Sailing South American Skies by James Saxon Childers

Back in April I posted a piece on one of Hudson Strode's travel books, Now in Mexico. Strode taught English at the University of Alabama for many years before his death in 1976; many of the state's fiction writers passed through his classes. In addition to his travel books, Strode published a three volume biography of Jefferson Davis. 

In some ways James Saxon Childers [1899-1965] was similar to Strode. Childers was born in Birmingham and taught English at Birmingham-Southern College from 1925-1942. He also wrote some travel studies, such as the one I'm looking at in this post. While at Birmingham-Southern he published reviews and columns in local newspapers and several significant novels, including Hilltop in the Rain [1928], set at a small southern college. The significance of The Bookshop Mystery [1930] is noted at the end of this post. His 1936 work A Novel about a White Man and a Black Man in the Deep South was a daring portrait of endemic racism in the southern U.S. The 1942 spy novel Enemy Outpost was based on Childers' own military experiences. 

I have comments about this 1936 travel book below some of the images. As with the Strode book on Mexico, I haven't read this one and plan to let it go in the downsizing of my book collection.

You can find Childers 1933 Birmingham News-Age-Herald article on Parker High School here. One from the following year on the legendary Birmingham elephant Miss Fancy is here.

Photograph of Childers from the Encyclopedia of Alabama 

Childers in his study at Birmingham-Southern College in the late 1930's

Source: BhamWiki

My copy of the book is the 1936 first edition, but does not have the dust jacket, which you can see here. 

Like my copy of Strode's book, this one is signed by the author. I have been unable to identify "Vincent Townsend". Journeys through Childers' papers at the Birmingham Public Library or the University of North Carolina might solve the mystery. That message from Childers is rather cryptic. 

By the time this book appeared in 1936, Childers had quite a track record of publications.

Yes, we have the "Great White Visitor coming out of the jungle photograph" as the frontispiece. Childers is not only wearing a white suit and hat and a tie, but has the coat buttoned. Did people really travel like that or was the outfit donned for the photo?

I'm such a book nerd I researched the printers, Quinn and Boden of Rahway, New Jersey. The company was apparently a large one; a 1922 book about it can be read here. 

More cryptic dedications

Childers devotes a chapter to a strike by Mexican prostitutes and another to the "hellish sport" of bull fighting. 

More chapters are devoted to Rio, the "most beautiful city on earth", a thousand mile odyssey up the Amazon, and tropical fish. His final chapter, excerpts below, discusses American ignorance about the other America. 

One day while fishing on a lake in Alabama, Childers up and decided to fly around the whole of South America and see much of it. His reason? He knew "virtually nothing about the people of South America today, [and] I decided that I would go find out about them."

As he ends the book, Childers notes some things he would do differently if he took the trip again. 

The author notes that Americans need to overcome their lack of knowledge and their misinformation about the nations of South America. On a golf course in Uruguay, a famous surgeon gives him sage advice that we in the United States still haven't taken. 

Childers' only mystery novel, published in 1930, has never been reprinted and sells on the rare book market for prices ranging from $200+ to $900+. The work is an early example of the bibliomystery, a genre which involves libraries, bookstores, archives, their employees and/or the rare book market, etc. 

An Alabama Author & A Polar Explorer

On March 5 the shipwreck of the Endurance was located more than 100 years after Captain Ernest Shackleton and his crew abandoned the vessel during their 1915 expedition to the Antarctic. In January of that year the ship became frozen in ice; the crew remained with the Endurance until November when it sank. That event began even more incredible efforts by the crew. A recent account is Alfred Lansing and Nathaniel Philbrick's 2015 book Endurance. Incredibly, all members of the crew survived the ordeal. 

A photograph of Captain Shackleton's cabin on the ship reveals a few shelves of books he took on the expedition to help him pass the downtime. This article reprints the inventory of that personal library. The books include an encyclopedia, various dictionaries, collections of poetry, accounts of other polar expeditions, and wait--what's that? Why, it's a novel by an author with Alabama connections!

Let's investigate.

Over the course of her writing career, Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy published more than 20 novels between 1888 and 1930. One of those was World's-End, published in 1914. A copy of that book, probably with the cover and title page as shown below, ended up on a shelf in Shackleton's cabin. Also below is a contemporary review. You can read the novel online at the Internet Archive. So who was Amelie Louise Rives, later to become Princess Troubetzkoy?

Rives was born August 23, 1863, in Richmond, Virginia. Her parents were Alfred and Sarah; Alfred was an engineer. Amelie was the oldest of three daughters. At some point in the 1870's Alfred accepted a position as chief superintendent & general manager of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad in Mobile. Amelie--and probably her sisters--continued the study of music and drawing under tutors and governesses. She also studied music under Miss Evy, who operated a private school in the city, and drawing at the Mobile Academy of Design.

The Rives family can be found in Mobile in the 1880 U.S. census. Patriarch Alfred L. Rives was fifty years old, a civil engineer and born in France around 1830. His wife Sarah was from Virginia. The children were Amelia, 16; Gertrude, 13; and Daisy, 5. Their home was 87 Government Street, near the current location of the Exploreum Science Center and a couple of blocks from Bienville Square.

Amelia's first publication, the romantic short story "A Brother to Dragons" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1886. Two years later her first novel The Quick or the Dead? created a scandal with its daring--immoral!--content as it quickly sold 300,000 copies. The book featured a new widow attracted to her late husband's cousin. Rives career was off to an impressive start; she published many novels, poems, and plays until 1930 and her final novel, Firedamp. Poetry publication continued into the 1940s. She died June 15, 1945. 

In June 1888 Rives married her first husband, a wealthy New Yorker named John Armstrong Chaloner, who led a fascinating life himself. The marriage was tumultuous and by 1895 the couple divorced. The following year she wed a Russian prince, Pierre Troubetzkoy, an established portrait painter. The two were introduced to each other in England by Oscar Wilde. That union lasted until his death in 1936. The couple lived in her ancestral home Castle Hill in Virginia. You can see the prince's 1904 photograph of his wife here. 

Despite her many publications and fame during her lifetime, Rives has fallen into obscurity since her death. Little has been written about her life or critical evaluation of her work. All of which is a shame. She mixed with some of the best known authors of the day, ranging from Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ellen Glasgow and Mark Twain. Author James Branch Cabell was a cousin. She was an enthusiastic supporter of women's suffrage. Her work was parodied, surely a sign of her acclaim. Newspapers published anecdotes about her. 

Some reviews were positive, but many not. Her novels were long, stuffed with characters and events and included racial stereotypes of the day. Her heroines and heroes felt intensely, but spoke in the overheated dialog characteristic of so much literature at that time. Yet modern topics crept into them. In her 1915 novel Shadows of Flames a wife discovers the hiding place of her morphine-addicted husband--in his cigarettes. 

See Leila Christenbury's essay linked below for many more details of Rives' life and work. A search of the Library of Congress' Chronicling America newspaper database for 1880-1945 will turn up numerous articles about Rives published in her lifetime. 

Further Reading

Louis Auchincloss, A Writer's Capital Houghton Mifflin, 1979. [Includes a chapter on Rives]

Leila Christenbury, "Amélie Louise Rives Chanler Troubetzkoy 1863–1945," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 

Welford Dunaway Taylor.  Amelie Rives (Princess Troubetzkoy Twayne, 1973 [info on Rives' time in Mobile is on p. 21]

Amelie Rives [1863-1945]

Source: The Bookman via Wikimedia Commons

This photo of Shackleton's cabin was taken in early March 1915 by Australian photographer Frank Hurley. 

Source: BBC.com

These two illustrations in World's End were reproduced from paintings by Alonzo Myron Kimball; one is seen on the cover of Collier's below.

Source: Wikipedia

Prior to book publication the novel was serialized in Collier's November 29, 1913-April 11, 1914

Source: FictionMags Index

Findlay Weaver, editor of the Canadian publication Maclean's, discussed the book in the October 1, 1914, issue: 

To get back to the particular book to be considered this month, “World’s End” gets its name from the estate in Virginia where the greater part of the action of the story takes place. The novel can scarcely evade the charge of sentimentalism, yet it has an appealing quality which will endear it to the lovers of romance.

The principal characters of the tale are Phoebe Nelson, a heroine who blooms with all the charm of the South, her cousin Richard Bryce and his uncle Owen Randolph.

Richard is a fascinating young man, an abnormally clever artist with untold faith in himself as such and as a poet as well. But he has a twisted view of life, which, in the influence exerted on the girl with her rich and romantic nature, all but wrecks her prospects of true happiness and would have done so but for quiet strength in body, mind, and emotion of Richard’s uncle, Owen Randolph, who, stirred to the depth of his compassion and love for her, employs the force of his big character to reconstruct her life. Through deeply pathetic circumstances, by Owen’s assistance, she finally wins to triumphant happiness and the telling is lightened along the way by a charming humor and fine descriptive pasages making “World’s End” a most realistic place indeed, with warmly pictured characters, including funny and lovable negro servants.

Richard had peculiar views as to religion and marriage. He considered them “inartistic.” The universe was to him a vast studio. At twenty-six his enthusiasms gave him keener delight than they did to those about him. He did not restrict his attention to painting, for besides that he was, at the time of the opening of the story, engaged in writing a one-act opera in accordance with the Chinese laws of music which he maintained constituted the only real tonic-scale; and was also writing a volume of poems, the latest of his poems being “The Daughter of Ypocras.” Expounding this poem, he said: “Ypocras was a lovely girl who had been changed into a dragon and doomed to retain this fearful shape until some lover, knowing her plight, should be bold enough to kiss her on the mouth. The lover comes and, being often mirrored in the beautiful eyes which are all that remain to her of her woman’s form, is drawn gradually into doting on the rare sinuosities of her dragon-shape, and the play of the light along her scales of gold and violet. So that when at last his kiss transforms her again to woman, his artist heart breaks at the loss of his exquisite dragon, and he sinks dying at the feet of the sweetly normal maiden who has taken her place.” Richard further explained that he had endeavored in the poem to reveal some of the dark yet radiant magic lurking in the mysterious perversities of femininity, as opposed to the common-place attraction of what he called “the daylight charm of the uncomplex woman.”

Such twisted views were characteristic of Richard. For instance, when he came suddenly upon Phoebe in her garden, helpet crow “Jimmy Toots” was perched on her shoulder and as she caught sight of Richard she tried with both hands to tear “Jimmy Toots” from his perch but Richard, seeing “a picture of a young woman in an April garden with a bird of ill-omen on her shoulder,” urged her not to take it down.

“You with that crow are like a poem by Baudelaire” and forthwith “Jimmy Toots” became “M. Baudelaire” to Richard. How could one of his intensely artistic nature possibly employ such an inelegant term as “Jimmy Toots.”

Richard paints her picture in the garden with “M. Baudelaire,” calling the painting “Pandore et le Genie du Coffre.” In the painting he exaggerated a likeness he saw in her to a Botticelli, so that the head seemed a little small for the long nymphean limbs. “But the translation of Jimmy Crow into a bird of sombre presage was wholly a masterpiece.

Far more than any serpent he seemed fitted to whisper of honeyed sins in the ear of this virginal Eve-Pandore.

When Phoebe was permitted to see the painting her first words were, “Are my . . . am I quite as ... as long as that?” Her father, while admitting that the treatment was certainly original, considered that his living Phoebe was far prettier than Richard’s “Pandore.”

The reader can well imagine the effect of an attractive yet wholly self-centred young man in his influence upon the young woman who saw in him the ideal for whom she waited and will realize something of the possibilities which this situation opens to the author in working out the story and it is like getting into God’s clear sunshine when the influence of Owen Randolph eventually gains precedence.

The sinking of the Endurance 1 November 1915

Source: Wikipedia

Alabama Author: Gladys Baker

I recently wrote a blog post on a poet with Alabama connections, Sara Henderson Hay. In the course of researching Hay, I discovered her relationship in the 1930's with another state author, Gladys Baker. 

Here's what I wrote in that blog post about Baker: "In 1935 while at Scribner's Hay was able to tour Europe as secretary to Gladys Baker, a syndicated newspaper columnist. Baker had moved to the Magic City in 1926 to begin working for the Birmingham News. Small world, isn't it? I've yet to discover how the two women met, but on the tour they met with Pope Pius XI, Mussolini, Ataturk and other notables."

Unfortunately, I still haven't discovered how Hay and Baker met. Let's investigate.

Baker was born around 1900 in Jacksonville, Florida. Despite a fair amount of searching, I have yet to find an exact date. Her parents were Arthur Herbert [1869-1926] and Johnnie Niblo Baker [1873-1936]. They were married on December 23, 1890, in Glenn, Georgia. 

Before her death on December 18, 1957, Baker had published countless  newspaper articles in papers around the world and two books. Her first book, I Had to Know, was published in 1951 and chronicles her life up to that point and her conversion to Catholicism and from a Southerner to a "Damyankee" in Vermont. She retired from newspaper writing in 1942. 

She landed her first newspaper job at the Jacksonville Journal while in her late teens. According to the 1919 Jacksonville City Directory the family lived at 1849 Riverside Avenue, and her father worked as a clerk at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

Her next job was at the Birmingham News Age-Herald, "where that great editor Charles A. Fell created a job for me--special New York correspondent." Her contract called for a full-page interview with a celebrity or newsmaker for the Sunday edition.

In her autobiography she tells us she soon moved to NYC and had her pieces appearing not only in the Birmingham paper but also publications in Dallas, Charlotte, Atlanta and Jacksonville. Before long she had national syndication. Baker met H.L. Mencken, who introduced her to fine dining at the 21 Club, downstairs where celebrities ate. "Our table was the mecca of the literati," she declared. Unfortunately, she does not name a single one of them. By this time Mencken had met, but not yet married Sara Haardt, an author and native of Montgomery, Alabama. 

Baker often fails to offer names and dates. For instance, she discusses her childhood and parents, but does not give us their names! We learn them from the New York Times notice of her marriage to automotive executive Howard Coffin on June 2 1937: the late Mr. and Mrs. A. Herbert Baker of Jacksonville, Florida. The parents names also appear in Baker's "Alabama Authors" entry linked in the second paragraph.  Strangely, Baker is not named in Coffin's Wikipedia entry; at any rate the marriage did not last long. He died later that year. Oh, and he's not mentioned in her book, either. She also didn't bother to name her four siblings. 

She wrote two syndicated serial fiction stories, "Sallie's Temptations" and "Mr. and Mrs. Sallie" The first installment of "Sallie's Temptations" can be found in the Carbon County [Montana] News on January 8, 1925. Syndication to various newspapers had begun the previous year. Like so many such serials, neither was ever published in book form.

Baker had four husbands: William H. Oates, William H. Kellig, Jr., Howard E. Coffin and Roy Leonard Patrick.

Her first book, dedicated to her fourth husband, is mainly a record of two things: all the celebrities she interviewed during her newspaper career and her search for spiritual fulfillment that ends in Catholicism. One chapter also chronicles her battles with a mysterious illness in 1946. All well and good, but for my purposes very disappointing. There is little mention of her time in Birmingham or even the years she spent in Jacksonville. There is no mention at all of Sara Henderson Hay. 

I have not read her novel, Our Hearts Are Restless, published in 1955. You can find her first book at the Internet Archive. 

So my search for information about Hay in New York in the 1930's was fruitless. I did learn more about Baker, but she did not seem to be much interested in giving many details of her life before her conversion. Her connection with Alabama is also pretty slight. Another thing I found frustrating was the lack of information I found in census and other records about her parents and siblings. 

That "Alabama Authors" entry on Baker gives as sources "files" at the Birmingham Public Library and the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Research at those two places might produced more details. I was also unable to view her obituary in the New York Times; it's behind their paywall. 

Oh, well, you never know where these journeys down a rabbit hole will end up....

Published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951

Baker may have been famous in her day, but she's forgotten now. 

G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1955

Source:

Files at Birmingham Public Library; Alabama Department of Archives and History; and from New York Times, December 18, 1957.

Publication(s):

I Had to Know. New York; Appleton Century, 1951.

Our Hearts Are Restless. New York; Putnam, 1955.

Alabama Author: Gwen Bristow

Several states can claim Gwen Bristow including South Carolina, Louisiana, Connecticut, Mississippi, California and Alabama. Let's investigate.

She was born in Marion, South Carolina, on September 16, 1903. Her writing efforts seem to have begun with her reporting of junior high school events to a local newspaper. Since her father Louis Jordan Bristow was a Baptist minister, she began college at Anderson Bible College in that South Carolina town. After a year she transferred to Judson College, a very strict Baptist women's college in Marion, Alabama. Despite her dislike of the rules,, Bristow continued her artistic development. She directed and played men's roles in two plays, and in 1923 was voted "Most Original" by her junior class peers. 

Upon graduating the following year, Bristow began working odd jobs so she could study journalism at Columbia University in New York City. She only spent a year in the Big Apple, however. Bristow worked a summer job at the New Orleans Times-Picayune and when the paper offered her a permanent post; she took it. At first she lived with her parents on the grounds of Southern Baptist Hospital, where her father had become Superintendent. 

Bristow spent much of the 1920's covering a range of events for the newspaper, including crimes and the great flood of 1927. She also wrote obituaries of prominent people and interviewed actors visiting the city. She also wrote poetry during this period and in 1926 published a small collection, The Alien and Other Poems. 

While covering a murder trial Bristow met fellow journalist Bruce Manning, and they eloped on January 14, 1929, to avoid objections from her Baptist family to Manning's Catholicism. They moved into an apartment on 627 Ursuline Street in the French Quarter. 

The couple soon collaborated on a novel, The Invisible Host, published by the Mystery League in 1930. From 1930 until 1933 the League published 30 hardcover mysteries that were inexpensive but featured striking Art Deco covers. The early titles--The Invisible Host was sixth in the series--sold for a quarter. I presume that because of the Great Depression the publisher folded after issuing only one title in 1933. 

The plot of the book will be familiar to anyone who's read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None or seen any of the film versions. Eight people known to each other receive anonymous invitations to attend dinner at a New Orleans penthouse. As the unseen host informs them over radio, the place is booby-trapped, and they will all die before morning. Complications ensue. 

The Invisible Host was soon adapted into a Broadway play called The Ninth Guest by prolific playwright Owen Davis. A 1934 film adaptation used the same title as the play. Christie is presumed not to have read or seen these materials before writing her famous novel, which was published in November 1939.

For the next two years Bristow and Manning continued writing together and produced three more books: The Gutenberg Murders (1931), The Mardi Gras Murders (1932) and Two and Two Make Twenty-Two (1932). After these four collaborations their writing careers diverged when they moved to Hollywood in 1934.

Manning published one novel, Party Wire, in 1935, and then began working as a screenwriter, director and producer until 1957. He died in 1965. Bristow also wrote some novels on her own, couldn't find a publisher and destroyed the manuscripts. Then she began writing the first of what became three popular Louisiana plantation novels: Deep Summer (1937), The Handsome Road (1938), and This Side of Glory (1940). These works follow two families over several generations. 

Bristow published several more novels before her death in 1980. She also published two memoirs, Gwen Bristow, A Self-Portrait (1941) and From Pigtails to Wedding Bells (1977). I wonder if she covers any of her time at Judson in either of those books. 

Source: Wikipedia

Book jacket for the 1930 first edition as reproduced at Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC

Author Gwen Bristow, author of "Celia Garth." Shown here with Melvin Shortess at her book signing. This photo was probably taken at the Shortess Book Store in New Orleans in 1955. Melvin H. (1909-1975) & Helen T. (1910-1979) Shortess were proprietors of the Shortess Book Store.

Source: Louisiana Digital Library

This novel was first published in 1959. That probably means the caption above has "1955" in error. 

This novel, which appeared in 1937, was the first volume of Bristow's Plantation Trilogy. This paperback edition was published in 1947. 

This 1950 novel was a bestseller, and a film version, with screenplay by Bruce Manning, was released in 1954.

Source: Fantastic Fiction

Some Further Reading, etc. 

Bristow, Gwen. Papers. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Dean, Lauren. “Gwen Bristow: Best Selling Author 1903-1980,” New Orleans Historical, accessed July 31, 2020, https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/558

Lowry, Julia B. “Carolina’s Gwen Bristow Finds She’s Obliged to Write!” Columbia State Magazine, November 5, 1950, pp. 6–7.

MacNebb, Betty L. “Gwen Bristow: Carolina’s Best Seller.” South Carolina Magazine 12 (July 1949): 8, 10.

Theriot, Billie J. “Gwen Bristow: A Biography with Criticism of Her Plantation Trilogy.” Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1994.

An Alabama Author Buried in Marianna, Florida

On a recent trip to visit our daughter, son-in-law and grandson in the Jacksonville, Florida, area, Dianne and I stopped at a cemetery beside the St.Luke's Episcopal Church in Marianna. We do that sort of thing in our family. Daughter Becca visited her brother Amos in New Orleans recently, and the first photo she texted showed them in one of the city's spectacular cemeteries. Blog posts I've written about cemetery visits include--but are not limited to-- Allan Cemetery in northern Shelby County, the Pelham cemetery, and Harmony Graveyard in Helena. 

But the wife and I had a specific reason for stopping at St. Luke's. Caroline Lee Hentz, one of America's best selling antebellum authors, and many of her family members are buried there. Hentz and her husband Nicholas, accompanied by their children had spent a decade and a half in Alabama operating private schools in various cities. So let's look into this situation.

In 2014 I published a blog post on Marie Layet Shiep, a Mobile native and  author who died in Apalachicola. She had a fascinating career as well, which included script writing for early silent films and publication of a controversial novel, Gulf Stream, set in Mobile. She is buried in that city, but I'm sensing a theme of interest here--authors with both Alabama and Florida connections. Zora Neale Hurston, anyone?

Caroline Lee Whiting was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, on June 1, 1800, the youngest of eight children. Her father John was a bookseller. At 17 she began teaching in a local school, and seven years later married Nicholas Hentz, a French native who came to America in 1816 with his family after the fall of Napoleon. 

At the time of their marriage, Hentz was teaching at the Round Hill School in Northampton. He had studied medicine and miniature painting in France and in America expanded his interests to include the study of spiders; his manuscript on that topic was published posthumously in 1875. Hentz also suffered from serious bouts of depression and jealousy throughout his life; these emotional states may have been behind the family's tendency to move every few years.

As noted in the chronology below, the Hentzes lived in Massachusetts, North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Ohio before ending up in Alabama. Apparently an episode of jealousy by Nicholas led him to move the family from Cincinnati to Florence, Alabama. Hentz later used this family drama in her fictional accounts of male jealousy. 

The Hentzes were in Florence from late 1834 until 1843, the longest period the family ever lived in one place. Caroline kept a diary for 1836, their second full year in the state. That manuscript is in the Southern History Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The finding aid for the Hentz Family papers there can be found here. 

Their home and schoolhouse was a two-story white-washed brick cottage she named Locust Dell. The first floor was a large teaching room; dormitories for pupils were upstairs. Nicholas constructed a square building in the yard for the pianos and music instruction. Hentz had her own four children and 15-20 boarding students plus 60-100 day students to manage at Locust Dell.  

Hentz describes in her diary a range of emotions we might expect from a stranger in a strange land. She is homesick for both the Massachusetts of her youth and the friends she left in Cincinnati that she misses.

The pleasures and frustrations of running a private school are clear. On May 30 she has to treat her students with "Alternate coaxing and scolding, counsel and reproof, frowns and smiles--Oh, what a life it is. Oh woe's me--this weary world, I am oft tempted to say." Then, on June 6, "The last week of the session. Welcome sweet season of rest." And the next day, "Arithmetic, for the last time this session. Rejoice."

She also talks about July 4 celebrations, at that time a serious business of readings and speeches. She, Nicholas and the children made summer fishing trips to the Coffee plantation north of Florence. General John Coffee, who served under Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812, had died in 1833, but his widow and children still lived on the property. Two of the sons were among the few boys enrolled at the Hentzes' school. During these trips samples were collected for Nicholas' insect collection. 

Her leisure reading that year included the poetry of Lord Byron  and fiction by Frederick Marryat, Edward Bulwar-Lytton and Maria Edgeworth. The arrival of books by steamboat was a cause for family celebration.

The year's diary is filled with observations about the rich natural world around her. In February 1836 Hentz declares the snows of New England have lost their charms to the more "genial clime" of her new home. In various entries she notes the birds, nighttime stars, and many plants such as ranunculus, yellow narcissus and rosemary. 

Nicholas published one novel, Tadeuskund, the Last King of Lenape in 1825. Also In 1825 Nicholas published an article in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society about the North American alligator. i wonder if he had ever seen one in the wild? He does say he had dissected several large specimens soon after they died while he was in South Carolina. 

The couple had five children; Wikipedia summarizes: "Marcellus Fabius (1825–1827), Charles Arnould (1827–1894), Julia Louisa (1829–1877), Thaddeus William Harris(1830–1878), and Caroline Therese (1833–1904). Julia was born at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She was educated by both of her parents and married in 1846 to Dr. John Washington Keyes in Tuskegee.^[4] Julia wrote several short poems but most of her works were never published. Her most well known work was a prize poem called "A Dream of Locust Dell".^[5] The youngest daughter, Caroline Therese was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and also educated by her parents and married the Baptist pastor, Rev. James O. Branch. She went on to publish tales and sketches published in magazines. Charles Arnould became a physician." 

The Hentzes would end up spending fifteen years in Alabama operating private schools in several different towns. Caroline, a northerner by birth, became a southerner during that time and wrote several best selling novels about life in the South. When they arrived Alabama was still a frontier state; conditions were little changed by the the time she died except the Native Americans had been removed and the white and black populations had expanded. 

Hentz (and often Caroline) taught at schools in these places after their marriage:

1824-26: school in Northampton, Mass.

1826-1830: UNC Chapel Hill as Chair of modern languages and belles lettres 

1830-32: school in Covington KY

1832-34: Cincinnati

1834-43: Florence, Ala.

1843-45: Tuscaloosa

1845-48: Tuskegee

1848-ca. 1850: Columbus, Ga. 

ca. 1850-1856: Marianna, Fla. 

Caroline and Nicholas eventually moved in with son Charles the doctor in Marianna due to Nicholas' failing health. She wrote and published eight novels and seven story collections there to support the family before her death on February 11, 1856, of pneumonia. Her husband died on November 4 of the same year. Nathaniel Hawthorne probably would have included her in the "damned mob of scribbling women" he complained about in an 1855 letter to his publisher. In her final novel Ernest Linwood [1856], she explored such autobiographical themes as jealousy and the conflict between professional female authorship and domestic duties. 

Two of Caroline's children also did a bit of writing. The couple's youngest child Caroline Therese was born in Cincinnati in November 1833. She married a Methodist minister, Rev. James O. Branch. While living in California she wrote letters that were published in the Southern Christian Advocate  in 1875. She also published tales and sketches in other magazines. She died in October 1904 and is buried in Georgia. 

The older daughter Julia Louise had been born in North Carolina in October 1828. In 1846 she married John Washington Keyes while the family lived in Tuskegee. Keyes, a native of Athens, Alabama, was a physician who later studied dentistry. He served as a surgeon in the 17th Alabama Regiment in the Civil War. They lived in Florida at first, then moved to Montgomery in 1857. After the war Julia and her husband joined the Southerners who left the United States for Brazil. The pair and their children lived in the Gunter Colony from 1867 until 1870, when they returned to Montgomery. The family settled in Wewahitchka, Florida, where she died in 1877. She and John are both buried in Jehu Cemetery in that small Panhandle town. You can read more about the experiences of the Confederados in Brazil here and here.

Before and after her marriage Julia wrote poetry, most of which was not published. Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography [1892] notes, "In 1859 Mrs. Keyes wrote a prize poem entitled 'A Dream of Locust Dell.' A  selection of her poems was published by her husband." I have been unable to locate that collection, unless it's the one published as Poems in Brazil in 1918, some years after his death. Julia's memoir about their time in South America, "Our Life in Brazil" was published in the Alabama Historical Quarterly in 1966. 

Charles A. Hentz was the oldest child who survived to adulthood. He was born in 1827 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and died in Quincy, Florida, in 1894. Along with Thaddeus, Charles was the other physician among the Hentz children; he practiced in the small Florida panhandle towns of Marianna and Quincy for his entire career. Charles began a diary at the age of 18, when the family was living in Tuscaloosa. The diary includes much about his life and medical practice; near the end of his life he also wrote an autobiography. These were published in 2000 as A Southern Practice: The Diary and Autobiography of Charles A. Hentz, M.D., edited by Steven M. Stowe; they make fascinating reading. 

More text continues below the photos. 

Hentz was inducted into Florence's "Walk of Honor" in 2007. 

This cemetery marker notes the presence of other notables from the area in addition to the Hentzes. 

A view across the cemetery with the church in the background

Thaddeus W. Hentz [1830-1878], was a son of Caroline and Nicholas; I've seen references to him as either a doctor or dentist. 

Another view with the new church buildings in the background

Thaddeus W. Hentz [1860-1927], presumably a grandson

Grave of Caroline Lee Hentz [1800-1856]

The photo at Find-A-Grave shows the column atop its base; you can see the monument's condition when we were there below. 

A single stone is inscribed as follows: 

Children of Dr. John W. & Julia L. Keyes

 Julia Hentz [11 Feb 1849 6 Dec 1849]

 Infant boy [born & died 15 Dec 1853]

Henry Whiting [19 Sept 1851 4 Nov 1856]

The snapped rose usually indicates a young lady who died too soon, in this case young Julia.

Caroline Hentz's gravestone showing the column that has toppled

Cemetery view across Hentz's grave with the church in the background

Nicholas Marcellus Hentz 

During his lifetime Hentz published numerous articles on spiders in scientific journals, as well as textbooks and other items. 

Source: Wikipedia

Hentz was able to collect many more species of spiders during his years in the South than he had in the Northeast or Midwest. His collection of spiders and other insects was donated to a Boston museum.  This book was published after his death. 

Caroline Hentz's numerous novels and story collections are available via the Internet Archive. Her best known novel was The Planter's Northern Bride, published in 1854. The book is one of many that responded to Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayal of slavery and the South in Uncle Tom's Cabin. As she observes in her introduction, Hentz had lived in Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Florida and her own "northern bride" experience and observations were different from Stowe's. See below for an excerpt from that introduction. She felt her many years in the South gave her a truer picture of slavery than Stowe's. In one of those ironies of history, Hentz and Stowe had been members of the same literary society in Cincinnati. 

Hentz was one of a number of antebellum female authors writing "domestic fiction" largely designed to instruct young women of the upper classes how to conduct themselves as adults in their proper sphere, the home. Most of her writing fits this general template. Contemporary scholars have noted that although the heroines don't ultimately overturn any social norms, they often spend much of these novels challenging the menfolk in various ways. Hentz's novels were popular into the 1890's, but have not been reprinted, and she is pretty much unknown to all but specialist scholars. You can see some of that scholarship here.

In addition to slavery, in her novels and stories Hentz explored courtship and marriage, uncontrolled emotions in both men and women, and the conflict between domestic duties and female literary achievement. She defended female intellectual capabilities and pursuits, but not at the expense of her role in the home. 

Hentz's response to Stowe put her into the "public sphere" where supposedly only the men operated. Of course, the same could be said for other female writers who responded to Stowe, as well as Stowe herself and those who agreed with her.  Slavery was that kind of issue. 

Her apologia for slavery renders Hentz's best known work highly problematic. As you can see in the photos above of the graves of her and her family, her final resting place seems as decayed as those ideas. 

Press Notices 

Published in The Planter's Northern Bride

Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1854

READ WHAT SOME OF THE LEADING EDITORS SAY OF IT:   "It is unquestionably the most powerful and important, if not the most charming work that has yet flowed from her elegant pen; and though evidently founded upon the all-absorbing subjects of slavery and abolitionism, the genius and skill of the fair author have developed new views of golden argument, and flung around the whole such a halo of pathos, interest, and beauty, as to render it every way worthy of the author of 'Linda,' 'Marcus Warland,' 'Rena,' and the numerous other literary gems from the same author." — American Courier.   "We have seldom been more charmed by the perusal of a novel; and we desire to commend it to our readers in the strongest words of praise that our vocabulary affords. The incidents are well varied; the scenes beautifully described; and the interest admirably kept up. But the moral of the book is its highest merit. The 'Planter's Northern Bride' should be as welcome as the dove of peace to every fireside in the Union. It cannot be read without a moistening of the eyes, a softening of the heart, and a mitigation of sectional and most unchristian prejudices." — N. Y. Mirror.   "The most delightful and remarkable book of the day." — Boston Traveler.   "The characters are finely drawn, and well sustained, from the beginning to the end of the work." — Boston Morning Post.   "Written with remarkable vigor, and contains many passages of real eloquence. We heartily commend it to general perusal."

From Hentz's introduction:

  We believe that there are a host of noble, liberal minds, of warm, generous, candid hearts, at the North, that will bear us out in our views of Southern character, and that feel with us that our national honour is tarnished, when a portion of our country is held up to public disgrace and foreign insult, by those, too, whom every feeling of patriotism should lead to defend it from ignominy and shield it from dishonour. The hope that they will appreciate and do justice to our motives, has imparted enthusiasm to our feelings, and energy to our will, in the prosecution of our literary labour.

        When we have seen the dark and horrible pictures drawn of slavery and exhibited to a gazing world, we have wondered if we were one of those favoured individuals to whom the fair side of life is ever turned, or whether we were created with a moral blindness, incapable of distinguishing its lights and shadows. One thing is certain, and if we were on judicial oath we would repeat

---

it, that during our residence in the South, we have never witnessed one scene of cruelty or oppression, never beheld a chain or a manacle, or the infliction of a punishment more severe than parental authority would be justified in applying to filial disobedience or transgression. This is not owing to our being placed in a limited sphere of observation, for we have seen and studied domestic, social, and plantation life, in Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. We have been admitted into close and familiar communion with numerous families in each of these States, not merely as a passing visiter, but as an indwelling guest, and we have never been pained by an inhuman exercise of authority, or a wanton abuse of power.

        On the contrary, we have been touched and gratified by the exhibition of affectionate kindness and care on one side, and loyal and devoted attachment on the other. We have been especially struck with the cheerfulness and contentment of the slaves, and their usually elastic and buoyant spirits. From the abundant opportunities we have had of judging, we give it as our honest belief, that the negroes of the South are

---

the happiest labouring class on the face of the globe; even subtracting from their portion of enjoyment all that can truly be said of their trials and sufferings. The fugitives who fly to the Northern States are no proof against the truth of this statement. They have most of them been made disaffected by the influence of others-- tempted by promises which are seldom fulfilled[.] Even in the garden of Eden, the seeds of discontent and rebellion were sown; surely we need not wonder that they sometimes take root in the beautiful groves of the South.

Hentz's death on February 11, 1856, at the home of her son Charles in Marianna, was widely covered by the American press. This item from an Ohio newspaper reprints an article from the New York Tribune. 

Perrysburg Journal [Ohio] 1 March 1856

Source: Library of Congress Chronicling America

Even at least one anti-slavery publication covered her death; this one's author includes a description by someone who met Hentz. This article also includes a lengthy account of Hentz's return to Massachusetts in 1854 to visit relatives. 

Anti-Slavery Bugle [Ohio] 29 March 1856

Source: Library of Congress Chronicling America

Works by Hentz

Lovell’s Folly (1833)
De Lara, or, The Moorish Bride (1843)
Aunt Patty’s Scrap-bag (1846)
Linda or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850)
Rena, or, The Snow Bird (1851)
Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale; or, The Heiress of Glenmore (1852)
Ugly Effie, or, the Neglected One and the Pet Beauty (1852)
Marcus Warland, or the Long Moss Spring (1852) 
Wild Jack, or the Stolen Child (1853) 
The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) 
The Banished Son and Other Stories of the Heart (1856)
Courtship and Marriage (1856)
Ernest Linwood; Or, the Inner Life of the Author (1856)
The Lost Daughter and Other Stories of the Heart (1857)

FURTHER READING

Beidler, Philip D. Caroline Lee Hentz's Long Journal. Alabama Heritage winter 2005, pp. 24-31

Ellison, Rhoda Coleman. Mrs. Hentz and the Green-Eyed Monster. American Literature 22: 345-350, November 1950

Ellison, Rhoda Coleman. Caroline Lee Hentz's Alabama Diary. Alabama Review 4: 254-269, October 1951

Horn, Patrick E.  The Literary Friendship of George Moses and Caroline Lee Hentz. North Carolina Literary Review 28: 134-143, 2019 [Moses was an enslaved poet.]