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Common Knowledge

Birthdate: 1822-04-03
Date of death: 1909-06-10
Burial location: Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, USA
Gender: male
Nationality: USA
Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Place of death: Roxbury, Massachusetts, USA
Places of residence: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Education: Harvard College
Occupations: historian
clergyman
teacher
editor
Chaplain of the United States Senate
Relationships: Hale, Nathan (great-uncle)
Hale, Lucretia Peabody (sister)
Hale, Susan (sister)
Awards and honors: Phi Beta Kappa
Bowdoin Prize (1838)
Bowdoin Prize (1839)

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Reviews

The Man Without a Country by Edward Everett Hale

A long short story (or novella to be generous) "The Man without a Country" by Edward Everett Hale is rightly an American classic. It explores the issues raised by patriotism as seen by an American writer in the mid-nineteenth century through a fictional tragedy. It also teaches us something about the history of American attitudes toward identity.

Philip Nolan, a fictional American army officer during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, played a minor role in a historical conspiracy case in which former Vicepresident Aaron Burr 14arguably the first true psychopath in American politics, tried to carve his own empire out the American frontier. Nolan's courtmartial probably did not need to have such a draconian result as it did because of his minor role, but after Nolan stood up and yelled "Damn the United States! I never want to hear her name again!" his judges decided to grant his wish: He was put on a navy ship and was to be kept at sea for the rest of his life, never to hear about or see his country again.

Nolan lived this way for over fifty years. At first he treated his sentence as a lark, a paid cruise around the world, but during all that time, a number of incidents painfully reminded him of his psychological as well as physical imprisonment, and broke him so that he had to rebuild himself in order to maintain his sanity. (Not a small kaffkaesque touch is how even in this paean to American identity there is the recognition that an American government bureaucracy can lose justice between the cracks: after several years, the government no longer remembers Nolan's sentence 14or pretends not to remember; so his punishment goes on because no one ever decides to end it; the govenrment takes the position that Nolan does not exist and yet his punishment is to continue to be carried out.)

Among the reminders of his statelessness is an encounter with a slave ship. Although the United States continued to practice slavery, it outlawed the importation of slaves. This meant that the U.S. Navy was charged with stopping slave ships in the Atlantic. (The British Navy had been doing the same thing for a while before the U.S.) Nolan, as the only man on board able to interpret, helped find out whether the slaves would be willing to be freed on a nearby island; when the slaves began to cry that they wanted to go home to their own countries, Nolan could barely keep himself together; he too wished he could go home; and he persuaded the captain to take the Africans back to Africa.

Evidently, Hale believed 14or perhaps he just expresses the zeitgeist 14in Manifest Destiny (MD), the idea that America should stretch from sea to shining sea and perhaps acquire even more territory than that. His fictional narrator chides the administration of James Madison for not wanting to claim islands in the Pacific, and another character insists that the United States should claim Bermuda. Hale shows how MD was, indeed, a seductive ideology.

Hale's exploration of the meaning of patriotism still stimulates thought about a perennial question, and does so in an entertaining way.… (more)

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MilesFowler | 7 other reviews | Jul 16, 2023 |

The Man Without a Country and Other Great Stories by Edward Everett Hale

This venerable 1937 volume contains 8 short stories plus one novel extract, all by British and US authors. I found it of historical interest due to the the eponymous tale by Edward Everett Hale, a work whose nationalism / patriotism probably does not wear well today. Overall, I did not find the collection to be especially interesting or notable, but it probably served its purpose back in the 1940s and 1950s.

The works included are listed below; some are indicated with my ratings on a five star scale.

"Man Without a Country", by Edward Everett Hale
"My Double and How He Outdid Me", also by Hale
"The Phantom Rickshaw" by Rudyard Kipling
"The Bedford Row Conspiracy" by William Makepeace Thackeray
"The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper", by George Meredith (**)
"The Pavilion on the Links", by Robert Louis Stevenson (*)
"A Terribly Strange Bed" by Wilkie Collins (*)
"The Capture of Bill Sikes" (from Oliver Twist) by Charles Dickens
"Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriskie" by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (*)… (more)

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danielx | Sep 18, 2022 |

The Life of Columbus From His Own Letters and… by Edward Everett Hale

This is the story of Christopher Columbus' exploration based mostly on the writings of Christopher Columbus as told by a fan in celebration of the 400th anniversary of sailing the ocean blue. Hale presents Columbus as an imperfect hero explorer doing the work of God. This is the story of Columbus that I learned in school -- one that presents Columbus' own words written to extol himself to his financiers as the truth in spite of raising some concerns about the accuracy of his reporting.

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QualityFrog | Sep 13, 2022 |

The Brick Moon and Other Stories by Edward Everett Hale

The Survivors Story [2/5] see Updates for others.

That was pretty good collection. The title story isn't really sci-fi although it does start off as a sort of knockoff of Earth to the Moon but ultimately, like several of the stories, its actually just a social commentary.

A number of the tales are about the benefits of a close-knit social group over the larger society. There's also a good bit of humour here and there and some really dark humour in two of stories. The final story the Survivors Story is actually quite experimental too.

I like the style of writing also but it can be a bit confusing at times due to the age of the stories. First half of the collection was better than the second IMO too.

Four christmas stories and a thanksgiving one if your looking for something seasonal.

Note: I read the gutenberg version and (as of this post) the story Ideals is garbled there due to part of it originally being in two columns. I fixed that and a small typo and added the story One Cent to the contents page from which it was missing and hyperlinked the contents while i was at it.
Fixed version can be found HERE .… (more)

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wreade1872 | 2 other reviews | Jul 25, 2022 |

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