Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911)

Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911)

The real secret of The Secret Garden is that with enough picnics and plenty of food, any youth will be happy. “You can trifle with your breakfast and seem to disdain your dinner,” Burnet writes, “if you are full to the brim with roasted eggs and...
Booker T. Washington’s “All Day Meeting” (1911)

Booker T. Washington’s “All Day Meeting” (1911)

Washington’s “all day meeting” is also known as “dinner on the grounds.” It agrees with versions of meetings by William A. Clary, Edna Lewis, Bebe Meaders and maya Angelou. I’ve cited Washington’s whole passage because...
Maurice Baring’s Caligula’s Picnic (1911)

Maurice Baring’s Caligula’s Picnic (1911)

Before the picnic breaks up and all the guests are drowned in the Bay of Naples, peacock and eels are served. Baring’s sense of humor is satirical and macabre. Here is one of his jokes in Caligula’s Picnic, a one-act closet drama: Proteus: I once knew a...
Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911)

Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911)

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...
E.M. Foster’s “The Curate’s Friend” (1911)

E.M. Foster’s “The Curate’s Friend” (1911)

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...
Thomas Hardy’s “Where the Picnic Was” (1913)

Thomas Hardy’s “Where the Picnic Was” (1913)

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...
Eric Satie’s Le Pique-Nique (1914/22)

Eric Satie’s Le Pique-Nique (1914/22)

“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...
John Sloan’s Arch Conspirators (1917)

John Sloan’s Arch Conspirators (1917)

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...
Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913)

Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913)

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...