Showing posts with label Connor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Connor. Show all posts

18 December 2023

The Globe's Best Books of 1923: 'Canadian Authors Can Be Read With Pleasure, Profit and Pride'


The Globe, 10 December 1923

Three men feature on the first page of the 1923 'Recent Books and the Outlook,' the 'Globe 100' of its day. The first, Paul A.W. Wallace, is recognized for his debut, Baptiste Larocque: Legends of French Canada. The second man, W.J. Healy, wrote Women of Red River, which was "arranged and published under the Women's Canadian Club of Winnipeg by Russell, Land, and Company." Norris Hodgins, the third, was recognized for Why Don't You Get Married.

All three are Canadian and all three are new to me.

I've been following the Globe's century-old lists of best books for nearly a decade now, and so think I know what to expect. There will be a dour pronouncement – in this case, "there is a dearth of outstanding books, especially novels, at the present time" – which will, in turn, be counterbalanced by something of a positive nature:

Under the 'More Canadiana' banner are books by Americans LeRoy Jeffers, Charles Towne, John M. Clarke, Charles W. Stokes, Paul Leland Haworth, and Briton Wilfred Grenfell. The final ingredient in this messy mix is George King's self-published Hockey Year Book. Its inclusion marks the first ever mention of the sport in 'Recent Books and the Outlook.'

I can't imagine how much it would fetch today. 84 Victoria Street itself is worth a bloody fortune.

Despite the flag waving, Canadian writers don't fair all that well in the Globe's 1923 list, accounting for just 46 of the 196 titles featured. As in 1922, poets dominate: 

Ballads and Lyrics - Bliss Carman
Selected Poems - W.H. Davies*
Morning in the West - Katherine Hale
Flint and Feather - E. Pauline Johnson
The Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman
Shepard's Purse - Florence Randal Livesay 
 The Miracle Songs of Jesus - Wilson MacDonald
The Complete Poems of Tom MacInnes
The Songs of Israfel and Other Poems - Marion Osborne
The Garden of the Sun - A.E.S. Smythe
The Empire Builders - Robert Stead
Woman - Albert Durrant Watson

That's twelve titles! From a nation of nine million! The Globe informs that the rest of the world produced just five collections of note!

For the second year running, we have the inclusion of The Complete Poems of Archibald Lampman, of which there is no record. And so, for the second year, I'll suggest that what is being referred to is The Poems of Archibald Lampman, first published in 1900 by George N. Morang. As Ryan Porter notes, the collection enjoyed several reprints. Still, I see no evidence of a new edition in 1923, never mind 1922. I'll say the same of E. Pauline Johnson's 1912 Flint and Feather. There was a new edition of Robert Stead's The Empire Builders, which just happens to be the only poetry title I own.


Curiously, Wilson MacDonald's The Song of Prairie Land is singled out for mention in the introduction to the poetry list, yet only his The Miracle Songs of Jesus makes the cut.

Our non-fiction writers fare the worst with just four of the fifty titles listed. I don't have a copy of even one, though I am interested in the Marjorie Pickthall, "a memorial volume edited by Helena Coleman," which does not seem to exist.  

Our writers of fiction don't fare much better, contributing just eight titles to the list: 

The Gaspards of Pine Croft - Ralph Connor
Lantern Marsh - Beaumont S. Cornell
Why Don't You Get Married? - Norris Hodgins
The Happy Isles - Basil King
When Christmas Crossed the Peace - Nellie L. McClung
Emily of New Moon - L.M. Montgomery
The Viking Heart - Laura Goodman Salverson
Spirit of Iron - Harwood Steele

There were twenty-one Canadian works of fiction on the 1922 list.

Here are some that made it:

And here are some that did not:

Frank L. Packard's The Four Stragglers is at the bottom of the pile, Stephen Leacock's Over the Footlights is at the top. Between the two is Winnifred Eaton's "Cattle" – or is it Cattle? – which may just be the best Canadian novel of 1923. 

The Gaspards of Pine Croft, which I've not read, is one of my $2 Connors.  

I've long been on the lookout for Beaumont S. Cornell's lone novel Lantern Marsh because it's set in a thinly disguised Brockville, Ontario, which is where I do my weekly grocery shopping.  

Basil King's novel The Happy Isles is praised as the best since his 1909 breakthrough The Inner Shrine. I do like it, but nowhere near as much as The Empty Sack (1921).

I was once engaged to a woman who knew a woman who had been engaged to Harwood Steele. 

And so it goes.

* Correction: Roger Allen writes, "Are you sure the dozen poets are Canadian? The W.H. Davies nearly everyone thinks of - still in print - is the author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. He only became a poet because he lost a leg jumping on a train in Canada and had to go back to Britain, but that doesn't make him Canadian."

He's correct, of course. I can't explain the error, though it might have something to do with a bottle of Canadian Club sent by an aunt as an early Christmas gift. 

Related posts:



23 October 2023

Whither the Canadian American Bestseller?


Earlier this month, I tried to sell a friend on Basil King, as is my habit. I mentioned that in 1909 his novel The Inner Shrine outsold every other book in the United States, adding that he very nearly repeated that accomplishment the following year, and again the year after that. In this regard, King bested fellow Prince Edward Islander L.M. Montgomery, who never once made the annual top ten.

The annual top ten?

I refer here to lists compiled by The Bookman and Publisher's Weekly. The former cobbled together the first in 1895, the year Scotsman Ian Maclaren's Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush was all the rage. It didn't take long for a Canadian to appear. In 1896, Gilbert Parker's The Seats of the Mighty placed third, blocked from the top spot by Francis Hopkinson Smith's Tom Grogan and A Lady of Quality by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which I'm sure you've all read.

Gilbert Parker – later, Sir Gilbert Parker – was a publisher's dream. Scribner's 1912 twenty-four volume Works of Gilbert Parker is a beautiful thing. The more expensive editions come with a tipped in handwritten autographed letter.


And there was more to come! In 1914, Sir Gilbert's The Judgement House ended up as the republic's fourth best-selling book.

Parker is one of eight Canadians to hit the American year-end top ten. What follows is a year-by-year list  of those authors and their titles, beginning with Parker's The Seats of the Mighty. Some may question the inclusion of Saul Bellow and Arthur Hailey. My position on both men is simple. Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec. He was a nine-year-old when his family left Canada for the United States. Arthur Hailey immigrated to this country after the Second World War and became a Canadian citizen.

Long-time Toronto resident John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire, which placed second in 1981, is not included because it wasn't until 2019 that he became a Canadian citizen.

W.H. Blake's translation of Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelain, which in 1922 was the eighth bestselling book in the United States is excluded. Though the novel has been described as a "a classic of French-Canadian literature," Hémon was French, not French-Canadian. His visit to this country lasted months, not years. My late friend Michael Gnarowski argued that Hémon would've become a citizen had he not been struck and killed by a train whilst walking the tracks outside Chapleau, Ontario. On this we disagreed.

1896

#3 – The Seats of the Mighty by Gilbert Parker

"A Romance of Old Quebec" with cameos by Wolfe and Montcalm, The Seats of the Mighty was the only Parker novel to been adopted as a New Canadian Library title. It's available today through Wilfrid Laurier Press.


1901 

#4 – The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker

#4The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker

A Montreal melodrama involving amnesia, murder, drinking, romance, and false identity, I raced through The Right of Way last year. Recommended.

Two spots down from Parker – at #6 – we find The Visits of Elizabeth, the debut novel by one-time Guelph girl Elinor Glyn.

1902

#4 – The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker#6 – The Right of Way by Gilbert Parker

The Right of Way again, and why not! It's a hell of a story, as evidenced by the fact that it was adapted for Broadway. Hollywood took it on three times!




1907

#2  The Weavers by Gilbert Parker

"A Tale of England and Egypt of Fifty Years Ago," this one concerns a young Quaker who brings the Gospel to the Land of the Pharaohs. Must admit that each time I see this title I hear "Goodnight, Irene." 


#9 The Doctor by Ralph Connor [Charles W. Gordon] 

I've not read this Connor, but Ron Scheer did. Sadly, Ron is no longer with us. I miss his scholarship and astute criticism. Happily, his blog survives. Ron's review of The Doctor is a fine example of his work.


1908

#10  The Weavers by Gilbert Parker

The Weavers again, yet unlike The Right of Way, this one never made Broadway, nor was it adapted by Hollywood.

Seems an opportunity.




1909 

#1 – The Inner Shrine by Anonymous [Basil King]

Reverend King's sixth novel, The Inner Shrine was the year's literary sensation. I think that much of the interest had to do with questions over authorship. Did it come from the pen of Edith Wharton? Henry James? How about the daughter of Willian Dean Howells?

 

1910
#3 – The Wild Olive by the author of The Inner Shrine [Basil King]

Publisher Harper maintains the mystery.

I once described The Wild Olive as the best Basil King novel I'd ever read. Ah, but that was seven years ago and I was so young; The Empty Sack and The Thread of Flame are even better.


1912

#2  – The Street Called Straight by the author of The Inner Shrine [Basil King]

Shortly after The Street Called Straight was published, Reverend King revealed himself as the author of all three books. He continued to have success commercially, but his books never again appeared in the year-end top ten.


1913

#4  The Judgement House by Gilbert Parker

Lesser-known today – but then isn't Parker himself? – The Judgement House is set against the backdrop of the Boer War. Apparently, a femme fatale features. You can bet I'll be ordering a copy!
1918

#7  The Major by Ralph Connor [Charles W. Gordon]

One of Connor's Alberta novels, as expected, it was heavily influenced by the Great War. Germans and their country's imperialist aspirations don't come off nearly so well as settlers establishing themselves on the Prairies.



1919

#5 – The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land by Ralph Connor [Charles W. Gordon]

A Great War novel, complete with horrors. The author served as Chaplain in the 43rd Cameron Highlanders. I have more to say on this in an old post on New Canadian Library intros.



1927

#5 
– Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

The book that launched the longest running series of novels in Canadian history. Sixteen in total! 







1928

#9 
– Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

Jalna. Of course, Jalna. Do not get me started on the CBC's disastrous The Whiteoaks of Jalna, which at age ten served as my introduction to the works of Mazo de la Roche, and nearly killed my interest in Canadian literature.




1931

#8 
– Finch's Fortune by Mazo de la Roche

Interestingly, Finch's Fortune is the third volume in the Jalna saga; Whiteoaks of Jalna, the second, failed to make the year-end top ten.

 



1933

#7 – The Master of Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

The last in the series make the year-end top ten, which is not to say that Jalna was abandoned by the reading public. The surprisingly brief de la Roche Canadian Encyclopedia entry reports: "Jalna novels have sold 9 million copies in 193 English- and 92 foreign-language editions."
 

1945

#3 – 
The Black Rose by Thomas B. Costain

The Black Rose sold over two million copies. I learned this courtesy of The Canadian Encylopedia's entry on Costain, which is even shorter than de la Roche's!

More anon.


#9 
– Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham

The author's second and final novel, I've made the argument that its success had a paralyzing effect. Earth and High Heaven was to have been a film starring Katherine Hepburn, but Gentleman's Agreement, which deals with similar material, put an end to all that.


1946

#8 – 
The Black Rose by Thomas B. Costain

The Black Rose is a historical novel about a young Saxon's adventures in thirteenth-century China. I'm not much taken by the idea, but millions were. To be frank, I'm much more interested in the Hollywood adaptation starring Orson Welles, Tyrone Power, and Cécile Aubry, but not so much that I've seen it.

1947

#2 
– The Moneyman by Thomas B. Costain

Apparently, Thomas B. Costain wrote four unpublished historical novels in high school, one of which focussed on Maurice of Nassau, Prince of OrangeThe Moneyman takes as its inspiration the life of Jacques Couer, royal banker to Charles VII of France.


1949

#7 
The High Towers by Thomas B. Costain

One of two historical novels Costain set in what is now Canada; the other being Son of a Hundred Kings (1950). It was through my father's copy of the 1950 Bantam paperback edition that I was introduced to Costain. and so I share its cover and not Doubleday's bland and predictable jacket illustration.
 

1952

#1 
– The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain

Here Costain enters Lloyd C. Douglas territory with the tale of Basil of Antioch, a sensitive silversmith who is commissioned to decorate the chalice used by Christ in the last supper.




1953

#2 
– The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain

The novel continued to sell, but I wonder whether Costain missed the opportunity to write a sequel inspired by the burial of the Holy Grail on Oak Island by the Knights Templar.




1955

#9  – The Tontine by Thomas B. Costain

Book of the Month Club copies once littered every church rummage sale. The same might be said of many BOMC selections, but what set The Tontine apart was that it was published in two volumes, meaning that there were twice as many seemingly identical books. I never managed to pair volumes one and two. 

1957

#9 
– Below the Salt by Thomas B. Costain

New to me, Below the Salt marked a bit of a departure for Costain. It relies on the theory of reincarnation, linking a modern-day senator (American) to a thirteenth-century serf (English).




1964

#3 
– Herzog by Saul Bellow

How to explain Herzog's presence? It was awarded the National Book Award, but so had The Adventures of Augie March, and so would Mr. Sammler's Planet, and they didn't make the year-end top ten.





1965

#3 
– Herzog by Saul Bellow

In my first year of university I found a very nice first edition in dust jacket. I've carried it from home to home ever since, but it was only in putting this piece together that I saw the face in the cover.

That perfect font is so distracting.

#8 
– Hotel by Arthur Hailey

In Hailey's bibliography, Hotel follows In High Places (1962), a political thriller centred on challenges both domestic and international faced by Canadian prime minister James McCallum. Hotel doesn't sound nearly so interesting, though it did inspire a 1967 feature film and the ABC prime time soap of the same name starring James Brolin. 


1968

#1 
– Airport by Arthur Hailey

The novel that spawned Airport, Airport 1975, Airport '77, The Concorde - Airport '79Airplane!, and Airplane II: The Sequel,  Airport was the second Canadian novel I ever read. I think there were some sexy bits, but I'm not sure. If they existed, they weren't so memorable as the stuff in Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers.


1971

#1 
– Wheels by Arthur Hailey

A novel set inside the Detroit auto industry. Interestingly, the ten-hour five-part 1978 NBC mini-series starring Rock Hudson and Lee Remick is set in the 'sixties. It's a period piece, though you wouldn't know it.  




1975

#2 
– The Moneychangers by Arthur Hailey

The idea of a novel centring on banking, finance and investing doesn't sound nearly so interesting as one about a sleek and powerful car, which may explain why The Moneychangers failed to land at #1. It was kept from top spot by E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime


1979

#3 
– Overload by Arthur Hailey

Here the author whose previous novels were set in the hospitalty industry, the aviation industry, the automotive industry, and the banking industry, presents a 512-page novel focussed on a California utility company.

There will be brownouts!


And that's it.

Arthur Hailey went on to write three more novels: Strong Medicine (1984), The Evening News (1990), and Detective (1997). All were bestsellers, but not so much that they dominated the bestseller lists. He died in 2004, the eighth and last Canadian to have written a book that landed in the year-end top ten.

Between 1896 and 1979 eight Canadians wrote twenty-seven novels in the annual list of top American bestsellers. Six of the twenty-seven titles appeared two years running. These figures are impressive, until one realizes that all happened within an eighty-three-year span, and that it's been forty-three years since any Canadian writer has done the same. Margaret Atwood? Not even The Testaments. Life of Pi didn't make the cut, nor did The English Patient.

Why is that?

All my theories have fallen flat.

Any ideas?

27 February 2023

Go West, Young Woman



The Prairie Wife
Arthur Stringer
London: Hodder & Stoughton, [n.d]
251 pages

In the summer of 1985, I bought a copy of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature and read it from cover to cover. This is nowhere near as impressive as it might seem; what I read was the original two-column 843-page edition (1983), not the two-column 1099-page second edition (2001). Nevertheless, it was through the Companion that I first learned of Arthur Stringer. The author's entry, penned by Dick Harrison, amounts to little more than a half-page. Here are some of the things I learned:
  • born 1874 in Chatham, Ontario;
  • studied at the University of Toronto and Oxford;
  • wrote for the Montreal Herald;
  • established his literary career in New York;
  • "made an enduring contribution to Canadian literature with his prairie trilogy: Prairie Wife (1915), Prairie Mother (1920), and Prairie Child (1921)."
Harrison gets the titles of the trilogy wrong – The Prairie Wife, The Prairie Mother, and The Prairie Child are correct – but never mind, what stuck with me was Prairie. As decades passed, I forgot all about Chatham, Toronto, Oxford, Montreal, and New York, and came to think of Stringer as a Western Canadian. It wasn't until 2009, when I read The Woman Who Could Not Die (1929), my first Stringer, that I was reminded he was an Ontario boy. A Lost World novel set in the Canadian Arctic, I liked it well enough to keep reading and begin collecting his work.

My Arthur Stringer collection (most of it, anyway).
Cliquez pour agrandir.
Admittedly, much of my interest has to do with his enviable popularity, the deals he cut with Hollywood, and his marriage to Jobyna Howland. This is not to suggest that I didn't like the books themselves. My favourite Canadian novel of the early twentieth-century is Stringer's The Wine of Life (1921), which... um, was inspired by his marriage to Jobyna Howland.


A second admission: I put off reading The Prairie Wife, the first volume in Stringer's "enduring contribution to Canadian literature," for no other reason that it is set in rural Canada. Before you judge, I rush to add that this Montrealer has lived in rural Canada these past two decades. Country living attracts, but not novels set in the country. This may explain how it is that I was swept up by its early pages.

The Prairie Wife takes the form of a series of entries, written over the course of more than a year to someone named Matilda Anne. Its writer, Chaddie, begins by describing a voyage from Corfu to Palermo and then on to the Riviera. She is of the moneyed class – that is until Monte Carlo, where Chaddie receives a cable informing that the "Chilean revolution" has wiped out her nitrate mine concessions. Made a pauper, Chaddie's first action is to dismiss her maid; the second is to send word to her German aristocrat fiancé:
I sent a cable to Theobald Gustav (so condensed that he thought it was code) and later on found that he'd been sending flowers and chocolates all the while to the Hotel de L'Athenee, the long boxes duly piled up in tiers, like coffins at the morgue. Then Theobald's aunt, the baroness, called on me, in state. She came in that funny, old-fashioned, shallow landau of hers, where she looked for all the world like an oyster-on-the-half-shell, and spoke so pointedly of the danger of international marriages that I felt sure she was trying to shoo me away from my handsome and kingly Theobald Gustav — which made me quite calmly and solemnly tell her that I intended to take Theobald out of under-secretaryships, which really belonged to Oppenheim romances, and put him in the shoe business in some nice New England town!
After a respectable period of mourning lost wealth, Theobald Gustav throws her over. Just as well, really, because the Paris Herald had reported on of a traffic accident that had occurred when he'd been in the company of a "spidery Russian stage-dancer." On the rebound, Chaddie proposes to Scots-Canadian Duncan Argyll McKail, whom she'd met in Banff the previous October. He is too much in love and far too practical to turn her down.

And so, this is how Chaddie, an American socialite who'd shared the company of Meredith and Stevenson, and had sat through many an opera at La Scala, ends up in a one-room shack with flattened tin can siding on the remote Canadian prairie.

Duncan – annoyingly, his bride refers to him as "Dinky-Dunk" – is a civil engineer from the east. He's got it in his mind to make a fortune through farming, and has purchased a 1700-acre parcel of land one hundred or so kilometres northwest of, I'm guessing, Swift Current.

"He kept saying it would be hard, for the first year or two, and there would be a terrible number of things I'd be sure to miss," Chaddie writes Matilda Anne. 

No doubt!

Harrison doesn't use the term "Prairie Realism" in his Stringer entry, but I will; The Prairie Wife is a good fit with later novels by Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostenso, and Robert Stead. Can we agree that Prairie Realism was never terribly realistic? Though pre-Jazz Age, Stringer's story begins as a crazy Jazz Age adventure in which a carefree debutante marries a man she may or may not love. In her earliest pages to Matilda Anne, she writes:
O God, O God, if it should turn out that I don't, that I can't? But I'm going to!  I know I'm going to! And there's one other thing that I know, and when I remember it, It sends a comfy warm wave through all my body: Dinky-Dunk loves me. He's as mad as a hatter about me. He deserves to be loved back. And I'm going to love him back. That is a vow I herewith duly register. I'm going to love my Dinky-Dunk.
Chaddie continues:
But, oh, isn't it wonderful to wake love in a man, in a strong man? To be able to sweep him off, that way, on a tidal wave that leaves him rather white and shaky in the voice and trembly in the fingers, and seems to light a little luminous fire at the back of his eyeballs so that you can see the pupils glow, the same as an animal's when your motor head-lights hit them!
There's a clear separation between the opening pages and the rest of the novel. Whimsy gives way to practicality, as Duncan chases his fortune. Remarkably, Chaddie settles on the prairie, and into matrimony, rather nicely. Harrison writes of "disillusionment as the marriage deteriorates," but this reader saw nothing of the kind. True, there are moments of discord, as in the strongest of marriages, but Dinky-Dunk and Chaddie – he calls her "Gee-Gee" – are soon in one another's arms. She does come to love her Dinky-Dunk.

The frontispiece of the A.L. Burt photoplay edition, c.1925.
I don't know what Harrison means when he writes of Chaddie's "mature resolve as she begins an independent life on the Prairies." The married couple only become closer as the novel progresses, and the two are increasingly reliant on a slowly growing cast of characters. The earliest, hired man Olie, is a silent Swede who at first can't keep his eyes off Chaddie. This male gaze has nothing to do with objectification, rather her ridiculously impractical city dress. Pale Percival Benson Wodehouse, whom this reader suspects to be a remittance man, is next to appear. He was sold the neighbouring ranch from "land chaps" in London. Nineteen-year-old Finnish Canadian Olga Sarristo enters driving a yoke of oxen. Two weeks earlier, what remained of her family had burned to death in their own shack one hundred or so miles to the north. To Chaddie, stoic and stunning Olga is like something out of Norse mythology, "a big blonde Valkyr suddenly introducing herself into your little earthly affairs." Olga is a welcome addition to the farm; every bit as capable physically as Olie and Duncan. Last to arrive is Terry Dillion, a fastidious young Irishman who had once served in far off lands with the British Army.

Together they support Duncan's big gamble, which involves putting all he has on a sea of wheat covering his 1700 acres. Threatened by draught, fire, and hail, the crop survives, making him a wealthy man. His riches are further increased by a new rail line to be built across his land. The final pages have Duncan and Chaddie poring over house-plans mailed from Philadelphia. "We're to have a telephone, as soon as the railway gets through," she writes Matilda Anne. 

The Prairie Wife is the first Stringer novel I've read with a woman narrator. Early pages aside, I found Chaddie's voice oddly convincing. This audio recording by Jennifer Perree, stumbled upon in researching this novel, reinforced my conviction. An enjoyable story, an entertainment, it left me wanting to hear more from Chaddie.

And there is more!

Stringer wrote more than forty novels, but The Prairie Mother is the only one to spawn a sequel, The Prairie Mother (1920)  – and then another in The Prairie Child (1922).

Like Dinky-Dunk, Stringer really knew how to make a buck.  

Favourite sentence:
The trouble with Platonic love is that it's always turning out too nice to be Platonic, or too Platonic to be nice.
Bloomer: 
I can't help thinking of Terry's attitude toward Olga. He doesn't actively dislike her, but he quietly ignores her, even more so than Olie does. I've been wondering why neither of them has succumbed to such physical grandeur. Perhaps it's because they're physical themselves.
Trivia: In 1925, The Prairie Mother was adapted to the silver screen. A lost film, the trade reviews I've read are lukewarm, mainly because there is no gunplay. Chaddie is played by comedic actress Dorothy Devore, one of many who fell in making the transition to talkies. New to me is Herbert Rawlinson, who played Duncan. Olga is played by Canadian Frances Primm, about whom little is known, A pre-Frankenstein Boris Karloff plays Diego, a character that does not feature in the novel. Most interetsing to the silent film buff is Gibson Gowland (Olie), the man who played McTeague in Erich von Stroheim's Greed.

Motion Picture Magazine, December 1924 
Object: My copy was purchased last year from a bookseller located in Winterton, Lincolnshire. Price: £9.00. Sadly, the jacket illustration is uncredited.

The rear pushes all three books in Stringer's trilogy, The Prairie Child not yet available in a bargain edition. The flaps feature a list of other Hodder & Stoughton titles, including works by Canadians Ralph Connor (The Sky Pilot of No Man's Land [sic]), Hulbert Footner (The Fugitive Sleuth, Two on the Trail), Frank L. Packard (The Night Operator, The Wire Devils, Pawned), Robert J.C. Stead (The Homesteaders), and Bertrand W. Sinclair (Poor Man's Rock).

Access: The Prairie Wife first appeared in 1915, published serially over four issues of the Saturday Evening Post (16 January - 6 February). That same year, it appeared in book form in Canada (McLeod & Allen) and the United States (Bobbs-Merril). Both publishers used the same jacket design:

Evidence suggests that The Prairie Wife is Stringer's biggest seller. A.L. Burt published at photoplay edition tied into the 1925 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer adaptation. Is that Boris Karloff as Diego on the right?


At some point, Burt went back to the well to draw Prairie Stories, which included all three novels in Stringer's prairie trilogy. As far as I've been able to determine, The Prairie Wife last saw print in The Prairie Omnibus (Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), in which it is paired with The Prairie Mother

Used copies of The Prairie Wife can be purchased online for as little as US$8.95.