One exception to the unremitting cold in Wharton’s Ethan Frome is a summer church picnic when Ethan and Mattie Silver first feel love for one another. When Mattie is forced to leave, Frome drives her to the train station. Along the way, they stop by the frozen...
The Curate’s Friend” is one of two Forster’s coming-out stories published in The Celestial Omnibus (1911). In “The Story of a Panic,” it’s Pan who rapes a young boy. But in “The Curate’s Friend,” it’s a Faun...
Hardy’s poems reveal an unhappy life with his wife, Emma Gifford. Perhaps the most definitive is “Where the Picnic Was,” in which he attempts to resolve their often “horrid shows” ends definitively: – But two have wandered far From...
“Le Pique-nique,” a piano composition about 30 seconds long, is one of twenty-one very short musical interpretations in Sports et Divertissement [Sports & Entertainments] devoted to the happiness of people at play. Satie’s preface explains that two artistic...
One January night, John Sloan and a boozy group climbed to the top of Greenwich Village’s Washington Arch. According to Sloan, they toted balloons, candles, food baskets, wine, a pot for boiling water, and the makings of a campfire. Fictionalized or not, No one...
Picnicking sandwiches and much more food play an important part in the courtship of Billy Roberts, a wagon driver, and Saxon Brown, a laundress, in Jack London’s Valley of the Moon. Intending to propose marriage, Billy and Saxon drive into the hills beyond...
Woolf’s picnic on the summit of Monte Rosa, a fictional place in South America, is the high point (pun intended) of The Voyage Out (1915). Journeying on donkeys walking in a single file, the narrator creates the image of “a jointed caterpillar, tufted with...
Even after zeppelin attacks on London in May and June, Brits are undeterred and cannot refrain from picnicking even under the threat of being gassed. Acid satire by F.H. Townsend. Featured Image: Even under threat of attack, Upper-class Brits cannot refrain from...
Sherrill was sure that picnic was an English word for an English custom, he ridiculed his French visitors for not spelling the word correctly. “That pleasant word “picnic,” so popular at all times in our country, “he writes, “played havoc...
Sandburg’s “Picnic Boat” is a snapshot of the aftermath of a Sunday picnic. It’s a visual and musical image picnicker returning at the end of a long leisurely day. Sunday night and the park policemen tell each other it is dark as a stack of...
