Frank Norris’s McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899)

Frank Norris’s McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899)

Norris’s picnic in McTeague is a moment of pleasure in a sad novel. McTeague’s courtship of Trina Sieppe intensifies at the Sieppe family’s Sunday picnic at Schuetzen Park. When Mrs. Sieppe asks him, “Don’t you think picnics are fine fun,...
Stephen Crane’s Shame (1900)

Stephen Crane’s Shame (1900)

Stephen Crane’s Whilomville Stories were written in haste and provided ready money. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, written when he was twenty-three years old, lacks the polish of Crane’s future writing. Maggie was self-published and made no money....
L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Have you ever noticed that when Dorothy says, “There’s no place like home,” she’s eating a picnic lunch? Dorothy has just left Munchkin Country and is on her way to the Emerald City of Oz in the company of the Strawman. Though her meal is a...
Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902)

Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902)

Between 1892 and 1902, Owen Wister published stories about a man from Virginia who settled in Wyoming after the Civil War. When these were collected and published as The Virginian, A Horseman of the Plains, Wister declared the Old West was dead. The popularity of his...
E.M. Forster’s “The Story of a Picnic” (1904)

E.M. Forster’s “The Story of a Picnic” (1904)

“The Story of a Panic” is one of several stories Leonard Wolff complained that were “Pan-ridden.” It was well-known that Pan was code for identifying gay men and women. Woolf’s complaint implies that a Pan story such as “The Story...
Leonid Andreyev’s The Red Laugh (1904)

Leonid Andreyev’s The Red Laugh (1904)

Photograph of Leonid Andreyev in the English edition of The Red Laugh (1905). Andreyev’s antiwar story conjures the nightmare of Russia’s war in Manchuria. The novel is constantly morose, and each chapter is a fragment. First of which beginsAndreyev’s antiwar story...
Grace Margaret Gould’s “The Motor Picnic” (1905)

Grace Margaret Gould’s “The Motor Picnic” (1905)

“Miss Grace,” as Grace Margaret Gould was known among fashionistas, advocated for motorcars and picnics but stopped short at women’s suffrage. Writing for Hearst Magazine’s Motor: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to Motoring (1905), Gould puffed the “motor...
Foster, E. M. “The Curate’s Friend” (1904)

Foster, E. M. “The Curate’s Friend” (1904)

“The Curate’s Friend” is one of two of Forster’s coming-out stories published in The Celestial Omnibus. In “The Story of a Panic,” Pan appears in a whirlwind and rapes a young boy. In “The Curate’s Friend,” a Faun...