Brother Men: The Correspondence of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston - Hardcover

Burroughs, Edgar Rice; Weston, Herbert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822335298 ISBN 13: 9780822335290

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Brother Men

is the first published collection of private letters of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the phenomenally successful author of adventure, fantasy, and science fiction tales, including the Tarzan series. The correspondence presented here is Burroughs’s decades-long exchange with Herbert T. Weston, the maternal great-grandfather of this volume’s editor, Matt Cohen. The trove of correspondence Cohen discovered unexpectedly during a visit home includes hundreds of items—letters, photographs, telegrams, postcards, and illustrations—spanning from 1903 to 1945. Since Weston kept carbon copies of his own letters, the material documents a lifelong friendship that had begun in the 1890s, when the two men met in military school. In these letters, Burroughs and Weston discuss their experiences of family, work, war, disease and health, sports, and new technology over a period spanning two world wars, the Great Depression, and widespread political change. Their exchanges provide a window into the personal writings of the legendary creator of Tarzan and reveal Burroughs’s ideas about race, nation, and what it meant to be a man in early-twentieth-century America.

The Burroughs-Weston letters trace a fascinating personal and business relationship that evolved as the two men and their wives embarked on joint capital ventures, traveled frequently, and navigated the difficult waters of child-rearing, divorce, and aging. Brother Men includes never-before-published images, annotations, and a critical introduction in which Cohen explores the significance of the sustained, emotional male friendship evident in the letters. Rich with insights related to visual culture and media technologies, consumerism, the history of the family, the history of authorship and readership, and the development of the West, these letters make it clear that Tarzan was only one small part of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s broad engagement with modern culture.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), most well known as the author of the Tarzan books, was one of the bestselling American authors of the early twentieth century. Millions of copies of his books sold during his lifetime.

Herbert T. Weston (1876–1951) was a businessman in Beatrice, Nebraska.

Matt Cohen is Assistant Professor of English at Duke University.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"As a modern mythmaker and one of the bestselling and most reproduced writers in English, Edgar Rice Burroughs deserves richer treatment than he has received, and several tendencies in the study of American culture--particularly the emphases on empire, masculinity, and popular culture--suggest that he will be more and more prominent in scholarly discourse. This book makes Burroughs accessible to a very broad range of scholars."--Carlo Rotella, author of "Cut Time: An Education at the Fights"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Brother Men

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS AND HERBERT T. WESTON

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3529-0

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......................IXINTRODUCTION.........................1NOTE ON THE TEXT.....................49CORRESPONDENCE.......................51NOTES................................287INDEX................................301

Introduction

[N]ewer formations of manhood ... affectively and ideologically isolated men in a newer form of individualist competitiveness. -DANA NELSON, National Manhood

I always knew that [Theodore] Roosevelt had me in the palm of his hand, but until his death I never suspected that I also had a personal feeling for the man. His going has put a real crimp in me. It is said that no man is necessary-but to my way of thinking, we could much better spare the next ten greatest men in the USA. Honestly I dont know what in hell we are going to do without THE Colonel! -HERBERT T. WESTON TO EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, 15 January 1919

As I may have intimated once or twice, people mean a lot more to me than things or places. I get more that way the older I get, and I just could not have a better time than to just jimmy around with you Burroughses. I think your children are peaches. I wish I could have seen more of them. [...] What I would like to do would be to hang around the Burroughs Wyoming ranch house for a few days (I could sleep in the 4d truck) and have you pay no attention to me, and watch you come and go, read your books, play with the rats, be bitten by Lobo and Jet, ride a horse and shoot a little golf. Not strenuous perhaps, but joy enough for me! -WESTON TO BURROUGHS, 13 April 1927

I WAS IN GRADUATE SCHOOL in Virginia, working on the last stages of a dissertation about bachelors in America and deeply interested in the complicated relationships among emotion, economics, and identity in men's lives of the nineteenth century. Needing a break, feeling the isolation of sustained writing, I headed to Beatrice, Nebraska, to spend a few days with my mother and my grandmother. While I knew that they would ask me how my work was coming along (the unsettling litany of graduate school: "Is your dissertation finished yet?"), I also knew that they would not press me about my interpretations of the residual culture of ascetic masculinity or the connections between postcolonial anxiety and imperialist manhood in American fiction. I could relax; or so I thought.

After I had finished describing some of the more entertaining parts of my research-on men's lives in the bachelor hotels that began to proliferate during the Gilded Age-my grandmother wondered out loud if, considering my focus on men's friendships, I might be interested in "the Burroughs letters." My mother immediately agreed that I would, and they began talking about people and places from our family's past that were completely unfamiliar to me. Becoming aware of my confusion, they explained that my great-grandfather, Herbert Weston, and the author of the Tarzan books, Edgar Rice Burroughs, went to military school together and afterward sustained a lifelong correspondence, much of which was currently right there in our house. My mind swam with questions: How many letters were there? What period did they cover? Did we only have half of the correspondence, as is usually the case with such collections? Their answers astonished me: There were hundreds of items, including letters, photographs, telegrams, postcards, and drawings; they dated from the early years of the twentieth century to after the Second World War; and most important of all, my great-grandfather kept carbon copies of his letters. As I delved into the collection, my vacation ended and I did not even notice.

The letters would be worth publishing if they were only rich and lively documents illuminating Edgar Rice Burroughs's daily life and career, but they are much more than that. They are uncharacteristic as a collection, not least because they survived the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The forms of labor (agriculture and popular literature) and capital (land investments) that these men engaged in buffered them from the worst effects of the crash. Burroughs bought an airplane during this time; and both men took up home movie making, with all the expensive equipment that entails, as a hobby (they did use cheaper paper for their letters during the Depression). But the letters have further value. Until now, only fragments of a few letters from Burroughs's vast correspondence have been published. This collection of documents will enable cultural historians to examine an important American author and his most famous product in great depth.

Some have already done so; in fact, Tarzan, if not Burroughs himself, has emerged at the center of recent debates among cultural studies scholars and theorists interested in the development of mass media, imperialism, and gender and sexuality. With these letters we can begin to bring this symbolic analysis into dialogue with Burroughs's social and intimate lives. The letters and images offer a fascinating, detailed look at masculine self-generation during a time of tremendous change. Because these two men were products of the 1870s and 1880s, their correspondence traces their encounters with modernity and America's rise onto the world stage. They were friends and old school buddies, but they were also in business with each other. Both struggled with masculine self-definition-Burroughs early, Weston late-and discussed their problems with a circle of male friends. A near-constant ironic banter shapes the letters, but there are many moments of powerful emotional self-exposure as well. Within these pages readers will find a panorama of the difficulties, advantages, and possibilities of middle-class white manhood in the early twentieth century.

The quotations that begin this introduction trace my own rethinking of some critical assumptions about manhood. Dana Nelson's work on masculinity illuminates our understanding of both the means and the costs of the generation of white masculine subjectivity. As her comment shows, however, there remains a pervasive sense that, in Bryan Garman's words, "most bourgeois men sought to shun close emotional attachments" at the dawn of the twentieth century. Weston's response to the news of the death of Theodore Roosevelt is an example of the kind of national emotion that Nelson has taught students of American cultural history to perceive: Weston's "personal feeling" for a man he had never (as far as we know) seen forms a romance of citizenship with the dead president as ideal partner. The final image, which collapses Roosevelt's kaleidoscopic career into his military identity, signals Weston's participation in a national imaginary that posits individuality in the service of ideals-in this case, of Roosevelt's famous "strenuous life." But the final quotation complicates this reading. Here Weston imagines the dissolution of his identity into the Burroughses' in a perpetual visit to Tarzana, Burroughs's California ranch. A national subservience becomes an intensely personal one ("I think your children are peaches") and an idyll of leisure ("shoot a little golf"). Weston's final pronouncement, "Not strenuous perhaps, but joy enough for me," replaces Roosevelt's strenuousness with the ecstasy of intimate proximity.

This introduction will first trace the biographical and historical backgrounds of Burroughs and Weston. Some...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822335298
• ISBN 13: 9780822335290
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar