Caroline M. Kirkland

A collection of articles by various writers.

Looks at how the New Deal helped to create jobs during the Depression. Interviews former Civilian Conservation Corps workers who benefited from these programs.

Caroline Matilda (Stansbury) Kirkland (1801-1864) was a middle-class white woman with a literary bent who moved with her husband and children to the woods of Michigan in the mid-1830s to settle a newly-planned village. In this book, first published in 1839, she offers what she claims to be "an honest portraiture of rural life in a new country" (p. 5). Through a series of vignettes and anecdotes strung loosely into a narrative, Kirkland brings to life the social and material culture of a community on what was perceived as the frontier, presenting her experiences with a sense of ironic amusement. She reveals much about social life, social roles and behavior, especially among women. She describes the business of settlement, including how land was purchased and towns planned, and the haste, confusion, speculation and fraud attendant on such transactions. She comments on the social shifts pioneer life made possible, especially the egalitarianism which poorer migrants claimed as their right in new settlements, and the tensions that resulted as migrants from wealthier classes struggled to maintain and adapt the ways of status and culture they had formerly known. Her narrative also dwells on the details of domestic life, showing how houses were constructed and furnished, depicting the difficulties of housekeeping in crudely-built settlements, and the physical challenges of disease, accidents, bad roads, and the exhausting labor of deforestation and new farming. For all its light-hearted tone, Kirkland's book suggests much about how human communities bound together by neighborhood and necessity began to coalesce in a challenging and drastically changing land.

Kirkland moved west with her husband to Detroit in 1835, and they founded the town of Pinckney in Southeastern Michigan in 1837. She wrote two books while in Michigan; A New Home; Who’ll Follow and Forest Life. They returned to NYC in 1843, partly because her Pinckney neighbors were not pleased with her portrayal of them. Back in New York she wrote a third book about Michigan; Western Clearings, and went on to become a highly successful novelist.

My kinsman: Major Mollineux / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- [Black cat]( / Edgar Allan Poe -- Benito Cereno / Herman Melville -- Baker's bluejay yarn / Mark Twain -- The coup de grâce / Ambrose Bierce -- The beast in the jungle / Henry James -- The return of a private / Hamlin Garland -- Roman fever / Edith Wharton -- The open boat / Stephen Crane -- The heathen / Jack London -- I want to know why / Sherwood Anderson -- A day's work / Katharine Anne Porter -- Dry September / William Faulkner -- The short happy life of Francis Macomber / Ernest Hemingway.

The Best American Humorous Short Stories features tales from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain and many other well known writers. From the editor:This volume does not aim to contain all "the best American humorous short stories"; there are many other stories equally as good, I suppose, in much the same vein, scattered through the range of American literature. I have tried to keep a certain unity of aim and impression in selecting these stories. In the first place I determined that the pieces of brief fiction which I included must first of all be not merely good stories, but good short stories. I put myself in the position of one who was about to select the best short stories in the whole range of American literature, but who, just before he started to do this, was notified that he must refrain from selecting any of the best American short stories that did not contain the element of humor to a marked degree. But I have kept in mind the wide boundaries of the term humor, and also the fact that the humorous standard should be kept second - although a close second - to the short story standard.

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