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.
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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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Archery with Many Chapters of Adventure by Field and Flood, Etc" by THOMPSON, JAMES MAURICE: 1844-1901. in:
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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Round" by THOMPSON, JAMES MAURICE: 1844-1901. in:
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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others.)" by THOMPSON, JAMES MAURICE: 1844-1901. in:
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 - Poems. Boston, 1892.
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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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Hartford Theological Seminary" by THOMPSON, JAMES MAURICE: 1844-1901. in:
Close X - Lincoln's Grave: the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poem of
1893. Cambridge, Mass., 1894.
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1893" by THOMPSON, JAMES MAURICE: 1844-1901. in:
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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Skies" by THOMPSON, JAMES MAURICE: 1844-1901. in:
Close X - Alice of Old Vincennes. Indianapolis, 1900.
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Close X - Sweetheart Manette.
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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Poe the Man, in a Letter Written by … Ridley Park" by THOMPSON, JAMES MAURICE: 1844-1901. in:
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