Francis Grierson

Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard (born September 18, 1848 in Birkenhead , England ; died May 29, 1927 in Los Angeles , United States ) was an American pianist, writer and occultist .

Francis Grierson about 1890

At the end of the 19th century he gained some recognition with improvisations on the piano in the salons and court circles of Paris, St. Petersburg and other European metropolises. In addition, he knew how to successfully stage himself as a medium in spiritualistic séances . After settling in London in 1896, he called himself Francis Grierson after his mother's maiden name, and under that name had a moderately successful career as a writer of essays on art, society and spirituality. While his musical achievements - never recorded as improvisations - fell into oblivion after his death and so did his essayshardly read, Grierson unexpectedly returned to the interest of literary scholars in 1948 when Bernard DeVoto Grierson's autobiographical work The Valley of Shadows, first published in 1909, re-edited. In this book, in the words of Edmund Wilson one of the "strangest anomalies" in American literary history, the aging Grierson described his childhood in a simple log cabin on the Illinois prairie in the years leading up to the civil war .

Life

Youth (1848–1869)

Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard was born in the English port city of Birkenhead in 1848. As a result of a severe economic crisis in England, his family emigrated to America in the same year and bought a log cabin in Sangamon County in the state of Illinois, which at that time was still part of the western boundary of the settlement, the Frontier . His parents, especially his mother, found it difficult to cope with the privations of frontier life; Jesse Shepard, on the other hand, found his childhood particularly happy because he was not forced to go to school until the age of ten and instead was able to spend a lot of time in nature. In 1859 his father took a job in the big city of St. Louis , later his parents briefly moved to Niagara Falls and finally to Chicago before returning to England in 1871.

As becomes clear in The Valley of Shadows, Shepard's childhood in Illinois was decisively shaped by the great religious and political upheavals that gripped the entire country, but particularly Illinois, in the 1850s: the revival movement of the Second Great Awakening , the radicalization of the anti-slavery movement and the rise of Abraham Lincoln to national hope. The Shepards' log cabin was a station on the so-called Underground Railroad , via which the abolitionists smuggled fugitive slaves into Canada. As a ten-year-old Shepard witnessed one of the historical debates between Abraham Lincoln and his rival Stephen A. Douglas . As a schoolboy he experienced skirmishes between secessionists and Union troops in St. Louis in 1861, from June of that year he served, although only thirteen years old, on the staff of Major General John Charles Frémont , who commanded the Union troops in the Mississippi Valley. Shepard was particularly proud of the military successes of Cavalry General Benjamin Grierson , one of his mother's cousins; they are described in the final chapters of The Valley of Shadows .

Shepard claims to have discovered his musical talent at the age of 16 when he broke into a neighbor's house through an open window, sat down at a piano and began to play on it without prior knowledge. Even during his later career, he always stated that he had no musical training whatsoever, but a letter from his mother testifies that he had taken piano lessons in St. Louis. Shepard's talent for singing was discovered there - he had a vocal range of four octaves - so that he soon sang mass in various churches. Stéphane Mallarmé is said to have expressed appreciation later that his voice was “not a voice, but a choir”. In 1868 he left his parents' home and tried his luck in New York, Boston and Baltimore, where he got by with odd jobs.

Career as a musician and spiritualist (1869–1890)

An advertisement in the Chicago Daily Tribune dated May 2, 1875 praised Shepard as "the greatest living singer and pianist."

The Villa Montezuma in San Diego is a monument in today National Register of Historic Places out

In April 1869 Shepard embarked for France, where, although almost penniless, he ended up in the salons of the higher circles in Paris, which he could interest with his musical talent. He claims to have played at receptions for the Marquise de Ricard, the Mme de Valois, the Duchesse de la Roche-Guyon, the Marquis de Planty, the Comtesse de Beausacq, the Princess Metternich , the Princess Sophie Trubezkoi and for Alexandre Dumas père and failed to do so never after his return to the USA to use these sounding names to prove his reputation in Europe. How it actually stood can hardly be reconstructed - Edmund Wilson and Harold P. Simonson's Grierson biography (1966) often adopted his information without questioning, even if in other places they recognized his tendency towards transfiguring legends.

Shepard claims to have received encouragement from Daniel-François-Esprit Auber , director of the Conservatoire de Paris , and he is said to have been invited in March 1870 to sing the most important solo part in a mass by Léon Gastinel , the celebration of the Annunciation was performed in Notre Dame . One month later, in time before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he left France, initially settling in London, which, however, hardly seemed equal to the sophistication of the Parisian salons of the Second Empire , and returned to France for a short time in December of that year the US back. He came back to Europe in April 1871 and spent the summer in Baden-Baden . There he looked for and found connection with the illustrious spa society: Pauline Viardot-García and Ferdinand Lassalle's former lover Helene von Racowitza were among his associates here ; apparently he also met Kaiser Wilhelm . In autumn of that year he first went to Cologne, where he was invited by Ferdinand Hiller to improvise on the piano after one of his orchestra's concerts in Cologne Cathedral . In October Shepard then traveled to St. Petersburg , where he again moved in higher circles and finally even gave a private concert for the tsar in Gatchina . In the summer of 1872 he left Russia again and met his parents in London, who had returned to England after 23 mostly disappointing years.

In 1874 Shepard returned to the United States and settled first in New York, and a year later in San Francisco. From 1877–78 he spent a year in Australia, but it is not known what prompted him to do so - he himself always remained noticeably covered over the years after his second trip to Europe. There is evidence of his stay in Chicago in 1880, where he appeared as a medium and demanded two dollars for séances . Apparently he first came into contact with occult teachings in St. Petersburg. He first met Helena Blavatsky in Chittenden in October 1874 and later occasionally visited her in the rooms of her “ Theosophical Society ” in New York. The attraction, however, was by no means reciprocal, for, as her letters to Henry Steel Olcott suggest, Blavatsky thought Shepard was a charlatan . Not only did she find out that Shepard's claim to have played for the tsar was false, but she also knew of a certain music teacher to whom Shepard had paid 32 rubles to teach him certain Russian songs - the same songs he did in Chittenden had sung, "in a dark séance when the Grisi and Lablache supposedly spoke from him!" She also exposed Shepard publicly, for example in a letter to the editor to the Spiritual Scientist in 1875, in which she expressed herself with biting mockery, particularly about Shepard's mediumistic visions of Russian history.

In 1885 Shepard met Lawrence Waldemar Tonner, who was around twenty years his junior. In older depictions, a picture of the relationship between a master and his "devoted secretary and companion" is drawn tactfully to ashamed, but it can be assumed that the two had a love affair. They were to live together until Grierson's death in 1927. In 1887, the couple appeared in San Diego , one of the fastest growing boomtowns in the United States since the completion of a railroad line . In the general gold rush mood, Tonner and Shepard also managed to find happiness, albeit with dubious means. Shepard was wooed by the city's real estate speculators because he promised to enrich the city with cosmopolitanism and a sense of art and was often invited as a speaker to give officious occasions a worthy setting. With his charisma he succeeded in particular in winning over the wealthy brothers John and William High for themselves. Although these two had already lost a good part of their money to other spiritualists, Shepard was able to convince them that he was able to receive messages from William High's deceased wife as a medium. The deceased instructed the brothers to erect a memorial for her, in the form of a villa, to be furnished according to Shepard's wishes and plans. The highs pawned all of their belongings and began construction, in 1888 Shepard and Tonner moved in. The Villa Montezuma, which is still preserved today, is an architectural curiosity, a fantasy of history adorned with turrets, battlements and stained glass. Shepard held receptions, concerts and seances here until 1889 - after another trip to Paris - the money of the High brothers was exhausted and he left for Europe with Tonner.

Years in Europe (1890–1913)

Over the next few years, Shepard and Tonner traveled frequently in Europe. The stations of their wanderings can hardly be reconstructed, but Shepard apparently often played in salons and courts in Germany, for example in Munich, Hamburg, Leipzig, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe, in front of the Saxon royal couple in Dresden and in 1892 in Gmunden Castle Cumberland in front of Prince Ernst August II . of Hanover with wife Princess Thyra of Denmark . Until he tried his hand at writing, his fame was based on his musical achievements. His singing as well as his piano playing, however, were always improvisations - since none of his performances have ever been recorded, one has to rely on the testimony of contemporary listeners to judge his performances. Ever since he tried his hand at being a spiritualist, Shepard explained his improvisations to inspirations from the world of spirits. While he was still in St. Louis, he claims to have been visited by a ghost named "Rachel" who whispered to him to train his singing talent. Apparently he actually had an enormous vocal range, ranging from soprano to bass, so that he was able to sing duets with himself. Séances in which he channeled female voices were particularly impressive on his audience ; his soprano is said to have been indistinguishable from that of a woman. His piano playing, which is said to have been given to him from a higher level, was also impressive. For example, he channeled Mozart, Meyerbeer, Beethoven, Rossini, Persiani, Liszt and Chopin in his performances. From his time at the Villa Montezuma in San Diego, a séance is documented in which he performed impressions of ancient Egyptian music in a trance. Here, as in his later séances, his music was accompanied by light phenomena, behind which one can probably assume Tonner's technical skills. In 1894 the (presumably self-proclaimed) Prince Adam Wisniewski published a report on one of these meetings in the London Journal of Light :

“In complete darkness we sat in a circle around the medium who was seated at the piano. As soon as the first strings were struck, lights suddenly flashed in every corner of the room ... The first piece he played was a Thalberg fantasy about the aria from Semiramide ... the second a rhapsody for four hands, played by Thalberg and Liszt , with astonishing fire and a truly great sonority. Despite the extraordinarily complex playing technique, there was an extraordinarily admirable harmony, no one in attendance had ever heard anything like it, even from Liszt himself, whom I knew personally ... "

In 1896 the couple settled permanently in London , where Shepard intended to advance his writing career; it was here that he first took the name Francis Grierson. In 1899 he published the essay volume Modern Mysticism and Other Essays under this name , followed in 1901 by The Celtic Temperament . After that, he largely withdrew from the public eye and spent years mostly writing his childhood memories. Little is known of Grierson's years in London. Van Wyck Brooks remembered in his 1952 memoir The Confident Years of "the old essayist" Francis Grierson as one of the many "strange fish" that romped about in the "London Ocean" at that time. According to this, Grierson lived with Tonner in an apartment above a grocery store in Twickenham , although no one knew the exact address. Only occasionally did he appear by invitation at a Richmond club to receive admirers. The local newspaper, the Twickenham Post , reported on these receptions, according to Brooks, as if Grierson were a "literary potentate" or "world-famous professor" to whom "the greats of the world made pilgrimages". Behind this PR work he identified Tonner, Grierson's “ Sancho Panza ”. In one episode Brooks reports how he received Grierson for dinner one evening in his house - when he finally escorted the guest to the door after hours, he found Tonner sitting in the stairwell, who had been waiting in front of the door the entire evening.

The Valley of Shadows finally appeared in 1909 and was well received by literary critics in England and the USA. As if publication had taken a burden from him, Grierson published essays in rapid succession in the following years, including in the magazine The New Age , one of the leading journals of the beginning literary modernity. When Arnold Bennett , who drew a rather uncharming portrait of Grierson in his diaries, asked him in Italy in 1910 whether the magazine would also pay him for the articles, Grierson evasively replied that "someone" was paying him for them. Obviously Grierson relied again on wealthy patrons, and in fact it seems that Grierson has gathered a small but loyal, almost cult-like following. This included at least Edwin Björkman, the music critic of Harper's Magazine , who repeatedly expressed himself in extravagant superlatives about Grierson's performances, and in 1927 Shaemas O'Sheel in the New Republic expressed the view that the literary quality of The Valley of Shadows surpassed everything " since Homer and Xenophon ”.

His garish appearance will have contributed to Grierson's attraction, even if it was rather disturbing to most observers. He was evidently quite ectomorphic , tall, with hands that could grip the piano for an octave and a half and huge feet that he himself often tripped over. Brooks wrote that the aging Grierson seemed almost like a charlatan to him, but at the same time gave the impression of a “strange innocence”: dressed in worn tweed suits with a crimson tie, his mustache dyed, his cheeks rouged ; white hair stuck out from under his wig on the ears, revealing his true age. Bennett described Grierson as a "mysterious person" and wondered about Grierson's refusal to dress for lunch - the latter apparently preferred to dine in pajamas. The young reporter for the New York Evening Post , who was expecting Grierson on his return to the USA in 1913 at the port of New York, was visibly disturbed by Grierson's appearance: “I had never seen a man with blush on his cheeks and lips and blackened brows . His hair was carefully teased over his browbones in an orderly chaos, his hands impeccably manicured and adorned with countless rings, and he wore a discreetly colored, gently flowing scarf. ”With increasing age this fashion became less and less attractive to him; a Los Angeles Times reporter recalled attending a lecture by the elderly Grierson entitled The Secret of Eternal Youth in the 1920s ; he saw in Grierson a "little old man who dyed his mustache, put on thick lipstick, painted his cheeks bright red and quite obviously wore a toupee - in short, a charlatan".

Return to the USA and end of life (1913–1927)

The cover of The World magazine of January 18, 1914 shows Grierson as a "psycho-pianist"

In 1913, after 24 years, Grierson and Tonner left Europe in anticipation of the First World War - in The Invincible Alliance (1911) and numerous lectures he warned urgently against German hegemony and called for a permanent military alliance between Great Britain and the USA - because Germany would soon be start a war that would not represent a “fashion show” like the wars of the past, but rather a cool “calculated starvation” of the enemy. On November 30, 1913, Grierson and Tonner returned to the USA on board the Lusitania after 24 years. They first settled in New York. In the following years they financed themselves through lecture tours along the American east coast. Although a devoted following gathered around Grierson during these years and were impressed by Grierson's cosmopolitanism and spiritual aura, younger commentators increasingly saw his ideas as obsolete. In 1920, at the age of 73, Grierson and Tonner finally settled in Los Angeles, where he hoped to gain a foothold in the particularly large market for religious and spiritual certainties. However, he had only limited success with this project. After he had not found a publisher, he had to pay for the printing of his last published work out of his own pocket. These are the messages of prominent deceased, which he claimed to have received and recorded between September 1920 and May 1921 with the "psychophone" he developed. Among others, Grierson let Benjamin Franklin , Thomas Jefferson , Daniel Webster and Otto von Bismarck have their say.

Nor did he find a publisher for his autobiography (Anecdotes and Episodes) , the manuscript of which is now lost. After Grierson and Tonner's hopes of making a livelihood had been dashed through séances and lectures, they finally formed a flat share with the exiled Hungarian Count Mihály Teleki and his mother, who had been expelled from their Transylvanian castle Gernyeszeg after the Treaty of Trianon , and opened a dry cleaning with these . Nevertheless, Grierson was now becoming increasingly impoverished and had to pledge the many gifts that he had amassed in his heyday, including a pocket watch that Edward VII had allegedly given him. Most recently, he received grants from the Southern California charity. On May 29, 1927, friends organized a benefit dinner for Grierson, at which the 78-year-old also played one of his famous piano improvisations. At the end of the lecture, he paused in front of the keyboard for an unusually long time until the guests realized that he had passed away.

plant

Essays

Grierson's essays are the product of the aesthetic mentality of the fin de siècle , even if they often elude a clear categorization or even a summary. His observations on art and society are in a rather nebulous, oracular style. Rough generalizations and daring assertions dominate, but rarely stand up to logical analysis. In longer texts he is hardly ever able to bring his argument to one point; as Theodore Spencer noted, they don't quite end - they just stop; If he tried shorter forms such as the epigram or the aphorism , the results often appear banal or even embarrassing. The essays made a “strange impression” on Wilson - their language always seemed precise and full of meaning, but entire paragraphs often left him at a loss - when reading Grierson's essays he often got the feeling that the “visible and tangible and their meaning are fading away lose the fact that the concrete image and the specific word evaporate at any time in pure fiction. ”Wilson, however, in no way dismissed Grierson's essays as charlatanism, but interpreted the supposed swagger about the“ psychic energy of genius ”or the“ Celtic temperament ”as sincere Try Griersons to explain his own enigmatic talents, which he subjectively actually felt as an expression of an otherworldly spiritual source.

Theodore Spencer divides Grierson's essays into three subject groups: “mystical” or “semi-mystical” essays; Observations on general social and political developments; as well as anecdotal accounts of personal acquaintances and experiences as in Parisian Portraits (1911). The “mystical” or, better, aesthetic essays identify Grierson as a late heir to Romanticism. The cosmos seemed to him to follow the laws of a higher power that could not be experienced by reason, which only the artist can come close to in moments of mystical rapture. In many essays he therefore lamented the positivist zeitgeist and urged people to reflect on the true, but especially on the beautiful. His idealism occasionally took on rather strange forms, for example in the volume The Celtic Temperament (1901), in which he saw the spiritual basis of the English-speaking world in an essay in the continuing "Celtic mind", recommended in two others ( Practical Pessimism and The Hebraic Inspiration ), on the other hand, used the "Hebrew spirit" of the prophets of the Old Testament to reflect against the brutalities that the harmful Greco-Roman spirit brought upon European culture. In the arts, Grierson saw signs of decline everywhere. Already in his first volume there is a sharp attack on Émile Zola , whose realistic program seemed to him to be a betrayal of the mandate of art. In his later essays, Grierson's cultural pessimism appears more and more shrill and out of date, verbally he complained again and again about the decline of “spiritual” values, the rise of gross materialism, the licentiousness of the beginning Jazz Age (especially the “barbaric” saxophone and dances with “ syncopated hugs” "), The increasing consumption of alcohol and tobacco, warned against cubism , psychoanalysis and especially against the double threat to the English-speaking world from the" yellow danger "and the" expulsion "of the USA by the large number of immigrants of" Teutonic "blood and mind. In his final volumes of essays, Illusions and Realities of the War and Abraham Lincoln, The Practical Mystic (1918), Grierson's remarks then appear, as Wilson noted, "openly millenarist." He saw a new age of purification, heralded by Lincoln's superhuman genius the prohibition approaching; it is only the first step to be followed by laws to close bars and saloons, the prohibition of all films and pictures that do not serve moral or religious edification, to laws to completely abolish the big cities.

The Valley of Shadows

Grierson's work was largely forgotten during his lifetime; only Carl Sandburg , who cemented the Lincoln legend in the 20th century, quoted Grierson from time to time. In 1948 The Valley of Shadows appeared in the book series The History Book Club . Bernard DeVoto demanded classic status for the work in a preceding editor's note; Edmund Wilson , the most respected American literary critic of the time, followed this assessment shortly afterwards in a detailed review for the New Yorker . A revised version of the review can be found in Wilson's volume Patriotic Gore (1962), which deals with the literature of the civil war. Since then, however, only a handful of literary studies dealing with Grierson have been published. Although new editions of The Valley of Shadows appeared in 1966, 1970 and 1990 , the work, in the words of the literary scholar James Hurt, “occupies a strange place in American literary history, and again and again there is a knock on the door of the established canon, but it will never really let in ”. It is only occasionally dealt with in specialized studies of regional literature in the Midwest , but not mentioned in current accounts of American literary history. Grierson took great care in composing his childhood memories; For a good ten years he polished every sentence again and again and published hardly anything else at the time. The style and subject of the work appear particularly remarkable in contrast to Grierson's other works, in the words of Edmund Wilson:

“Grierson [...] started out as a European writer who hardly ever got better than second rate, and didn't write a first-rate book until he turned back to American subjects. The spectacle of how the dialects of Mark Twain and Uncle Remus finally break out of this rather pale creator of French pensées is one of the strangest anomalies in our literary history. The connoisseur of modern French poets, the critic of Wagner and Nietzsche, ultimately turned out to be as close to none of them as Lincoln. The flatterer of the Duchesse de La Roche-Guyon, the Comtesse de Beausacq and the Princess Bonaparte-Ratazzi could finally write a lot more eloquently about Kezia, the wife of Silas Jordans, than about those women. "

Silas Jordan and his wife Kezia are two of the recurring characters in The Valley of Shadows , who brave the rigors of nature as simple farmers in the wide prairie of Illinois. In this seemingly primeval landscape, they become both witnesses and actors in the developments that in a few years' time would lead to the civil war, the deepest turning point in American history. From a religious point of view, broad sections of the population were caught up in a revival movement that culminated in so-called camp meetings with thousands of believers and led to a strengthening of the previously ostracized movement of the abolitionists ; politically, this development was reflected in the rise of Abraham Lincoln to leader of the Republican Party. Grierson describes how runaway slaves were hidden in the houses of his family and neighbors and how paid slave hunters combed the area: His home was a station on the so-called " Underground Railroad ", through which thousands of slaves smuggled into Canada with the illegal help of white anti-slavers where freedom awaited them. A highlight of The Valley of Shadows is the description of a camp meeting , during which violent clashes between abolitionists and their opponents broke out between all the sermons. There was one death on both sides at the end of the event - an omen of the impending war.

Despite all the precise description of the milieu, The Valley of Shadows is by no means bound to a realistic or even naturalistic program; on the contrary, the landscape descriptions sometimes appear like a symbolist prose poem. With impressive descriptions of nature, in particular the peculiar moments of complete silence (silences) that arise on some nights, Grierson succeeds not only in creating a dense atmosphere, but also in transfiguring the prairie into a mystical place where one can Can participate in the work and weaving of higher powers. Natural events such as the lightning strike during the camp meeting or the sudden appearance of Donati's comet herald with meaningful meaning of the coming upheavals. In Grierson's description, the simple, uneducated inhabitants of this remote landscape grow to almost Old Testament stature. Edmund Wilson, for example, characterized the book as a " spiritual game " (sacred drama) . The supposedly back forest Illinois appears here not only as a metonymy of the United States (the state is in DeVoto's words the core of the American Heartland ), but for Grierson it is the scene of developments that are nothing less than one Should usher in “a new era in human history”. Abraham Lincoln, whom Grierson described in a later essay as the "greatest practical mystic the world has seen in two thousand years," appears as the messianic redeemer who guides Americans through a "valley of shadows" (here the King James sounds -Translation of the 23rd Psalm to: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil ) into a new Canaan. As Grierson writes in his foreword, Lincoln's genius first "enlightened" the area around Springfield , the capital of Illinois, around 1858 and permeated "all hearts, beliefs, parties and institutions" before his "mystical" spirit came with the election of President expanded to the entire country. In Patriotic Gore , Edmund Wilson makes it clear that Grierson's understanding of the Civil War as an apocalyptic event is by no means as extravagant as it might seem to today's reader, but that the salvation-historical exaggeration of the conflict and the person of Lincoln appears omnipresent in contemporary literature, for example in Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic and the many downright hagiographic Lincoln biographies that have had a lasting impact on the image of war.

literature

Works
In addition to numerous articles in various often obscure journals, Grierson published the following individual volumes (indicated here with the year of first publication and, if available, references to digital copies of the Internet Archive ):

• Essays and Pen-Pictures (1889)
• Pensées et Essais (1889)
• Modern Mysticism and Other Essays (1899)
• The Celtic Temperament and Other Essays (1901)
• The Valley of Shadows (1909)
• Parisian portraits. (1911)
• La Vie et les Hommes (1911)
• Some Thoughts (1911)
• The Humor of the Underman, and Other Essays (1911)
• The Invincible Alliance, and Other Essays, Political, Social, and Literary (1913)
• Illusions and Realities of the War (1918)
• Abraham Lincoln, The Practical Mystic (1918)
• Psycho-Phone Messages (1921)

Modern editions of The Valley of Shadows

While all of Grierson's other works were reprinted at most, several editions of his main work The Valley of Shadows have been published with a critical apparatus since 1948:

• Bernard DeVoto (Ed.): The Valley of Shadows. The Coming of the Civil War in Lincoln's Midwest: A Contemporary Account. The Riverside Press, New York 1948; Reprint at: Harper & Row, New York 1966.
• Harold P. Simonson (Ed.): The Valley of Shadows. College and University Press, New Haven CN 1970. ISBN 0808403109
• The Valley of Shadows. Sangamon Sketches. With an introduction by Robert C. Bray. University of Illinois Press, Urbana IL 1990. ISBN 0252061039

Secondary literature

• David Bergman: Gaiety Transfigured. Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI 1991. ISBN 0-299-13050-9 .
• Joan Bigge: Illuminations. In: The Journal of San Diego History 16: 3, 1970 ( online version ).
• Robert C. Bray: The Mystical Landscape. Francis Grierson's The Valley of Shadows. In: The Old Northwest 5: 4, 1980. pp. 367-385.
• Robert C. Bray: Rediscoveries. Literature and Place in Illinois. University of Illinois Press, Urbana IL 1982. ISBN 0-252-00911-8 .
• James Hurt: Writing Illinois. The Prairie, Lincoln, and Chicago. University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1992. ISBN 0-252-01850-8 .
• Thomas L. Scharf (Ed.): A Special Centennial Edition. The Villa Montezuma . In: The Journal of San Diego History 33: 2 and 33: 3, 1987 ( online version ).
• Harold P. Simonson: Francis Grierson in San Diego. On episode in Charlatanry. In: American Quarterly 12: 1, 1960.
• Harold P. Simonson: Francis Grierson. Twayne, New York NY 1966 (= Twayne's United States Authors Series 97).
• Theodore Spencer: Introduction. In: Francis Grierson: The Valley of Shadows . Published by Bernard DeVoto. Riverside Press, New York NY 1948.
• Edmund Wilson : Patriotic Gore. Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. Oxford University Press, New York NY et al. 1962. Reprint: WW Norton, New York and London 1994. ISBN 0393312569

Web links

Commons : Francis Grierson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Harold F. Simonson: Francis Grierson , pp. 15-22.
2. ↑ Harold F. Simonson: Francis Grierson , p. 110.
3. ↑ Harold F. Simonson: Francis Grierson , pp. 22-25.
4. ^ Edmund Wilson: Patriotic Gore , p. 73.
5. ↑ On Grierson's first stay in Europe, see Harold F. Simonson: Francis Grierson , pp. 26-30.
6. ↑ For the years 1875–87 s. Harold F. Simonson: Francis Grierson , pp. 31-34.
7. ^ A Word of Advice to the Singing Medium, Mr. Jesse Sheppard ; In: Spiritual Scientist July 8, 1875, p. 209.
8. ↑ See for example David Bergman, 1991.
9. ↑ On Grierson's time in San Diego, see: Harold P. Simonson: Francis Grierson , pp. 34-39 as well as: Francis Grierson in San Diego: An Episode in Charlatanry . In: American Quarterly 12: 1, 1960.
10. ^ ^{A b} Melvyn J. Willin: Music, Witchcraft and the Paranormal. Melrose Press, 2005. pp. 53-56.
11. ^ Molly McGarry: Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America. University of California Press, Berkeley 2008. pp. 164-65.
12. ^ Van Wyck Brooks: The Confident Years: 1885-1915. New York, EP Dutton, p. 237.
13. ↑ Bennett's comments on Grierson can be found in The Savor of Life. Essays in Gusto. Doubleday, New York 1928. pp. 237-39, and in Journals Cassell & Co., London 1932. pp. 315 and 366.
14. ↑ Quoted in Harold Simonson: Francis Grierson , p. 107.
15. ^ Theodore Spencer: Introduction to The Valley of Shadows. , The Riverside Press, New York 1948.
16. ^ Van Wyck Brooks: Scenes and Portraits. EP Dutton, New York 1954. pp. 229-30
17. ↑ Quoted in Edmund Wilson: Patriotic Gore , p. 78.
18. ^ Paul-Jordan Smith: BOOKS and AUTHORS; Sometimes the Angle Between Promise and Fulfillment Is Tragically Wide. In: Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1954, p. D6.
19. ↑ On Grierson's life from 1913, see Harold F. Simonson: Francis Grierson , pp. 135-138.
20. ↑ Lynn Altenbernd: Grierson, Francis in "American National Biography Online", 2000. Online access only with subscription .
21. ^ Theodore Spencer, Introduction to The Valley of Shadows , Riverside Press, New York 1948. pp. Xxxvii-xviii.
22. ↑ Edmund Wilson: Patriotic Gore , pp. 74-78.
23. ^ Theodore Spencer: Introduction to Bernard DeVoto (ed.): The Valley of Shadows. S. xxxvii.
24. ↑ For a detailed review of all essays see the monograph by Harold Simsonson: Francis Grierson.
25. ^ Bernard Devoto: Editor's Note. for the 1948 edition, pp. ix-xvi.
26. ↑ James Hurt: Writing Illinois: The Prairie, Lincoln, and Chicago. P. 40.
27. ^ Edmund Wilson: Patriotic Gore , p. 81.
28. ↑ James Hurt: Writing Illinois: The Prairie, Lincoln, and Chicago. P 41.
29. ^ DeVoto, Editor's Note on The Valley of Shadows , 1948. pp. Xiii-xv.

This article was added to the list of excellent articles on November 8, 2009 in this version .