller of 1900 and it began 1901 with even more promise. In the first weeks of that year there appeared no reason why the record of Gen. Wallace, down street, should not soon be equalled. The prospect must have been pleasing even to the unenvious spirit of Maurice Thompson, for the General was a bit arrogant in his own success and there had been some rather dismal failures among Thompson's earlier novels.
As it turned out, Ben Hur, with the world-wide interest in its subject and setting, continued to sell in tens of thousands after the four or five year boom in sales of Alice Of Old Vincennes had settled to a few thousand copies a year. By that time it made little difference to James Maurice Thompson, for he had died quietly at Sherwood Place on Feb. 15, 1901–at exactly the summit of his popularity.
- Hoosier Mosaics. New York, 1875.
Search "Hoosier Mosaics" by THOMPSON, JAMES MAURICE: 1844-1901. in:
Close X - The Witchery of Archery–a Complete Manual of
Archery with Many Chapters of Adventure by Field and Flood, Etc. (withWill Henry Thompson). New York, 1878.
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Close X - How to Train in Archery: Being a Complete Study of the York
Round (withWill Henry Thompson). New York, 1879.
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Close X - A Tallahassee Girl. Boston,
[1881].
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Close X - Songs of Fair Weather. Boston,
1883.
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Close X - His Second Campaign. Boston,
1883.
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Close X - By-Ways and Bird Notes. New
York, 1885.
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Close X - At Love's Extremes. New York, 1885.
(Reissued in 1901, as Milly: At Love's Extremes: a Romance of
the Southland.)
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Close X - A Red-Headed Family. New York,
1885.
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Close X - A Banker of Bankersville: a Novel. New
York, 1886.
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Close X - The Boys' Book of Sports and Outdoor Life (with
others.)New York, 1886.
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Close X - Sylvan Secrets, in Bird-Songs and Books.
New York, 1887.
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Close X - Sunshine and Song, or, Southern Literature.
Nashville, Tenn., 1887.
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Close X - A Fortnight of Folly: a Novel. New York, 1888.
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Close X - The Story of Louisiana. Boston,
1888.
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Close X - The King of Honey Island: a Novel. New
York, 1893.
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Close X - The Ethics of Literary Art: the Carew Lectures for 1893,
Hartford Theological Seminary. Hartford, Conn.,
1893.
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Close X - Lincoln's Grave: the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poem of
1893. Cambridge, Mass., 1894.
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Close X - The Ocala Boy: a Story of Florida Town and Forest.
Boston, 1895.
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Close X - Stories of Indiana. Cincinnati,
1898.
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Close X - Stories of the Cherokee Hills.
Boston, 1898.
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Close X - How to Study History, Literature, Fine Arts (withA. B. Hart and C. M. Fairbanks). Meadville, Pa.
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Close X - My Winter Garden: a Nature Lover under Southern
Skies. New York, 1900.
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Close X - Alice of Old Vincennes. Indianapolis, 1900.
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Philadelphia, 1901.
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Close X - Rosalynde's Lovers. Indianapolis, n.d. [1901].
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Close X - Toxophilus in Arcadia.
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Close X - Genius and Morality: a Curious but Sincere Appreciation of
Poe the Man, in a Letter Written by … Ridley Park,
Pa., 1934.
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Close X
- Hoosier Mosaics. New York, 1875.
- Publication Year:
- 1888
- Source:
- New York: John A. Berry & Company, 1888.
- Bookmark:
- https://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/inauthors/VAA2386
A FORTNIGHT OF
FOLLY.
BY
MAURICE THOMPSON
.Author of "Songs of Fair Weather," "Sylvan Secrets," "A Tallahasse Girl," "By-Ways and Bird Notes," "A Banker of Bankersville," "At Love's Extremes," etc.
NEW YORK: JOHN A. BERRY & COMPANY, 1988.
Copyright, 1888.
BY
MAURICE THOMPSON.
