Marleen Gorris Antonia’s Line  (1995)

Marleen Gorris Antonia’s Line  (1995)

Antonia is the matriarch of an extended family: her daughter, child, and partner, her friends, and castoffs who need a home. Each year, a long table is set in the barnyard for the extended family to picnic. See Marleen Gorris. Antonia’s Line  (1995). Screenplay by...
Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place (1956)

Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place (1956)

Allison McKenzie and Norman Page teenagers ride bicycles to a picnic on the Connecticut River. Metalious’s picnic is similar to Carson McCullers’s in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; during which Mick Kelly and Harry Minowitz talk about adult life and...
Theodore Boyer’s  Luncheon with the Devil (2012)

Theodore Boyer’s Luncheon with the Devil (2012)

The Devil is portrayed as a smiling horned goat enjoying a picnic with a man and two women dressed in contemporary clothing. The food is watermelon. There is a story for this picnic that is yet to unfold. Featured Image: Theodore Boyer. Luncheon with the Devil. Oil...
Children’s Picnic Food

Children’s Picnic Food

In picnic stories, unlike real-life children who are often persnickety, there are no arguments about food choices. Most importantly, most juvenile stories associate fun with baskets full of sweets, carbs, and fats. Presumably, well-behaved children require tasty...
Georgina Battiscombe’s English Picnics (1949)

Georgina Battiscombe’s English Picnics (1949)

Georgina Battiscombe’s 1949 English Picnics is a pioneering study of English picnics in literature and art that has become a go-to standard. Battiscombe asserts the English picnicker “is a devotee of the simple life; for a brief moment, he apes the noble savage....
Frederick Law Olmsted’s Sense of Picnicking in Public Parks

Frederick Law Olmsted’s Sense of Picnicking in Public Parks

“Lives of women and children too poor to be sent to the country can now be saved in thousands of instances by making them go to the Park, During a hot day in July last, I counted at one in the park eighteen separate groups, consisting of mothers with their...
The Picnic Grove in E.M. Forster’s “Other Kingdom” (1911)

The Picnic Grove in E.M. Forster’s “Other Kingdom” (1911)

Forster is the first to add a picnic to the story of “Daphne and Apollo,” the best-known version of which is Ovid’s Metamorphosis. When Harcourt Worters gives his wife Evelyn Beaumont a grove of beech trees as a wedding present, she calls it her...