The Red Light of Mars; or, A Day in the Life of the Devil

The Red Light of Mars; or, A Day in the Life of the Devil - A Philosophical Comedy

There is to me something typically American about the life-story leading up to the play contained in this volumea story in which the creation and publication of that play will undoubtedly represent only a temporary climax. I want to tell it, not only as a curiosity, but as something that has genuine significance to the world of letters. The meaning of this story, read in conjunction with the work that has grown out of it, is that the time when books were bred by books only is about gone now. The new literature will come straight out of life, apparently, and will in consequence have made a decided gain, even though it may have lost something else. As it springs forth, full-blooded and ready-tongued, we shall undoubtedly hear melancholy voices proclaim the vulgarization of poetry. But if, on hearing such protests rising from some anmic scholars cloistered cell, we look back through the ages and fix our gaze not only on the little followers but on the great leaderson the Dantes and Shakespeares and Cervanteses and Moliresthen we shall find that almost always the term of opprobrium quoted above has implied a vitalization of the supposedly menaced art form. The author of The Red Light of Mars is now in his thirtieth year, having been born on January 7, 1884, in Howard County, Maryland. His father was a Baltimore merchant and insurance broker, who, in his turn, had a Confederate blockade runner for father and an officer in the English army for grandfather.viii His mother sprang from an old French middle-class family, which had to emigrate from Dijon after the Edict of Nantes. George Bronson-Howard studied in a private school in London, in the public schools of Baltimore, and in the City College of the same place. At fourteen he lost both parents, just as he was about to enter Johns Hopkins University, his age having been carefully concealed in order that the examinations might be open to him. Instead he became a messenger in the Weather Bureau at Baltimore. While thus employed, he submitted successfully to the first of a series of civil service examinations, each one of which required some skilful disingenuousness lest the applicants age prove an insuperable obstacle. During the next seven years, Mr. Bronson-Howard busied himself successively as follows: ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 57598
Author: Bronson-Howard, George
Release Date: Jul 28, 2018
Format: eBook
Language: English