LITERARY COLONIES

Literary colonies refer to settlements of writers who often share aesthetic and political ideals. Between 1870 and 1920, five significant literary colonies afforded American writers shelter and intellectual camaraderie.

NOOK FARM

In the 1850s a community was established on the western edge of Hartford, Connecticut. Known as Nook Farm, the colony was founded by three prominent New England activists: John Hooker, a lawyer and abolitionist; his wife Isabella Beecher Hooker, a suffragist and women's rights leader; and Francis Gillette, a senator, abolitionist, and temperance reformer. They purchased the 140-acre farm and split it into large residential parcels in 1853. The community originally consisted of intellectuals united in their strong religious beliefs and opposition to slavery. Among them was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1852), who was Isabella Beecher Hooker's half sister.

Nook Farm's most famous resident was Mark Twain, who did not arrive until 1871. Disgusted by the grasping values of post–Civil War America—though paradoxically always tempted by get-rich-quick schemes—Clemens did not light out for the territory as did his hero Huck Finn but instead built a large, showy house—sometimes described as "Steamboat Gothic"—amid this community. Some have argued that he chose Nook Farm because it was halfway between New York and Boston, the two primary publishing centers of the time, but other considerations were undoubtedly more important. For one thing, his wife, Olivia, was a close friend of the prestigious Hooker family, particularly of their daughter Alice. Also, Hartford's honorable intellectual tradition, as well as its beautiful pastoral setting and relaxed lifestyle, appealed to him.

The community at Nook Farm was close, and the consequences of having a circle of intellectuals living in close proximity were significant. One of Twain's neighbors was the writer and newspaper publisher Charles Dudley Warner. At a dinner in February 1873, the story goes, Twain and his wife entertained Warner and his wife Susan. When the two men complained of the poor quality of popular literature, the women challenged them to do better. The two men agreed to collaborate on a work, which led to the writing of The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). Based on the novel's mocking portrayal of American society, the expression "the Gilded Age" soon became synonymous with the period after the Civil War, which was marked by unprecedented corruption in business and government. William Dean Howells, the senior man of American letters of the time and a frequent visitor to Nook Farm, wrote to a friend on 21 March 1874 about the collegial atmosphere at the community: "It seems to me quite an ideal life. They [Twain and Warner] live very near each other, in a sort of suburban grove, and their neighbors . . . go in and out of each other's houses without ringing" (Twain 1:16n).

Another resident of Nook Farm was the Reverend Joseph Hopkins Twichell, who was also a writer. Twichell became Twain's closest friend and accompanied him on his European tour in 1880, which led to A Tramp Abroad (1880); Twichell is represented by the character Harris in the book. Twichell also suggested to Twain that he write Life on the Mississippi (1883), and he often read over Twain's manuscripts, offering editing and more substantial suggestions. Twichell would later write the biography John Winthrop: First Governor of the Massachusetts Colony (1891) and edit Some Old Puritan Love-letters—John and Margaret Winthrop—1618–1638 (1891).

Due in part to his financial difficulties, Twain began an around-the-world tour in 1895, leaving two of his daughters, Susy and Jean, in America. Initially, the girls were expected to later join their parents in Europe, but Susy became ill and died of meningitis before her parents could return to America. Susy's unexpected death was particularly traumatic for Twain, and his writing becomes notably darker and more pessimistic afterward. Another seeming consequence of Susy's death was that Twain and his family avoided Nook Farm afterward, though they often discussed returning. However, shortly after visiting Nook Farm to attend the funeral of Charles Dudley Warner in 1900, Twain put the Connecticut home up for sale.

GREENWICH VILLAGE

Greenwich Village, a section of Lower Manhattan in New York City, is the longest-standing literary colony in America. Its history as an important retreat for writers goes back to the revolutionary period, when Thomas Paine lived and wrote there. Interestingly, Henry James and Edith Wharton were born in Greenwich Village when it was an affluent neighborhood. After 1870, however, a huge influx of German, Irish, and Italian immigrants, as well as the arrival of transplants from rural America, led to an urgent need for cheap housing in New York. As a consequence, many of the large older homes in Greenwich Village, which had escaped business development because the roads were too narrow and winding for commercial access, were subdivided into low-cost tenements. Because of its affordable rents, Greenwich Village became the intellectual center for various forms of socialism, for the feminist movement, for avant-garde literature and theater, and for various alternative lifestyles that stood in opposition to the pervasive Victorian morality of the surrounding society.

A significant literary movement beginning late in the nineteenth century was naturalism, which depicted scenes that challenged the optimism and Victorian ideals embraced by popular culture. Not surprisingly, proponents of literary naturalism initially had difficulty getting their works published and were often accused of immorality and censured. Many of these writers sought refuge in Greenwich Village. Stephen Crane, for example, stayed there in the mid-1890s while revising The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Another naturalist, Frank Norris, lived in the Village in 1898 while writing for McClure's Magazine, and he also read manuscripts for Doubleday, Page, & Company. Based on his recommendation, the company agreed to publish Theodore Dreiser's naturalistic Sister Carrie (1900). Dreiser stayed briefly in the Village in 1915 before moving back more permanently in 1923 to continue work on An American Tragedy (1925).

Greenwich Village also was home to a number of small alternative magazines that challenged the middle-class periodicals published uptown. In 1910 the Masses, edited by the writer and poet Max Eastman, began operation. A political magazine from a socialist perspective, it published left-wing writers such as John Reed and Floyd Dell. Of course, it was highly critical of American capitalism, and when World War I began in 1914, it argued against American involvement. Consequently, in 1917, when the United States entered the war, the U.S. government revoked the magazine's mailing privileges, making it all but impossible to get copies to subscribers. In addition, five of its editors, including Eastman, were twice tried under the Espionage Act, which made it a crime to publish any material that undermined the war effort. Both trials ended in hung juries, and since the magazine had folded in April 1918 and the war was over by the second trial in 1919, the government did not pursue the case further.

Another Greenwich Village–based magazine, the Little Review, founded by Margaret Anderson in 1914, was probably the most influential literary magazine of the time. It ushered in modernism, publishing writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford, Ernest Hemingway, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and most significantly, James Joyce. The Little Review serialized Joyce's ground-breaking novel Ulysses beginning in 1918 (it did not appear in book form until 1922). The Seven Arts began in 1916 and published both literary and political works by authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, and John Dos Passos. Bohemian magazine, created by Dreiser in 1909, is most notable for publishing poems by Hart Crane, another Village resident. The Dial, which moved to Greenwich Village from Chicago in 1918, was edited at various times by the critic Kenneth Burke and the poet Marianne Moore, both Greenwich Village residents. It was another vanguard for modernism, publishing some of the most radical poetry of the time, including The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, which appeared in November 1922.

Experimental theaters also sprang up in Greenwich Village as an alternative to the lucrative but conservative productions on Broadway. Until that time, Broadway productions focused primarily on melodrama, farce, musical revues, and productions of Shakespeare. While summering in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1915, George Cram Cook and his new wife, Susan Glaspell, decided to produce some of the plays they had written for their own amusement. When friends and neighbors asked to see their productions, they converted an old fish house into the Wharf Theater. In 1915 the theater featured Suppressed Desires, a collaboration by Cook and Glaspell. Thus was born the theater group known as the Provincetown Players, a group of young, left-wing actors and writers, including Floyd Dell, John Reed, Mary Heaton Vorse, Louise Bryant, and later Eugene O'Neill and Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1916 they staged O'Neill's play Bound East for Cardiff (1916), the first production anywhere of an O'Neill drama, and Glaspell's play Trifles (1916), both of which were popular successes. When the summer season ended in Provincetown that year, Cook, the guiding force of the company, and John Reed decided to move their base of operation to Greenwich Village and continue on through the winter. They began producing amateur plays by American playwrights in two small, uncomfortable theaters, the Playwright's Theater and the Provincetown Playhouse. Plays by Glaspell during this period include The People (1917) and Inheritors (1921). They also put on several one-act plays by O'Neill. Particularly significant was The Emperor Jones (1920), both because of its expressionism and because a black actor was the main character; it was another popular success.

Unfortunately, the success of the Provincetown Players eventually led to the demise of the troupe. Many of the productions were so successful they drew large crowds, and the members were divided between their desire to stay an amateur theater group to support new American playwrights and the demands for a larger theater, more professional actors, and more professional productions. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, in 1920, O'Neill left the Provincetown Players to have his plays more professionally performed on Broadway. On the other hand, Glaspell and Cook, frustrated with the commercial direction the group was taking, moved to Greece in 1922. These defections led to the virtual end of the Provincetown Players. Still, their early works, often harshly realistic, nearly always tragic, and highly critical of American society, are considered the beginnings of serious American theater.

Many other journalists and novelists also lived in Greenwich Village during this period. Willa Cather was a longtime resident. She moved to New York in 1906 to write for McClure's Magazine, which, after 1902, focused primarily on muckraking articles. She was the magazine's editor from 1908 to 1911. Often taking short trips out west to gather material for her novels, she would then return to Greenwich Village to write. Other significant writers who lived in Greenwich Village during this period, or shortly thereafter, include Malcolm Cowley, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, and William Carlos Williams.

HELICON HOME COLONY

The short-lived literary community called Helicon Home Colony, in Englewood, New Jersey, was created by the socialist writer Upton Sinclair, who wanted to establish a literary colony based on communal living. Using the profits from his successful muckraking novel The Jungle (1906), Sinclair bought a mansion on four hundred acres complete with a tennis court, swimming pool, bowling alley, and pipe organ—not exactly the proletarian ideal. Still, the goal was to create a true cooperative, so everyone shared in the household duties, such as cooking and cleaning. Several families lived there, and the children were kept in a separate wing and watched by nurses, though their parents could visit them when they wanted (Lingeman, pp. 25–26). Among the prominent figures who stayed there briefly were William James, the philosopher and psychologist; John Dewey, the philosopher and educator; Emma Goldman, the feminist, pacifist, and anarchist; and a young Sinclair Lewis. As was often the case in Greenwich Village, charges of immorality by the mainstream press were common. Local newspapers ran articles describing Helicon House as a "free-love nest" and accusing the residents of being communists, so when it burned down mysteriously in 1907, many suspected arson. In any case, Upton Sinclair, now penniless, chose not to rebuild, and the artists dispersed. Internal problems may also have been an issue. In a humorous article that Sinclair Lewis later wrote for Life, he complained "that the 'workers' had become real servants and the colonists were getting tired of a simple life with institutionalized children" (Lingeman, p. 26).

CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA

On the West Coast, another literary colony formed in Carmel, California, or, as it is sometimes called, Carmelby-the-Sea, in the first decade of the 1900s. This colony began when the San Francisco–based poet George Sterling (1869–1926) moved to Carmel with his wife in 1905 to escape the financial pressures of life in San Francisco. Soon several writers and artists followed their lead. As with Greenwich Village and Helicon Home Colony, the artists who gathered in Carmel were generally left-wing radicals, often socialists, and they expounded feminist ideas and liberal views of sexuality. Besides being beautiful, Carmel made it possible for writers to live cheaply and focus on their craft. The settlement had perhaps a dozen permanent residents living in small cabins among scattered pines along a jagged hill over-looking the bay. There was neither electricity nor paved roads.

In 1908, thanks to the efforts of the poet-dramatist Herbert Heron and the authors Mary (Hunter) Austin and Michael Williams, an outdoor theater, known as the Forest Theater, was built to stage plays. Austin, the poet Robinson Jeffers, and the journalist Lincoln Steffens, best known for his leadership in the muck-raking movement, all lived in Carmel for some time. For brief periods, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis also stayed there.

Jack London, a lifelong friend of George Sterling, had been part of the Piedmont Circle of writers with Sterling in San Francisco. Sterling, in fact, was the model for the idealistic Brissendon in London's largely autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909). London was also close friends with Mary Austin; they corresponded throughout London's life. Consequently, London visited Carmel often. There he met Sinclair Lewis, and after looking through his collection of story plots, eventually agreed to buy fourteen of them from him for $5 each. Later he would buy more plots from Lewis. London describes the Carmel art colony in idyllic terms in The Valley of the Moon (1913).

Robinson Jeffers moved to Carmel with his wife, Una, in 1914. On a barren promontory, using granite boulders he quarried himself, he built first their stone home, Tor House, which he completed in 1919, and later Hawk Tower, completed in 1924. Much of his best poetry focuses on accurate descriptions of the harshness and simultaneous beauty of nature. In particular, he often describes the rugged Carmel coastline through the lens of his philosophy, which emphasizes that humans are not at the center of the universe and contrasts the more permanent aspects of nature to the transitory values of modern society. In "Carmel Point," for example, the narrator first describes the natural beauty of Carmel before the art colony: "How beautiful it was when we first beheld it / Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs." But then he worries that they are "the spoiler" destroying the very beauty they love. Finally he realizes that nature is beyond their influence and will abide:

does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the images of the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.

(P. 676)

Robinson and Una Jeffers had many influential literary guests stay with them in Carmel, including Sinclair Lewis, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Langston Hughes. Jeffers rarely left his beloved Carmel, but not surprisingly, when he did, he made several trips to another literary colony, Taos, New Mexico, beginning in 1930.

TAOS

Taos, in the high desert, was an established art community when Mabel Dodge Sterne, a wealthy East Coast socialite who had kept a salon for writers in Greenwich Village, followed her third husband, the painter Maurice Sterne, to Taos in 1917. He had come, like so many others, to paint Native American subjects. Taos's appeal to artists and writers can partly be understood by its separateness and consequential freedom from conventions both of art and society. Also, Taos's ruggedness stood in refreshing contrast to the superficiality and ease of modern society, and the local pueblo people's simpler, more communal lifestyles appealed to those fleeing the competitiveness encouraged by capitalism.

Mabel Dodge Sterne was immediately taken by the place and quickly divorced Sterne and married a Pueblo man named Tony Lujan, becoming Mabel Dodge Lujan (often spelled Luhan). Using her money and influence, she began encouraging writers she had known in Greenwich Village to come to stay at her estate in Taos. Her liberal ideas and her love of the desert landscape and of Native American cultures, as well as her attempts to defend Native American rights, created a bond between her and several writers, particularly Mary Austin and Willa Cather, who had been similarly inspired by the Southwest's landscape and people. Both Austin and Cather spent some time at Lujan's estate, and Mary Austin eventually built a permanent residence, Casa Querida (Beloved House), in nearby Santa Fe in 1924. Cather stayed with Austin at Casa Querida while finishing Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Lujan's prize recruit, however, was the British novelist D. H. Lawrence, who arrived in 1922.

CONCLUSION

Members of these literary colonies generally shared some fundamental aesthetic or political beliefs that were at odds with mainstream culture. As a consequence, they often became close friends united by common values, and this sense of fellowship usually extended to members of other literary colonies sharing similar attitudes as well. For this reason, there was not only a great deal of camaraderie within each literary colony but also a great deal of correspondence and travel among the colonies. This interaction resulted in a rich sharing of ideas and values, which inspired the writers and became the impetus for many of their best works.

See alsoAestheticism; Clubs and Salons; Literary Friendships

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Jeffers, Robinson. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Edited by Tim Hunt. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Twain, Mark. Mark Twain–Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872–910. Edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960.

Secondary Works

Andrews, Kenneth R. Nook Farm: Mark Twain's HartfordCircle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Black, Stephen A. Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning andTragedy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.

Brophy, Robert J. Robinson Jeffers. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1975.

Ellis, David. D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930. Vol. 3 of The Cambridge Biography of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain, A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Gerber, John C. Mark Twain. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

Harris, Leon. Upton Sinclair: American Rebel. New York: Crowell, 1975.

Lingeman, Richard. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House, 2002.

O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Waterman, Arthur E. Susan Glaspell. New York: Twayne, 1966.

Richard S. Randolph