Listen to Ocean Vuong talk about Hartford and Literature on “Shelf Talker,” an audio file from CT Museum’s Connecticut’s Bookshelf exhibit, 2024. Continue reading Ocean Vuong, “Hartfordian”
Tag Archives: Connecticut Setting
The River of Rivers in Connecticut
The river of rivers in Connecticut is both the Connecticut River that flows through Hartford and the invisible river of life that flows endlessly through all living things. Haddam is a town on the Connecticut River. The town of Farmington is located on the Farmington River, a tributary of the Connecticut River. Continue reading The River of Rivers in Connecticut
from Horseless Carriage Days
Chapter VII of Percy Maxim’s memoir Horseless Carriage Days recounts Maxim’s role in the pioneering of the automobile, particularly:
pioneer days between the years 1893 and 1901, when a ride out into the country in a horseless carriage was an adventure; when that temperamental machine, the gasoline engine, was being tamed; when there were no good roads, no road signs, no road maps, no filling stations; when gasoline had to be purchased either in paint shops before dark or in drug stores; when there were no registration plates, no operator’s licenses, no protection against wind, rain, and cold; and when every horse on the road stood upon his hind legs and made a scene. (Maxim 1937, xi) Continue reading from Horseless Carriage Days
from Masters of Illusion
Masters of Illusion (1994) was Mary-Ann Tirone Smith’s fourth novel. It is a fictional account of the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944 and the decades following. The protagonist and the fire arrive on the first page, and then there’s a life-changing meeting on an Old Saybrook beach. Continue reading from Masters of Illusion
from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Clemens’s fascination with English history developed with his visits to the country and his research for The Prince and the Pauper (1881), a tale of a royal and a commoner changing places so each could find out what he had been envying. He was fascinated by the Elizabethan period and its wholesome frankness about sex and bodily functions, which he celebrated in a short obscene work called 1601: Conversation as it Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors. The book was concealed to all but select male friends, but is now freely readable on the Internet. Continue reading from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Country Fire
“Country Fire,” first published in The New Yorker (October 1, 1938), is an event-driven short story that seems to prefigure Gill’s later interest in architecture and preservation as well as his personal reckoning with a New York/Connecticut divide. While there are many people in the story, the only character that is developed is the community of this Connecticut country town, in amalgamation. If there is an antagonist other than the fire, it is the New Yorkers and the architect lurking in the outskirts of the town’s consciousness. Continue reading Country Fire
The Triumph
“The Triumph” was originally published in The New Yorker (February 1, 1941) and is described as Gill’s finest by the article on his fiction in Gale’s Contemporary Novelists. The story is set in Connecticut and is centered on an elderly woman and her daughter clinging to the mores and social distinctions of the Old World in a way that contrasts ironically with their present circumstances. “The Triumph” ends in a subtle revelation of character that exposes a layer to the story the reader may have missed and increases the title’s irony. Continue reading The Triumph