The man behind the Little Blue BooksMany would be surprised to learn that in the early twentieth century, the tiny town of Girard, Kansas, was, as historian R. Alton Lee proclaims, “the literary and publishing Mecca of the United States, and thus the international center of Western civilization.” That claim may be a stretch, but not a very big stretch. In 1915, Jewish Philadelphian Emanuel Haldeman-Julius moved to Girard to take over the Appeal to Reason, America’s most widely circulated socialist newspaper of all time. The appeal of the Appeal was on the decline, however, which gave Haldeman-Julius the impetus and opportunity to experiment with his own radical ideas of publishing. His big brainchild was the Little Blue Books, a line of inexpensive publications, designed to bring useful knowledge and quality literature to readers of all classes, that spawned thousands of titles, hundreds of millions of copies sold, and a variety of subjects so broad as to constitute a self-proclaimed “university in print.” In his 2017 book Publisher for the Masses, Lee provides a biography of this exceptional and enigmatic publishing mogul.
I have read many of the sources listed in Lee’s bibliography, so the story of Haldeman-Julius’s life was familiar to me. At first it didn’t seem like Lee was going to dig deep enough to make this biography worthwhile. The first few chapters seem to be taken entirely from Haldeman-Julius’s autobiographies, My First 25 Years and My Second 25 Years, so why not just read those? In subsequent chapters, however, Lee does dig deeper into the archival record. He has clearly perused the Haldeman-Juliuses’ correspondence and many of the myriad editorials Emanuel wrote for his multiple periodicals. From these Lee uncovers enough lesser-known details to enlighten even well-read fans of Haldeman-Julius. In particular, this biography provides a great deal of insight into the Haldeman-Juliuses’ marriage (Marcet Haldeman-Julius was an active partner in her husband’s enterprises) and the financial problems faced by the couple during the Great Depression. Lee may hail Emanuel the publisher as a heroic figure, but this book is not a unilateral exercise in hero worship. Emanuel the husband and father was not quite the knight in shining armor, and Lee doesn’t let his subject off the hook for his less praiseworthy qualities and actions.
This book could have used a better edit by the University of Nebraska Press because there are several noticeable errors, and not just typos, of which there are quite a few. One sentence is repeated verbatim at the end of two paragraphs within a page of each other (pages 77-78). Haldeman-Julius’s book A Trip to Plutopia is erroneously titled A Trip to Utopia (p. 96). His book The Big American Parade is described as a novel, when in fact it is a nonfiction book of cultural criticism (p. 143). Someone named Fagnani is quoted without any indication of who he might be (p. 141). Maybe he was just some random reader of the Little Blue Books who wrote a fan letter to Haldeman-Julius, but if that’s the case then say so.
Despite such flaws, Publisher for the Masses is likely the best one-volume biography written about Haldeman-Julius thus far. Kansans, socialists, freethinkers, autodidacts, and other fans of the Little Blue Books who may have only a passing knowledge of Girard’s great publishing entrepreneur will certainly get an admirably comprehensive education on the man’s life from this book, without having to hunt down and read through all the obscure articles and dissertations heretofore written about him. The wide-reaching radical publishing industry in Girard, Kansas, is an episode of American history that merits better recognition. Haldeman-Julius has long deserved an engaging biography for contemporary readers, and Lee has delivered one with this book.
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A history of radical KansasMost people think of Kansas as a conservative “red state,” which may be true today, but historically the Sunflower State has demonstrated markedly progressive and, dare I say, radical tendencies in its political leanings. The cleverly titled When Sunflowers Bloomed Red, published in 2020, is a history of Socialism in the state of Kansas. (Let’s not forget that red was originally the worldwide color of Socialism, before some American TV news executive in the 1980s decided to assign the color to the Republican Party.) The book was written by R. Alton Lee, a historian who has published much on Kansas history, and Steven Cox, archivist at Pittsburg State University, located in the Southeastern and historically reddest corner of the state. The scope of the book spans roughly from the 1890s up to World War II.
In the book’s introduction, the authors state flatly, “This is not a definitive history of socialism in Kansas.” That’s disappointing because, given the title, one would expect it would be, and if this isn’t it, what is? Rather than relating Kansas’s socialist history in a chronological narrative, the authors have divided their study into thematic chapters focusing on particular people or movements. One chapter, for example, focuses on the highly successful publishing operations of J. A. Wayland and Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius in Girard, Kansas. The former founded America’s most widely circulated socialist newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, while the latter sold millions of copies of his Little Blue Books. Another chapter covers union organizing among miners, while another is devoted specifically to prominent women socialists in Kansas. The activities of the International Workers of the World (IWW, or “Wobblies”) and the Nonpartisan League in Kansas are also discussed at length. Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, perhaps the most famous socialist in U.S. history, was not a Kansan, but he was an active campaigner in the state, and the elections in which he figured are frequently mentioned throughout the book.
I already had an interest in this subject before I discovered this book, so I would consider myself predisposed to a favorable reaction. Although the authors deliver much informative content, however, the writing is difficult to get excited about. As confirmed by the notes, almost every paragraph is a summary of a newspaper article, and reads like one. These follow one another in chronological order, amounting to a rapid-fire delivery of names, places, and facts but with little attempt to connect the dots and assemble a cohesive narrative. The text is heavy on election statistics, when tables might have been a better way to impart that data. The thematic arrangement also leads to further confusion with a lot of jumping back and forth in time and repetition of events. The result is a book that would probably serve better as a reference volume for historians than as an enlightening read for the curious general reader. Those in the latter category, like myself, may find themselves so exhausted by the blow-by-blow commentary on policy debates that the more violent incidents of class struggle actually come as a refreshing relief. When Sunflowers Bloomed Red contains a lot of valuable information, but its relentless barrage of detail makes it hard to see the forest for the trees and never really brings this history or the personalities of its prominent activists to life.
Compiling a one-volume socialist history of Kansas is surely a difficult task, since so many of the characters who played a part in that history lived lives that could merit a book of their own. Talkin’ Socialism by Elliott Shore, a biography of J. A. Wayland and the Appeal to Reason, is one commendable example. R. Alton Lee also wrote a book that focuses exclusively on Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, Publisher for the Masses, which I look forward to reading.
More marketing than biography
In the early twentieth century, one of America’s most successful publishing enterprises was run out of the little town of Girard in southeastern Kansas. There Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius printed thousands of titles in his Little Blue Books series. Hundreds of millions of copies of these small, inexpensive paperbacks were sold at newsstands and through mail order. In addition to literature and knowledge of general interest, Haldeman-Julius also published books on topics that were radical for his time, such as socialism, atheism, feminism, and sex education. The most prolific writer in Haldeman-Julius’s stable of authors was Joseph McCabe, who covered all of the above subjects and more. McCabe was a former Catholic priest who lived for 12 years as a monk before leaving the church and rejecting Christian dogma. Even before he met Haldeman-Julius, McCabe became a champion of rationalism and established himself as one of the most outspoken opponents of the Catholic church and organized religion.
Though not a Little Blue Book, Joseph McCabe: Fighter for Freethought is the fourth volume in another series of Haldeman-Julius publications, Reviewer’s Library. The text is only 43 pages long. The author is Isaac Goldberg, another likeminded Haldeman-Julius regular. Goldberg doesn’t provide a biography of McCabe but rather a laudatory critical essay. Goldberg has never met McCabe or interviewed him; he has only read some of McCabe’s works and doesn’t appear to have done much research on the man. There is some coverage of McCabe’s career in the clergy and his reasons for defecting to atheism, but the biographical content stops there. The rest of the text is mostly Goldberg’s thoughts on McCabe, but Goldberg ends up talking about Goldberg just as much as he talks about McCabe. Goldberg uses McCabe’s life and works as a springboard to elaborate on freethought issues and anti-religious views. Because of the time period, there is also much discussion about the rise of fascism and authoritarianism, with vehement criticism of Hitler and Mussolini but mixed messages concerning Stalin.
The text is written in a somewhat casual style that’s aimed at habitual readers of Haldeman-Julius publications. It reminds one of the columns Stan Lee used to write in Marvel Comics that offered a look inside the “bullpen,” making readers feel like they were part of a club. Goldberg’s prose reads more like a magazine editorial than a book. This tone allows Goldberg to work in plugs for Little Blue Books and praise for Haldeman-Julius that would be inappropriate in a more formal treatise.
The best thing this booklet has to offer is a bibliography of McCabe’s published works. The list of titles is five pages long, includes around 175 entries, and teaches you more about McCabe’s writing career and scope of thought than anything Goldberg has to say. It covers not only McCabe’s publications with Haldeman-Julius but his entire published output up to 1936.
The book closes with one piece of McCabe’s writing, but the choice of essay is questionable. It’s a book review on a series of publications by (who else?) Haldeman-Julius. This, along with the 21 pages of advertisements, makes it clear that the Reviewer’s Library is little more than a marketing vehicle to promote sales of Haldeman-Julius publications. I learned surprisingly little about Joseph McCabe from this book that bears his name, but I am glad that I at least found a decent (though partial) bibliography of his work.
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Agrarian epics from around the world
As an enthusiast of classic literature, Old Books by Dead Guys loves to review epic novels. Just because a story is epic, however, doesn’t mean it has to be set in ancient Rome, a war-torn battlefield, or outer space. Some of the best epics take place right at home on the farm. In these “peasant” epics, hard-working multigenerational families carve a living from the soil while contending with poverty, family conflicts, and the unforgiving elements. Such books often bear a strident message of social justice, the dignity of labor, and in some cases perhaps even hints of socialist revolution. Every nation’s literature has got to have at least one great agrarian epic. Realist writers of all nations have captured the heroic drama in the daily life of their homeland’s agriculturalists. Today at Old Books by Dead Guys, we celebrate the literature of “earth,” “soil,” and “dust,” listed below in chronological order. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.
Sons of the Soil (Les Paysans, 1855) by Honoré de Balzac (France) - 3.5 stars
This is Balzac’s final novel, also known as Les Paysans or The Peasantry. The story takes place in the Burgundy region of France and focuses on the antagonism between a land-owning count and the peasants of his district. Rather than glamorizing farming life, Balzac approaches the story from an aristocratic perspective that makes the poor farmers the villains of the story. The plot is like a comical chess game in which the peasants try everything they can think of to rob, cheat, or swindle their landlord. Not exactly the message one usually looks for in an agrarian epic, but it does make for one entertaining novel.
Virgin Soil (1877) by Ivan Turgenev (Russia) - 4 stars
Virgin Soil is Russian realist Ivan Turgenev’s final novel. This is not really a peasant epic, but it does deal with agricultural life. The narrative takes place in the 1860s, at a time when a populist movement was gaining influence in Russia. Urban middle-class intellectuals venture out into the farmlands to preach socialist ideas to workers and the rural poor, hoping to inspire a revolution against the feudal system maintained by the Tsarist government. Like Balzac above, however, Turgenev’s depiction of these revolutionaries is quite unflattering and satirical. Though the main focus of the novel may be political, it does provide a vivid depiction of rural life in Russia.
The Earth (La Terre, 1887) by Emile Zola (France) - 5 stars
The official opinion of Old Books by Dead Guys is that Emile Zola is the world’s greatest novelist, and this is his second greatest novel, after Germinal. The Earth takes place in the Beauce, an agricultural region between Chartres and Orleans, where families have cultivated the same plots of land for generations. When one of these veteran farmers, Old Fouan, feels himself ready for retirement, he divides up his holdings among his three children. Not one of them, however, is happy with the portion he receives, which leads to animosity and treachery. Zola’s depiction of farm life is gritty and unglamorized. He captures both the dirty, exhausting toil and the spiritual satisfaction of agriculture in a range of moods from the terrifying to the hilarious. A masterpiece.
Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896) by Hendrik Pontoppidan (Denmark) - 4.5 stars
This is one of only a few works available in English by Pontoppidan, a Nobel Prize winner. The story takes place in rural Denmark in the late nineteenth century. As in Turgenev’s Virgin Soil, discussed above, the proliferation of liberal democratic ideals has begun to undermine the authority of the conservative aristocracy and the Church. A new young priest arrives in a seaside parish in rural Denmark. Rather than adopt the party line of his church, he sympathizes with the peasants and bears a romantic image of the farming life as a more honest and natural way of living. Such liberal ideals infuriate his superiors and threaten his career in the clergy. Through expert descriptive prose, Pontoppidan delivers an authentic slice of Danish rural life.
The Octopus (1901) by Frank Norris (California, USA) - 5 stars
Although it doesn’t have “Earth” or “Soil” in its title, The Octopus is one of America’s greatest agricultural epics. It concerns the lives of wheat farmers in Tulare County, California. Based on a real-life incident, the Mussel Slough Tragedy (1880), this novel tells the story of a violent conflict between the farmers of this community and an all-powerful railroad corporation (the “octopus” referenced in the title). In his portrayal of the rural landscape and agricultural life, Norris displays an extraordinary faculty for natural description and an exceptional talent for drawing gripping scenes of ordinary people faced with extraordinary circumstances. If you’re looking for the Great American Novel, this is it.
The Peasants (four volumes, 1904-1909) by Wladyslaw Reymont (Poland) - 5 stars
This lesser-known Polish novel just might be the gold standard by which all peasant epics must be measured. The Peasants (Polish title: Chlopi) was published in four volumes, one for each of the seasons of the year: Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer must be read in order. Over the course of that fictional year, the reader becomes intimately involved in the lives and loves of the residents of the rural town of Lipka. The children of the village’s most prosperous farmer, Mathias Boryna, want him to step down and divide his land among his descendants, but he scoffs at them by marrying a young bride, thus inciting family conflict. Similar in style and subject matter to Zola’s The Earth (see above)—it’s a toss-up as to which of these two epics is the greater work of literature.
Growth of the Soil (1917) by Knut Hamsun (Norway) - 5 stars
This is a masterful peasant epic from Nobel laureate Hamsun. A solitary figure, heavily laden with supplies, trudges into the Norwegian wilds, a day’s walk from the nearest village. He selects a plot of land, cuts the timber, and begins turning the soil. One day a woman comes. Together as man and wife they carve out a living from the earth and build a home, a farm, and a family around which a community forms. Bad influences from the city, however, threaten the peace of their agrarian life. This novel is a truly powerful and moving reading experience.
Dust (1921) by Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (Kansas, USA) - 5 stars
Written by Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius, who ran America’s largest publisher of socialist literature from a little town in Southeastern Kansas. Dust is set in that very region and depicts agricultural life in hard-scrabble, unromantic terms. The novel’s primary concern, however, is a dysfunctional marriage between a husband who believes hard work, livestock, land, and profits are all that’s valuable in life and a wife who longs for love, happiness and beauty while condemned to a life of unrelenting toil. The setting may be reminiscent of Willa Cather, but the story bears the brutal naturalism of one of Frank Norris or Emile Zola’s darker works. A Kansas classic!
The Good Earth (1931) by Pearl S. Buck (USA, raised in China) - 5 stars
Pearl S. Buck, though born in America, was raised by missionary parents in China. Her second novel, The Good Earth, took the Western world by storm, for it was the first authentic literary peek behind the silk curtain of Chinese life. Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan start out as poor farmers in a mud-brick house, but through hard work, personal sacrifice, and a little luck, their family gradually rises from humble beginnings to a position of security and status. The story spans the first few decades of the early twentieth century, including scenes of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. Though steeped in Chinese culture, The Good Earth transcends time and place with universal themes of love, family, pride, and greed. This is the first volume in a trilogy, followed by Sons and A House Divided.
Of course, you can’t really talk about peasant epics without mentioning John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). I have not read that book in the last eight years, so it hasn’t been reviewed at Old Books by Dead Guys. I do have a copy and hope to get to it in 2020.
False Alarms
Judging from their titles, these books might sound like agrarian epics, but in fact they are not:
Shallow Soil (1893) by Knut Hamsun (Norway) - 4.5 stars
Although this is a very good novel by Hamsun, it is not about “soil” or anything remotely agricultural. It is a story of modern urban life in late-nineteenth century Kristiania (present-day Oslo). I believe Hamsun uses the title Shallow Soil as a critical metaphor for the lack of national spirit necessary for Norway to develop into a great nation. (His opinion, not mine.)
Children of the Soil (1894) by Henryk Sienkiewicz (Poland) - 1 star
This is a terrible novel and again has very little to do with farming. Some of the characters do own agricultural lands, which peasants farm for them. This is a book about rich people’s problems, however, and a depressingly grueling examination of the institution of marriage.
The Native Soil (1957) by Alan E. Nourse (USA)
This is actually a science fiction novel about a planet made of mud. Definitely not a peasant epic.
Brevity its only virtue
The Miraculous Revenge is a short story by George Bernard Shaw, originally published in 1885. The e-book version you’re likely to find online, however, is a reproduction of the story as it was reprinted in one of the Little Blue Books, an immensely popular series of inexpensive pocket paperbacks published by Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius, a radical publisher based in southeastern Kansas. Haldeman-Julius, sometimes referred to as the “Henry Ford of Literature,” published thousands of titles in the series and sold hundreds of millions of copies. This story from Shaw is number 215 in the series, which was probably published around 1923 or 1924. Shaw, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925, is best known as a playwright, but he was also an influential public intellectual who championed the same sort of socialist political causes as Haldeman-Julius. Given his prolific output, it was inevitable that Haldeman-Julius would publish the work of Shaw, a man for whom he probably held great admiration and esteem. That makes it all the more unfortunate and baffling, however, that he picked such a terrible story to showcase.
The Miraculous Revenge takes place in Ireland, and is narrated by an Englishman named Zeno Legge. He is described as “mad,” which in literary terms is an undefined mental illness that allows the hero to act like a jerk in public, speak in non-sequiturs, and generally annoy people. Legge travels to Dublin to visit his uncle, a Cardinal Archbishop. Soon fed up with his nephew and a little frightened of him too, the Cardinal dispatches the crazy man as a poorly chosen emissary to the small town of Four Mile Water, where a Christian miracle has been recently reported. Legge is tasked with investigating the veracity of the miraculous claims and reporting back to his uncle. The madman can’t help but engage in mischief, of course, and soon the townspeople are tired of him also.
As is the reader. The story is intended to be comic, and it’s written as slapstick dressed up in the vocabulary and syntax of high-brow 19th-century literature. It’s infused with anti-religious sentiment, which is just fine by me, but one wishes the commentary would have been more biting and less absurd. If anything, the silly miracle that occurs in Four Mile Water is viewed with approbation rather than skepticism. The only one who really comes out looking like a fool is the madman, and what’s so novel about that? The tale ends with a twist which fails to surprise or delight. Turn-of-the-last-century intellectuals may have guffawed at this satirical farce, but today’s readers are unlikely to chuckle.
Very few of the Little Blue Books are available as downloadable e-books, and unfortunately this is one of them. Shaw may have been an important figure in the literature and politics of his day, and for all I know he probably deserved his Nobel Prize, but this story is clearly not indicative of his talents and doesn’t deserve to be read. Even though it only costs about twenty minutes, there are better ways to spend that time.
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A sarcastic oligarchic paradise
A Trip to Plutopia, a short story by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, was originally published in 1918 in the pages of the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. Haldeman-Julius was editor of the Appeal, but is probably best known as the publisher of the Little Blue Books, a series of inexpensive paperbacks sold by the hundreds of millions at newsstands and through mail order. Around 1919, A Trip to Plutopia was published as a 16-page book that sold for 15 cents. It was No. 8 in The Appeal’s Pocket Series, a red-jacketed precursor to the Little Blue Books. Though Haldeman-Julius’s little books covered a variety of topics—literature, philosophy, history, science, even sex education—he often used the series to promote his socialist political views. Such is the case with A Trip to Plutopia.
Plutopia is an island nation of 50,000 inhabitants. Of these, 49,500 work like slaves while the remaining 500 enjoy the fruits of their labors. Though this may sound like a depressing dystopian vision, Haldeman-Julius sarcastically depicts it as a utopia, and thus it becomes comedy. The narrator interviews representatives of Plutopia’s two classes, both of whom seem pleased as punch with the arrangement of their ideal society. The workers labor 12 hours a day, live in communal housing, and wear paper sacks emblazoned with numbers that serve as their names. The wealthy plutocrats live in palaces dreaming up ways to cut costs while squeezing the last drop of labor out of their workforce.
Haldeman-Julius takes examples of the actual atrocious working conditions of his era and exaggerates them to comic extremes. What’s not funny about it, of course, is that to some extent Plutopia is a reflection of reality. At the time of the story’s publication, big business was treating labor like slaves, and there was little protective legislation to prevent it. While the possibility of a socialist revolution or a strike in Plutopia is mentioned, the workers are too complacent to undertake such a fight or too foolish to realize when they’re being exploited by The Man.
A Trip to Plutopia will appeal to those who appreciate the labor literature of the early twentieth century, such as the more polemical writings of Upton Sinclair or Jack London. Sinclair once penned a similar satire called The Millennium, yet Haldeman-Julius’s story is funnier. In fact, A Trip to Plutopia is almost perfect for what it is, yet a mere 14 pages of text can’t help coming across as somewhat inconsequential. On the other hand, unlike Sinclair’s Millennium, Haldeman-Julius gets points for knowing when to stop and not dragging the joke out so long that it overstays its welcome.
Though penned almost a century ago, A Trip to Plutopia still bears relevance for today’s world. Though working conditions have improved, the 1% is still the 1%, and income disparity is still a huge problem in America. By depicting ridiculous wealth inequality as if it were natural and favorable, Haldeman-Julius points out the absurdity of the system that allows it to continue.
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A forgotten gem of American literary regionalism
Emanuel Haldeman-Julius is best known as the publisher of the Little Blue Books, popular inexpensive paperbacks on a variety of subjects that sold hundreds of millions of copies. For several years he was also the editor of the most prominent socialist newspaper in America, the Appeal to Reason. His wife Marcet Haldeman-Julius was his partner in business as well as family matters. Though best know for their publishing company, headquartered in the little town of Girard in southeast Kansas, the two were also writers, as evidenced by their jointly authored novel Dust, published in 1921. Dust is set in the fictional town of Fallon, Kansas, a surrogate for Girard. From the title and its setting, I was expecting a hard-scrabble agricultural epic, perhaps a farmer fighting for his family’s survival against a pitiless soil and unforgiving climate. There’s definitely a little of that here, but mostly Dust is a novel about marriage. And judging by the marriage from hell depicted in this book, the Haldeman-Juliuses must have had one complicated union.
When Martin Wade was a young man, he came to Kansas from Ohio with his parents and siblings. They picked out a patch of unwelcoming dirt and called it their own. Through years of struggle and toil the family built a farm from this dust. A lot of time passes in chapter one, and soon Martin is a grown man and master of his agricultural domain. His farm is one of the most respected operations in the county, yet Martin feels like it’s missing one important element, a wife. He soon convinces Rose Conroy to fill the position. Martin is an active but stern man with an atheistic and materialistic view of life. He willingly does the work of several men because he recognizes that work is the most effective distraction from the pointlessness and hardship of life. Rose’s outlook on life is not so harshly constructed. She believes in traditional virtues like love, happiness, and beauty, while all Martin believes in is stock, feed, and dollars. Once united in marriage, Rose feels more like a servant in Martin’s household than a wife. Like any bride, she longs to be loved, or at least appreciated. Instead, she finds herself a prisoner to his unrelenting and emotionless devotion to toil.
Though the setting and subject matter may be similar to writings by Hamlin Garland or Willa Cather, stylistically Dust has more in common with the blunt and brutal naturalism of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague. The language is plain and straightforward, not in a pedestrian way but in an insightfully precise descriptive manner devoid of superfluous flourishes. The psychology of the characters is intricate and authentic. They unapologetically behave the way real human beings would behave, regardless of fictional conventions or the desires and expectations of the reader. There’s not a lot of sentimental nostalgia for the good ol’ farming life in this book. In fact, it may be one of the more depressing novels you’ll ever read, but it’s certainly never boring. The reader becomes riveted to the characters’ plight, and it’s never clear what’s going to happen next. In its own way, the book is rather inspirational for its depiction of how not to live your life. It really compels the reader to consider the relative importance of work, family, money, and love in his or her own life.
As a transplanted Kansan, the Haldeman-Juliuses are sort of local heroes of mine, for the little Parnassus of the Plains they established in Girard. I knew they were both writers, but I had no idea they could write this well. Dust may be largely forgotten today, but it deserves to be remembered alongside the works of Garland, Cather, Norris, and other great American realists of the early 20th century.
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The Little Blue Book of Spanish lit
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| Emilia Pardo Bazán |
This collection of short stories was originally published as one of the Little Blue Books, an immensely popular series produced mostly in the 1920s and ’30s by Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius, a radical publisher based in southeastern Kansas who made it his personal mission to educate the masses (while making money, of course). Haldeman-Julius, sometimes referred to as the “Henry Ford of Literature,” published thousands of titles in the series and sold hundreds of millions of copies. These small, brief, and inexpensive books spanned subjects as diverse as fiction, philosophy, science, history, and sex ed. First Love, volume number 1195 in the series, focuses on Spanish literature and features five short stories amounting to about 64 pages of text. It is one of the very few Little Blue Books that are now available as public domain ebooks at Amazon and Project Gutenberg.
The book opens with its title selection, “First Love” by Emilia Pardo Bazán. Likely the best entry in the volume, it’s the story of a boy falling in love for the first time, not with a person but with a portrait. “Mariquita the Bald” by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch is an O. Henry-esque fable about a beautiful woman who is incredibly vain with regards to her thick and lustrous hair. “The Love of Clotilde” by Armando Palacio Valdés concerns an actress’s love affair with a playwright. Two shorter selections, “An Andalusian Duel” by Serafin Estebanez Calderon and “Captain Veneno’s Proposal of Marriage” by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón are so brief they amount to little more than jokes, and to summarize them would be to reveal half their contents. What these five stories have in common is that they’re all love stories, they all possess the flavor of Balzac’s more lighthearted offerings, and they’re all pleasantly predictable. The only one that really offers anything in the way of surprises is the Hartzenbusch entry. If you like 19th-century literature, then predictability shouldn’t necessarily be a deal-breaker. Though the stories may not be “Fascinating” as the title indicates, they do offer a refreshing glimpse into “Spanish Life.”
With the exception of Don Quixote and perhaps a few 20th-century Nobel laureates, Spanish literature (from Spain, not Latin America) is generally unknown to most English-language readers. We just don’t see the abundance of translations that one finds with French, German, or Russian literature, particularly for 19th-century fiction. Another collection that’s available for free download is the Spanish volume of the Stories by Foreign Authors series, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1898. It includes two better works by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. The quality overall is about on a par with this one, but the stories are lengthier and a little more literary. The pieces included in First Love are oriented toward a broader popular audience.
As for the Little Blue Books series, hopefully more will be digitized and distributed as ebooks. I find Haldeman-Julius’s grand enterprise fascinating, and count myself among the masses longing to be educated by his nickel-a-volume wisdom.
Works in this collection
First Love by Emilia Pardo Bazán
An Andalusian Duel by Serafin Estebanez Calderon
Mariquita the Bald by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch
The Love of Clotilde by Armando Palacio Valdés
Captain Veneno’s Proposal of Marriage by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
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