Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926)

When Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton stop for lunch while trout fishing on the Irrazy River, it looks like a picnic. Whether it’s a lunch or a picnic doesn’t matter because it’s when Hemingway chooses to reveal Jake Barnes’ spiritual disquietude...
Dubose Heyward’s Porgy & Bess (1926)

Dubose Heyward’s Porgy & Bess (1926)

According to Heyward, “It was the day set for the grand parade and picnic of “The Sons and Daughters of Repent Ye Saith the Lord,” and, with the first light of morning, Catfish Row had burst into a fever of preparation.” Expectations promise...
Conrad Aiken’s “Strange Moonlight” (1925)

Conrad Aiken’s “Strange Moonlight” (1925)

Conrad Aiken’s “Strange Moonlight” (1925) is a moody picnic story. It’s an elegy on death seen through the eyes of an unnamed young boy, somewhere between nine and eleven years old, who is bewildering affected by the death of his dear friend...
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)

Except for the picnic on Monte Rosa in The Voyage Out, Woolf’s other picnic is in To the lighthouse. It’s a skimpy lunch shared by Mr. Ramsay, James, and Camas as they sail to the lighthouse. Just before reaching the island, Mr. Ramsay announces that...
Roark Bradford’s Ol Man Adam (1928)

Roark Bradford’s Ol Man Adam (1928)

Bradford did not see it, but Ol’ Man Adam is imbued with his inherent racism. He means to entertain by portraying rural, uneducated happy-go-lucky African Americans retelling Old Testament stories in a dialect that’s more Bradford’s than theirs....
Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed Beach Picnic (1929)

Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed Beach Picnic (1929)

Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed has two picnics, and I’ll treat each as a separate posting. Each picnic features the protagonist Vance Weston with different women, Halo (Héloïse) Spear on Thundertop Mountain at sunrise over the Hudson River, and Laura Lou...
Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930)

Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930)

Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons takes its name from the Swallow and the Amazon, two fourteen-foot dinghies that the childre n of the Walker and Blackett families sail in Coniston Lake in the English Lake District, where they play pirates and picnic at their...
Ann Bridge’s Peking Picnic (1932)

Ann Bridge’s Peking Picnic (1932)

Bridge’s Peking Picnic is autofiction based on her life as the wife of the British Oriental Attaché in Peking. The romantic interlude suggests that Bridge’s real-life marriage to Owen O’Malley was no picnic. It’s the story of picnic romance...
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936)

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936)

Scarlett O’Hara’s first encounter with Rhett Butler is an April picnic at the Wilkes family’s Twelve Oaks plantation. It’s only days before the Civil War begins in Charleston, South Carolina (April 12, 1861), and the picnickers are oblivious to...