- Epigraph and Dedication
- An Oxford Symbol
- Scapegoats
- To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence
- A Call for the Author
- Mr. Pepys’s Christmases
- Children as Copy
- Hail, Kinsprit!
- Round Manhattan Island
- The Unknown Citizen
- Sir Kenelm Digby
- First Impressions of an Amiable Visitor
- In Honorem: Martha Washington
- According to Hoyle
- L. E. W.
- Our Extension Course
- Some Recipes
- Adventures of a Curricular Engineer
- Santayana in the Subway
- Madonna of the Taxis
- Matthew Arnold and Exodontia
- Dame Quickly and the Boilroaster
- Vacationing with De Quincey
- The Spanish Sultry
- What Kind of a Dog?
- A Letter from Gissing
- July 8, 1822
- Midsummer in Salamis
- The Story of Ginger Cubes
- The Editor at the Ball Game
- The Dame Explores Westchester
- The Power and the Glory
- Gissing Joins a Country Club
- Three Stars on the Back Stoop
- A Christmas Card
- Symbols and Paradoxes
- The Return to Town
- Maxims and Minims
- Two Reviews
- Buddha on the L
- Intellectuals and Roughnecks
- The Fun of Writing
- A Christmas Soliloquy
Another collection of mostly short “soliloquys” from Christopher Morley, an American literary luminary, who introduces them thus: “… these pieces were written, day by day, out of the pressure and hilarity and contention of the mind. I have made no attempt to conceal their ephemeral origin. They were almost all written for a newspaper, and contain many references to journalism. … it is remarkable that they should have been written at all: remarkable that any newspaper should take the pains to offer space to speculations of this sort. I have not scrupled, on occasion, to chaff some of the matters newspapers are supposed to hold sacred. …
But a columnist … is only a deboshed Editorial Writer, a fallen angel abjected from the secure heaven of anonymity. … unsuspecting whether intended by his scheming employer as a decoy, or a doormat, or a gargoyle, or a lightning rod (how is he to know, never having been given instruction of any sort except to go ahead and write as he pleases?) … [T]he columnist pursues his task and gradually distils a philosophy of his own out of his duties. Oddly enough, instead of growing more cautious by reason of his exposure, he becomes almost dangerously candid. He knows that if he is wrong he will be set right the next morning by a stack of letters varying in number according to the nature of his indiscretion. - Summary by Winnifred Assmann and excerpts from the Preface
Note: "The word ... niggardly [used in section 42, is] ... etymologically unrelated to the highly offensive and inflammatory racial slur euphemistically referred to as the N-word, despite the ... visual and auditory resemblance to it." Merriam-Webster
But a columnist … is only a deboshed Editorial Writer, a fallen angel abjected from the secure heaven of anonymity. … unsuspecting whether intended by his scheming employer as a decoy, or a doormat, or a gargoyle, or a lightning rod (how is he to know, never having been given instruction of any sort except to go ahead and write as he pleases?) … [T]he columnist pursues his task and gradually distils a philosophy of his own out of his duties. Oddly enough, instead of growing more cautious by reason of his exposure, he becomes almost dangerously candid. He knows that if he is wrong he will be set right the next morning by a stack of letters varying in number according to the nature of his indiscretion. - Summary by Winnifred Assmann and excerpts from the Preface
Note: "The word ... niggardly [used in section 42, is] ... etymologically unrelated to the highly offensive and inflammatory racial slur euphemistically referred to as the N-word, despite the ... visual and auditory resemblance to it." Merriam-Webster
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