Charles Dudley Warner

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > American Literature: Biographies

Warner, Charles Dudley (1829–1900), was born in Massachusetts, reared in western New York, and graduated from Hamilton College (1851). After publishing his commencement oration as The Book of Eloquence (1851), he went to Missouri as a railroad surveyor, then to the University of Pennsylvania (LL.B., 1858), and practiced law in Chicago (1858–60). Determining upon a literary and journalistic career, he made his home in Hartford, Conn., and after 1861 was editor of the Courant, although frequently occupied in other matters. His first mature book, My Summer in a Garden (1870), a series of essays about his farm, possessed the quiet humor and mellow grace of Irving, which also characterized his later essays, ranging from recollections of his childhood to literary criticism, and including Backlog Studies (1873), Baddeck (1874), Being a Boy (1878), On Horseback (1888), As We Were Saying (1891), The Relation of Literature to Life (1896), and Fashions in Literature (1902). His travel sketches, concerning his five trips to Europe and other journeys, are marked by similar qualities and include Saunterings (1872), My Winter on the Nile (1876), In the Levant (1877), In the Wilderness (1878), A Roundabout Journey (1883), and Our Italy (1891). Warner's biographies include Captain John Smith (1881) and, as editor of the American Men of Letters Series, Washington Irving (1881).

His first novel, written with his friend Clemens, was The Gilded Age (1873). The original idea has been attributed to Warner, and the character Philip Sterling is considered partly autobiographical, but the book's realism is more attributable to Clemens. Possibly prompted by this investigation of the shoddy Reconstruction era of big finance, Warner forsook the easy, rather shallow character of his essays to write his trilogy on the creation, immoral use, and dissipation of a great fortune. A Little Journey in the World (1889) depicts the ruin of the character of Margaret Debree through her reconciliation with the ruthless methods employed by her husband, Rodney Henderson, in accumulating his great fortune. The Golden House (1894) is centered on Henderson's second wife, Carmen, whose morality in her affair with Jack Delancy is shown to be on the same plane as that of her husband, who financially ruins the young aristocrat. That Fortune (1899) concerns the marriage of Carmen, after her husband's death, to Mavick, a wily politician who loses her fortune and thus destroys the sole distinction she enjoyed. The regeneration of values is suggested by the marriage of her daughter to Philip Burnett, an honest but socially undistinguished young lawyer, who becomes a journalist.