James Branch Cabell and Richmond-In-Virginia

By Edgar E. MacDonald

Book Overview

James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virginia by Edgar MacDonald In his prime Vanity Fair nominated James Branch Cabell for "Immortality" on its pages reserved for acclaiming the most select of notable achievers. Favored by the intelligentsia, Cabell was the author of a series of fabulous, well-told fictions that in the 1920s made him a household literary name. Among his many acclaimed books published by 1930 are Jurgen, The Lineage of Lichfield, The Silver Stallion, Something About Eve, The White Robe, and The Works of James Branch Cabell in eighteen volumes. By the time of his death in 1958 the list of his works had become prodigiously long, but he had been in eclipse for almost three decades. This definitive biography serves to restore to Cabell the recognition he deserves. Here he is portrayed as a jesting critic of southern chivalry, an ambivalent artist whose feelings for Richmond required a lifetime to reconcile. He was quintessentially a Virginian. His native Richmond shaped him, and its social milieu indelibly marked him. He matured as a writer in the climate of the postbellum South and excelled in subjecting the rigid graces of "Richmond-in-Virginia" to satire and burlesque. Like his fellow Virginian Ellen Glasgow, he had mixed emotions about home. Not to love Virginia was an act of betrayal, yet to condone its stultifying, Old South idealism was to betray oneself. With the deterioration of Richmond's Edwardian values in the 1920s Cabell emerged as a major literary figure, hailed as an iconoclast and debunker of myths, but by the 1930s his mannered, self-conscious style was out of fashion. Cabell was dogged by scandal. There was the question of homosexuality. It was charged that he murdered the man reputed to be his mother's lover. After a notorious New York trial his most notable book Jurgen was suppressed for violating antiobscenity laws. In this inclusive examination of Cabell's life and milieu a fascinating literary figure is rescued from the literary shadows and acknowledged as a writer of major worth in the canon of American literature. Edgar MacDonald is Cabell Scholar-in-Residence at the James Branch Cabell Library, Virginia Commonwealth University.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1604738561
• ISBN13: 9781604738568
• Release Date: June 2010
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Length: 414 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Unjustly neglected author...

Along with his own autobiographical writings and a chapter in Joe Lee Davis's Twayne book on Cabell, this is the best coverage of the life of this unjustly neglected author. It is, however not without its flaws. There are a few places where information is unnecessarily repeated, even down to the use of identical phrasing; and there's at least one factual howler: Cabell's early friend the novelist Justus Miles Foreman is said to have died on the Titanic in 1912 -- but actually he died on the Lusitania in 1915! There could perhaps have been more interrogation of the racial and social situation in 19c Virginia. But over all a good job...