INDIANA AUTHORS
and
THEIR BOOKS
1816-1916
INDIANA
AUTHORS
and their
BOOKS
1816-1916
Biographical sketches of authors who
published during the first century of Indiana statehood, with lists of their books
Compiled by Banta, R. E.
Published as a contribution to institutional libraries byWabash College Crawfordsville, Indiana 1949
Composed, Printed and Bound by
The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., Scranton, Pa.
Editorial Committee:
- J. K. LILLY, JR., Chairman
- BENJAMIN D. HITZ
- HOWARD H. PECKHAM
- HAROLD F. BRIGHAM
- LEE MC CANLISS
- R. E. BANTA
The Editorial Committee wishes to make grateful acknowledgment of the assistance rendered in compiling this volume by Margaret K. Husting, Annie C. Leavenworth and Eunice Henley; by Indiana librarians, students of Indiana letters, and friends and relatives of the authors listed.
The Committee also wishes to acknowledge its debt to the unpublished Master of Arts theses of Thomas J. Barry—A Bibliographical and Biographical Dictionary of Indiana Authors and of Ora Cole Briscoe—Indiana Fiction Before 1870 and to the authors, editors and publishers of hundreds of books, encyclopedias, newspapers and periodicals who thoughtfully noted facts about Indiana authors and their works during the century and a half just past.
page: [viii][View Page [viii]] page: ix[View Page ix]A WORD ABOUT INDIANA AUTHORS
WE REALIZED that we were undertaking a task of large proportions when we began the compilation of a biographical and bibliographical list of Hoosiers who had published books during the first century of Indiana's statehood. We knew that it was a forbidding project even after we had decided to exclude textbooks, newspaper articles, contributions to periodicals or serials, state or federal publications, and printings of speeches except when they were discourses presumably intended as much for the printed page as for the platform.
We had always heard that every Hoosier had a book ready-outlined in his head and that literature grew as naturally and as luxuriantly as the horseweed along the banks of the quiet Indiana streams. But still we failed to realize the extent of the flowering of the art of letters in our state.
We knew that Coggeshall, early celebrator of the Midwestern muse, had quoted some thirty Indiana writers of verse in his Poets and Poetry Of The West, published in 1860; and that a contributor to the CINCINNATI GAZETTE for Dec. 7, 1876, who signed himself "D. S. A.," had remarked upon the abundance of Indiana letters at that date. We knew that Meredith Nicholson had devoted a large part of a successful book to the subject; we knew that the New York and Philadelphia and Boston newspapers (whose destinies were often enough guided by transplanted Hoosiers) frequently turned their eyes westward and commented on the literary fertility of Indiana soil. We knew that even the eastern literary magazines observed Indiana, in the strange midlands, and expressed wonder from time to time. Still we did not comprehend the magnitude of the task we had planned.
Now we have reached the end of our journey. But we fear that much Indiana literary territory remains unexplored. Later there must be supplements and additions, and even then the story will be far from told. For there has been and there still remains something in this rich, imperturbable Middle West–always doing more than its duty in combating such far away annoyances as wars, plagues, international politics and the unpleasant situation of the natives of Borrioboola Gha, but always realizing that those matters are not of real primary importance–which causes its true citizen to contemplate the things which interest him, and to cherish a desire to put his observations on paper. This desire to communicate is but one aspect of the noticeable friendliness of the Hoosier character.
page: x[View Page x]There has been a truly enormous amount of writing done in Indiana. Some of it is masterly, a great deal of it is average, and some of it is bad and colorless, with a depressing kind of badness which also sometimes comes from places other than Indiana and often with great names signed to it. We are glad to note, however, that there is also another kind of badness which appears in Hoosier literature now and then: it is inspired badness, of a kind which we sometimes find almost as charming as excellent writing. Stephen Leacock says, "It is the work of people who would undoubtedly have been poets if they had had education and academic background."
We have excluded nothing (except those categories mentioned before) which comes in the form of book or pamphlet. Private printing, far from being frowned upon, rather has been sought for. In that field there is nothing to prevent even the most inept from printing whatever he may write provided he can meet the printer's price; and we have listed some of that inept production. But there have been many other instances in which a writer had something important to say and said it extremely well, but could find no publisher who would accept his work; perforce, he resorted to self-financed publication. That is the sort of private publishing which gets into literary essays, booksellers' catalog notes, appreciations, memorials, et cetera. We have found some of that sort of private printing, also.
We have probably made errors of omission, and possibly other errors which will appear uncomfortably obvious, but we have made a start. Our sincere hope is that others will correct, amend and expand in the future.
Probably the principal claim to virtue in Indiana letters lies in the field of fiction. Some effete Easterner has intimated that the people of Indiana turn to fiction as an escape from the desolation of the midwestern scene. That, of course, is absurd. Hoosiers need no escape, psychological or physical. Did any Hoosier, author or other, ever leave the state except to make more money or as a sort of missionary to the benighted seaboards, east or west?
Indiana's first novelist (he was also one of the first west of the Alleghenies) is believed to have based part of his one novel on his father's reminiscences, thus setting the Hoosier pattern of successful writing even before Indiana emerged from territorial status. He was Jesse Lynch Holman and he settled near the present site of Aurora in 1811. It is true that his novel, The Prisoners Of Niagara, Or Errors Of Education, was written in Kentucky and published there the year before he came to Indiana; but, since he lived out his life as one of Indiana's leading citizens, he may be claimed by both states with equal justice.
A few current authorities might hold Theodore Dreiser and one or two others to be the great artists of the state. But who is to say that the phenomenal group of fairly recent best sellers, though early of their kind–David Graham Phillips, George Barr McCutcheon, Meredith Nicholson, Booth Tarkington, George Ade–may not eventually page: xi[View Page xi] be placed in a higher category of art as well as material success by some future critic? Such a revival of popularity has happened before.
Even these were not the first of the Indiana writers whose books sold in impressive figures. Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, Maurice Thompson's Alice Of Old Vincennes, and Charles Major's When Knighthood Was In Flower, all made substantial fortunes for their authors and brought fame to the state of Indiana.
The fact is that the works of Indiana authors have sold more extensively during the past half century than those of the authors of any other state except New York–and New York's margin of superiority is small. The study which resulted in this information was made by a new arrival in the state who wondered if the place of Hoosiers in literature could be even a fraction of what it was claimed to be. This new arrival was John H. Moriarity, then recently appointed librarian of Purdue University, who knew how to establish the facts. After making a careful analysis of the data in Alice Payne Hackett's Fifty Years Of Best Sellers, Mr. Moriarity reported:
"For each year since 1895, Mrs. Hackett lists the ten novels which lead in nation-wide sales in order of their popularity.
- New York, with a score of 218
- Indiana, with a score of 213
- Pennsylvania, with a score of 125
- Virginia, with a score of 102
- Kentucky, with a score of 94
- Missouri, with a score of 80
- Ohio, with a score of 73
- Michigan, with a score of 70
- Minnesota, with a score of 67
- California, with a score of 64
Customarily only fiction titles make the best seller lists, and there Indiana has been amazingly well represented. But Hoosiers have written in the non-fiction fields, with similar facility and distinction.
In the writing of history, Indiana need only show her list of names. It begins with Judge John Law of Vincennes and John Brown Dillon–a competent scholar by any standard and a tragic character worthy of a biography of his own. It proceeds through the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries with John Clark Ridpath (most prolific, if not most scholarly), James Albert Woodburn, Wilbur Cortez Abbott, Frederic Austin Ogg, Claude Bowers, Charles Austin Beard and his wife Mary Ritter Beard, and so on to a younger group, the members of which cannot be recorded here, brilliant as they are. There are, besides, dozens who were not historians by profession but whose one or two books or pamphlets, written on subjects timely in their day, were so well executed as to have become valuable history collectors' items. Any student of book auction records will immediately recognize the names of William H. Winter, Overton Johnson, Joel Palmer, Daniel McDonald, Sandford Cox, Isaac Reed and Isaac McCoy.
A similar distinction attends Hoosier writing in the field of science, even from the earliest days. In the New Harmony group were Thomas Say, David Dale Owen, Charles Alexandre LeSueur, and, for a time, Josiah Warren, not to mention those whose residence was ephemeral but who took notes while they visited the New Harmony community–John James Audubon, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque and Prince Maximilian von Neuweid. Their work was of permanent and world-wide significance. More recently there were, in the field of natural sciences, Willis Stanley Blatchley, Samuel Record, John Merle Coulter and George Brown Goode. And, though we may reluctantly concede that other states hold prior claim to his citizenship by reason of longer residence, it remains a fact that David Starr Jordan came to his intellectual maturity during his period as teacher in various Indiana institutions and as president of Indiana University.
Apparently the first work published in Indiana relating to the physical sciences had to do with the engineering problems involved in raising the roads out of what was then held to be the bottomless Indiana mud. It was Robert Dale Owen's A Brief Practical Treatise On The Construction And Management Of Plank Roads, published in New Albany in 1850. There was little writing on the pure sciences of mathematics, physics, and chemistry (since we exclude textbooks) before the last decade of the Nineteenth century. At that time the Indianians who had studied these sciences at Hanover, Wabash, DePauw, Franklin, Earlham and other Indiana colleges, and at Indiana University, began to put their findings and conclusions into books and pamphlets. Within another decade or two they were joined by the graduates of the more recently founded Purdue University and Rose Polytechnic Institute.
The first serious Indiana work on any phase of agriculture was published in 1826. Its title, after the fashion of the day, is fully explanatory: The American Vine-Dresser's page: xiii[View Page xiii] Guide, Being A Treatise On The Cultivation Of The Vine And The Process Of Wine Making: Adapted To The Soil And Climate Of The United States: By John James Dufour, Formerly Of Switzerland, And Now An American Citizen, Cultivator Of The Vine From His Childhood, And For The Last Twenty-Five Years, Occupied In That Line Of Business, First In Kentucky, And Now On The Borders Of The Ohio, Near Vevay, Indiana.
Soon there was more writing on agriculture. Most of the settlers in the state had been lured here by the glowing descriptions of Indiana lands which appeared in the "emigrant guides"; but these works had been written for the most part by Easterners who had an economic interest in undeveloped Indiana farmland–just as Indianians in later decades wrote alluringly of Kansas, Iowa, Texas, California and, even within the memory of living man, of Florida.
One such book was written about Indiana in the early days by a New Englander who had some Indiana land in his family holdings and who eventually became a distinguished citizen of the state. He was Henry W. Ellsworth; and his book, The Valley Of The Upper Wabash, published in New York in 1838, certainly sold his land very profitably. Incidentally it was good land and well worth the price.
Solon Robinson, of wide reputation among students of the history of agriculture, did much of his most important writing and research while a resident of Crown Point. He was a tireless contributor to newspapers and agricultural periodicals and his name or initials appear over sound, sensible writing on many phases of farm life and farm improvement.
A somewhat different form of agricultural literature appeared in the Eighties, which saw the flowering of the County History Era. The pioneer who had come to new Indiana as a young man was now a prosperous old gentleman and ready to pay the necessary five or ten dollars to see himself immortalized by the followers of this school of historical writing. He believed his agricultural opinions and successes to be of interest and value, if he was a farmer, and he usually managed to work them into the notes he supplied for his biographical sketch.
In another field of literature Indiana appears, perhaps unfortunately, to have led the way–the juvenile "series" novels.
Mrs. J. R. Hibbard, a Richmond doctor's wife who wrote under the name of Faith Wynne, seems to have made a beginning at one of those long juvenile series when she published two books before 1876–Flossy Lee and Flossy Lee At The Mountains. Had she written two or three decades later she would have seen the "series" fad off to a good start, and a continuing source of expense to the parents of youthful fans who followed the repetitious doings of their little heroes and heroines. Did Indiana have a part in this? Indiana had practically a monopoly. Elsie Dinsmore, The Little Colonel, the Bobbs Hill Boys, the Twins series, the myriad Brownie books, Raggedy Ann–their creators were all Hoosier born or Hoosier seasoned. These enjoyed phenomenal success and, far from page: xiv[View Page xiv] being out-dated by the decades which have passed since their first publication, many of them are still in demand in the children's section of every public library.
Evaleen Stein wrote, illustrated and decorated truly beautiful little books for children. They did not have the benefit of wide circulation but they will be rediscovered one of these days.
A great deal of Indiana writing has been devoted to one sort or another of social reform. Dreaming in the broader fields began in Robert Owen's New Harmony with plans for making every citizen happy, for reducing the working day to the vanishing point, illuminating children's minds without bothersome letters and figures, and feeding one and all a bountiful diet magically produced by cooperative effort. At about the same period, the Quakers around Centerville and Richmond were thinking and writing on the problems of how best to secure an opportunity for their own and their neighbors' children to learn to read and write, how to improve farming methods and, later, what to do toward helping eliminate the national evil of slavery, which they saw all too plainly as a coming threat to the welfare of the whole country.
Two brief years brought the New Harmony social visionaries to a rude awakening; but the anti-slavery movement, even though half of the State's influential citizens had moved to Indiana from slave-holding territory, continued and was voluminously written of in newspapers, books and pamphlets.
Much writing on the subject of religion resulted from the evangelical wave which washed the Middle West and South in the Twenties and Thirties. It was almost all of a rabid sectarian nature. The writing was not particularly creditable either to religion or to letters, but it has a significance. There was a lull in religious writing after the Forties, and when it began again in Indiana it was more restrained, broader in view, and in many cases of considerable importance.
The first tide of religious writing waned around the Mexican War period, but soon a new and different evangelical wave struck the state and the country; someone in England had discovered in the Thirties that alcohol, used in its various forms as a beverage, was sometimes associated with trouble, domestic, economic, legal, physical and moral. Word of this eventually reached the United States and, in due time, filtered through to Indiana. A great army of speakers, pleaders and exhorters deserted their previous subjects and took up the cause of Temperance. It could not be Prohibition, in that day, for whiskey was one of the chiefest of the doctor's prescriptions and a staple article in every grocery. Naturally, writing in pamphlet and book form followed the pleadings and exhortations: exhortation alone was insufficient; the audience needed to be sold or given something to take home to read and mull over at moments of temptation and to use as a reference work in debates with the neighbors. It was exciting stuff and it continued to attract readers for many years. Luther Benson's Fifteen Years In Hell, published and republished in Indianapolis in the Seventies and Eighties, must have outsold many an American classic in its day.
page: xv[View Page xv]There were other evils crying for suppression. Gambling, for instance. Jonathan H. Green, who made his headquarters in Lawrenceburg for some time and who frequented many brawling river towns along the Ohio and Mississippi, had a peculiar literary experience in connection with a book which he expected to discourage gambling. In his book, Jonathan H. Green: The Reformed Gambler, he went into such minute detail in describing the means by which the professional sharper mulcted his victims that the work became the foremost text for ambitious young men who wished to learn the lucrative trade which Mr. Green sought to destroy. The book had a remarkable sale.
In Terre Haute in the Seventies some writing began to appear about a new sort of reform. Terre Haute was the principal city in the western Indiana coal area, then beginning to be worked on a large scale, and it was also something of a railroad center. Coal miners and railroad men were early among those who organized their trades into unions. Terre Haute was also the town in which Eugene Victor Debs had been born in 1855. The result of these two factors was unavoidable: Terre Haute became a center of the modern labor movement in thought and writing. It is probable that this movement influenced the works of other Terre Haute citizens–William Riley Halsted, Robert Wiles Hunter, Ida Husted Harper, and Orlando J. Smith–whether they realized it or not.
But it is in the composition of poetry that the Hoosier, to use a rural Indiana phrase, runs hog-wild. In this compilation of Indiana writers who published during and prior to the year 1916 we have probably missed some writers of fiction, biography, history, scientific works and so on; but due to the astronomical numbers of its perpetrators within the confines of the state, now and in the past, we have undoubtedly omitted dozens of writers of book-published poetry.
It may be that the success of the folksy and easy-flowing verse of James Whitcomb Riley inspired his fellow citizens with the illusion that they could relax from their vocational duties and do likewise. However, a glance at the compilations of Venable, of Coggeshall, and of Parker and Heiney demonstrates that there was an inordinately great proportion of poets in Indiana long before Riley had learned his alphabet. Perhaps it is the soil, perhaps it is the climate, with its wide and unfavorably known extremes, perhaps it is a virus transmitted from Indiana weeds to Indiana citizens by Indiana cows –as in the notorious "milk-sick" of the early Nineteenth century–but it is unquestionably there. For some reason, about one Hoosier in ten writes what he believes to be poetry, whether or not he admits it to his friends and associates.
The writer of the before-mentioned article in the CINCINNATI GAZETTE for Dec. 7, 1876, said of the Indiana poets in the book collection which he described:
"Poems that never saw the type until 1871 were written when two-thirds of Indiana was a howling wilderness. Miss Chitwood died in 1855. Mrs. Bolton was born in 1820 [sic] and when fourteen years old excited the envy of her fellow-pupils in Madison by the excellence of her composition, A Few Poems of Judge Biddle's attracted the attention page: xvi[View Page xvi] of Washington Irving in 1842, and in 1830, John Finley… wrote 'The Hoosier's Nest' … Indiana has no reason to be ashamed of her poets … "
There were poetry pages in the newspapers, poetry societies, poetry clubs, poetry associations and poetry annuals, anthologies and collections, the latter not always above suspicion of venal aims. There were poetry prizes, poetry contests and poetry days, evenings, afternoons, and mornings. Besides those versifiers of sufficient merit to have had their works purchased and published by recognized houses, there was always a lush crop of the less talented awaiting the oily advances of the "vanity publisher." Many an elderly gentleman, or lady, with time on his hands finally got around to writing the verse he had always felt competent to write since he first heard Jim Riley read his things at the Baptist Church benefit in 1897. And he had the result privately printed by the local printer and bound for distribution among the children and the nieces and the nephews. Strangely enough, there is occasionally in this twilight endeavor some rather well written verse, often the result of a tranquil and pleasant sort of thought of which this world could use a great deal more.
Between the paid and the self-published poets there is another and an interesting class. This third variety of Indiana poet paid for printing, it is true, but he bargained the local printer down to the ultimate dime. When an edition of the book came out he peddled it from door to door and from street corner to street corner and sold it with every art known to salesmanship. Not infrequently, if the work descended to a really remarkable literary depth, these people made respectable profits.
Such, to a superlative degree, was James Buchanan Elmore, "The Bard of Alamo," unofficial Poet Laureate of Indiana, who combined farming, poesy inspired by a genius of perfectly hopeless and unbelievable ineptitude, and a keen sense of personal publicity values. Elmore, author of such classics as "The Monon Wreck," died in his eighties possessed of five hundred acres of Montgomery County land, the fruit of his pen and his plow about equally.
Be the motives, the method and the results of authorship what they may, whatever could be located of the books of poems published before the end of 1916 are listed here. Indiana need make no apologies: Hoosiers have produced much poetry which is likely to live–even including "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight"!
So the speculation ends and the biographies and bibliographies begin. There are a considerable number of them. Never again need a native Hoosier be embarrassed, as apparently was D. S. A., the author of the CINCINNATI GAZETTE article quoted before, by any such episode as this which he reports in 1876:
"Several months ago Mr. Evans, the very urbane custodian of the Indianapolis library, spoke 'of the paucity of Indiana authors.' Said he, 'I'm preparing a list of our page: xvii[View Page xvii] authors for the Boston Library, and I've been unable to learn of more than Seventy!' Mr. Hough replied that 'he had the works of more than one hundred in his own library, and he presumed there had been many more than this … '"
Let not, henceforth, an Indiana librarian, urbane or otherwise, so underestimate the role of the Hoosiers in print!
The compilation of this work has been a long task but a pleasant one. We hope that it will prove useful to librarians and collectors, to students and teachers, and that it will serve as a start toward a more careful keeping of the records in the future.
R. E. BANTA,
for The Editorial
Committee
