Harold Frederic

This book is the first full-length biographical and critical study of the American Realist author Harold Frederic (1856-1898). As London correspondent for the New York Times and the author of nine novels, Frederic was internationally known at the time of his death; today he is remembered mainly for his novel The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896). Drawing on archival and published material not available to earlier writers on Frederic, Myers paints a fascinating portrait of the man and his times as an expatriate in London in the 1890s, his friendship with James, Crane, Wells, and their circle, and the scandal surrounding his death at the age of 42.

This book explores a notable if unlikely undercurrent of interest in Mary as mythical Madonna that has persisted in American life and letters from fairly early in the nineteenth century into the later twentieth. This imaginative involvement with the Divine Woman -- verging at times on devotional homage -- is especially intriguing as manifested in the Protestant writers who are the focus of this study: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harold Frederic, Henry Adams, and T.S. Eliot. John Gatta argues that flirtation with the Marian cultus offered Protestant writers symbolic compensation for what might be culturally diagnosed as a deficiency of psychic femininity, or anima, in America. He argues that the literary configurations of the mythical Madonna express a subsurface cultural resistance to the prevailing rationalism and pragmatism of the American mind in an age of entrepreneurial conquest.