Warner wrote this memoir about his childhood in poor, rural Massachusetts while living in prosperous, urban Hartford. Along with nostalgic descriptions of making maple sugar in the spring, Warner makes some comments on the commercialism of his adulthood versus the perceived innocence of his childhood before the Civil War and the era of big business that he and Mark Twain satirized in The Gilded Age. Continue reading The Sugar Camp
Tag Archives: Rural Life
from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Shifting from Clemens’s comical letters, speeches and short pieces to his classic, we get a sense of the depth he brought to his work. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was composed largely at Quarry Farm, Olivia Clemens’s sister Susan Crane’s farm in Elmira, New York. The family spent most of their summers there during the time they lived in Hartford, and Crane had built a study for her brother-in-law high on a hill overlooking the farm and the city. Continue reading from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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