The Virginian will live 100 years, if the Bolshevists and the IWW permit civilizations to endure so long as that

Tuesday, January 16th, 2018

Back in 1923 a little newspaper called the Los Angeles Times asked Edgar Rice Burroughs to write a thousand words about his extremely popular but non-literary works:

Mr. Ford suggests that I talk to you about my books — “At the Earth’s Core,” “The Chessmen of Mars” and the “Tarzan” stories. He wants me to talk about them for a thousand words… What I can say of them without outraging modesty can be put in fewer words by far. I think they are bully stories and that they fulfill the purposes for which they were written — to entertain and to sell. They were not written for any other purpose. Sometimes reviewers waste whole columns on them explaining that they are not what I never intended them to be — contributions to classical literature. That is misspent energy. Did a sport writer ever discuss the table manner of Battling Siki as seriously affecting his success in the prize ring? The only standard by which I judge the fiction that I enjoy is whether it has the punch to hold my interest and is able to deliver the k.o. to dull care and worry.

It seems to me that no one who functions properly above the ears can possibly read fiction for purposes of instruction or enlightenment. It is written by men no better, and oftentimes not so well, equipped to think as the reader. Each book contains the personal viewpoint of one man or woman, and even that opinion is usually seriously affected by what he thinks the public will pay $1.50 or $2 for. Occasionally there is a great piece of fiction, once in a hundred years, perhaps, or maybe I had better say a thousand years, that actually molds public opinion; but in the meantime fiction either entertains or it does not entertain, and that is all there is to it. What entertains you may not entertain the other fellow, but God knows there is enough of it written each year so that it is our own fault if we are not all entertained.

The really great purpose of fiction, however, is, as I see it, that it is a stepping stone to other and vastly more entertaining reading. The reading of clean fiction should be encouraged since the reading of anything will form the habit of reading and one day the novitiate, having no fiction on hand, will, perforce, have to read something else, and, lo, a new world will be opened to him — and there are so many wonderful books outside the fiction lists; but gosh! how they do charge for them. My favorites are travel exploration, biography and natural history, but there are others — countless others in which you can find more wonderful things than I or any other writer can invent.
Did you ever read an annual report of the Smithsonian Institute? I recently sat up nearly all night reading one that is ten years old, almost, and when, at dinner the following evening I recounted my adventures of the previous night to my three children they held them spellbound and elicited a thousand questions, 999 of which I could not answer.

And then there are magazines such as the Geographic, Asia and Popular Mechanics. These three constitute an encyclopedia of liberal education for adult or child that arouses a desire for more knowledge and fosters the habit of reading.

I am fond of fiction, too, although I do not read a great deal of it. And I have my favorites — Mary Roberts Reinhart and Booth Tarkington are two of them. When I read one of Mrs. Reinhart’s stories I always wish that I might have been sufficiently gifted to have written it, and then when I read something of Tarkington’s I feel the same way about that. I have read “The Virginian” five or six times, and “The Prince and the Pauper” and “Little Lord Fauntleroy” as many. I believe “The Virginian” to be one of the greatest American novels ever written, and though I have heard that Mr. Wister deplores having written it, I venture that 100 years from now it will constitute his sole link to fame — and I am sure that “The Virginian” will live 100 years, if the Bolshevists and the I.W.W. permit civilizations to endure so long as that.

I’m rather shocked that I’d never even heard of Mary Roberts Reinhart before:

Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876 – September 22, 1958) was an American writer, often called the American Agatha Christie, although her first mystery novel was published 14 years before Christie’s first novel in 1922.

Rinehart is considered the source of the phrase “The butler did it” from her novel The Door (1930), although the novel does not use the exact phrase. Rinehart is also considered to have invented the “Had-I-But-Known” school of mystery writing, with the publication of The Circular Staircase (1908).

She also created a costumed super-criminal called “the Bat”, cited by Bob Kane as one of the inspirations for his “Batman”.

Booth Tarkington wrote The Magnificent Ambersons, which I know from the Orson Welles movie.

Comments

  1. David Foster says:

    The author of The Virginian, Owen Wister, was the grandson of Fanny Kemble, a famous British actress and a very interesting diarist who wrote extensively about her impressions of American. I posted about here here:

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/55632.html

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