Henry Milner Rideout
Encyclopedia
Henry Milner Rideout was a native of Calais, Maine
Calais, Maine
Calais is a city in Washington County, Maine, United States. The city has three United States border crossings or also known as a Port of entry with the busiest being on the St. Croix River bordering St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada...

. Author of sixteen novels, twenty-three short stories and novellas, and a biographical memoir, he also was editor of one college textbook, as well as co-editor of three others. Many of his stories appeared in The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971.-History:...

.

Rideout's Life


Rideout's father, a miller and road contractor, died when Rideout was twelve. Rideout's elder brother, who managed a bank in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

, became the support of the family. At school, Rideout's ability caught the attention of his English teacher, Laura Burns, who was a cousin of the distinguished Harvard
Harvard College
Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...

 professor of English, Charles Townsend Copeland. She and Copeland motivated a group of Calais townspeople to lend Rideout the wherewithal to enter Harvard
Harvard College
Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...

 in 1895, where he was the first in his family to attend college. At Harvard, his literary talent came to the fore. Eventually he became Editor-in-Chief of The Harvard Monthly. His friends at Harvard included William Morrow, William Jones
William Jones (anthropologist)
William Jones was a Native American anthropologist of the Fox nation. Born in Oklahoma on March 28, 1871, after studying at Hampton Institute he graduated from Phillips Academy and went on to receive his B.A. from Harvard...

, Raynal Bolling
Raynal Bolling
Colonel Raynal Cawthorne Bolling was the first high-ranking U.S. officer to be killed in combat in World War I. He laid the foundation for the United States Army Air Service in the American Expeditionary Force...

, and Arthur Ruhl. After graduating in 1899 as Class Odist, Rideout was an instructor in the Harvard English department.

Four years later, his college debts were paid and Rideout was free to turn away from a promising but uncongenial academic career. The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...

 had accepted two of his short stories, giving him hope of earning his living by his pen. To gather background material, he set off from San Francisco
San Francisco, California
San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

 for six months of travel in the Far East
Far East
The Far East is an English term mostly describing East Asia and Southeast Asia, with South Asia sometimes also included for economic and cultural reasons.The term came into use in European geopolitical discourse in the 19th century,...

 under contract to the American Woolen Company
American Woolen Company
The American Woolen Company was established in 1899 under the leadership of William M. Wood and his father-in-law Frederick Ayer through the consolidation of eight financially troubled New England woolen mills. At the company's height in the 1920s, it owned and operated 60 woolen mills across New...

, reporting on jute mills in the Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...

, Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

, and India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. Keeping careful notes, writing long detailed letters to his brother, he observed so well and later used atmosphere so skillfully that readers familiar with places such as Bangkok
Bangkok
Bangkok is the capital and largest urban area city in Thailand. It is known in Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon or simply Krung Thep , meaning "city of angels." The full name of Bangkok is Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom...

 or Canton
Guangzhou
Guangzhou , known historically as Canton or Kwangchow, is the capital and largest city of the Guangdong province in the People's Republic of China. Located in southern China on the Pearl River, about north-northwest of Hong Kong, Guangzhou is a key national transportation hub and trading port...

 were persuaded that Rideout's familiarity equaled their own. During that arduous circumnavigation, Rideout made life-long friendships with various expatriate working people, especially sea captains. When his final jute-reports were filed, he returned via Europe, and settled down in central California with his bank-manager brother to begin an all-out effort to write novels for a living.

In California, he met his future wife Frances Reed, also a gifted writer. They lived in her family home in Sausalito
Sausalito, California
Sausalito is a San Francisco Bay Area city, in Marin County, California, United States. Sausalito is south-southeast of San Rafael, at an elevation of 13 feet . The population was 7,061 as of the 2010 census. The community is situated near the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, and prior to...

 where they raised their three children. There were a number of Rideout cousins in California, among them the playwright Ransom Rideout (1899-1975), whose play "Goin' Home" was performed on Broadway in 1928 and staged by Antoinette Perry
Antoinette Perry
Antoinette Perry was an actress, director and co-founder of the American Theatre Wing. The Tony Awards are her namesake....

 and Brock Pemberton
Brock Pemberton
Brock Pemberton was an American theatrical producer, director and founder of the Tony Awards.Pemberton was born in Leavenworth, Kansas and attended the University of Kansas. Before becoming a producer he was a press agent in New York...

, and who wrote dialogue for the film Hallelujah!
Hallelujah! (1929 film)
Hallelujah! is a 1929 MGM musical directed by King Vidor, starring Daniel L. Haynes and the then unknown Nina Mae McKinney.Filmed in Tennessee and Arkansas and chronicling the troubled quest of a sharecropper, Zeke Johnson , and his relationship with the seductive Chick , Hallelujah! was one of the...

, directed by King Vidor
King Vidor
King Wallis Vidor was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter whose career spanned nearly seven decades...

. As Rideout's work gained renown, readers in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain were eager for his stories. His eminence became such that the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...

 ran a banner headline announcing his sudden death from pneumonia while on a family trip to Europe.

Critical Appraisal

In a 1920 essay titled "The National Letters," H.L. Mencken said,
Yet a study of Rideout's life reveals that his literary career was more like a workman following traditions of honest craftsmanship. Rideout's Far Eastern voyage also fits into his Down East heritage. Maine Rideouts had been shipbuilders since the late seventeenth century. They were lumbermen who cut the trees to build those ships. Some were farmers who made the most of the resources of the Maine coast by building a family schooner to venture to China or India on a trading voyage. Rideout set out to seek literary treasure on the other side of the world. With workmanlike modesty, Rideout spoke of his stories as his "yarns." Even when he became well known, he never saw himself as a literary figure, and he despised coteries, literary movements, and intellectual snobbery.

Rideout's fiction drew from two different sources: Maine background, or exotic background. Though his most acclaimed work is in the former vein, yet toward the end of his life he did equally well with a group of traditional Chinese tales told him at the Sausalito kitchen table by his friend Pan Ruguei. Those stories were collected as Tao Tales. John Macy said in a 1928 review that Rideout set the Chinese stories in "enticingly classic English."

The classical training absorbed at Harvard shows in the commemorative ode commissioned from Rideout for the Tercentennial Anniversary of the settlement of Saint Croix Island, Maine
Saint Croix Island, Maine
Saint Croix Island , long known to locals as Dochet Island, is a small uninhabited island in Maine near the mouth of the Saint Croix River that forms part of the International Boundary separating Maine from New Brunswick....

 in 1904. Moreover, that ode, alone of all the Tercentennial speeches and formalities, makes mention of Native Americans. This awareness shows in his college friendship with William Jones, the Native-American anthropologist who died in the Philippines in 1909. (William Morrow and Raynal Bolling
Raynal Bolling
Colonel Raynal Cawthorne Bolling was the first high-ranking U.S. officer to be killed in combat in World War I. He laid the foundation for the United States Army Air Service in the American Expeditionary Force...

 commissioned Rideout to write a memorial biography of Jones.) Rideout's last published work was an adventure story, Lola the Bear, set in the Maine woods among tribal people with whom Rideout had hunted and fished since boyhood.

Rideout was a man who found ordinary people more interesting than high society. For example, he made friends with the engineer of a Cunard
Cunard Line
Cunard Line is a British-American owned shipping company based at Carnival House in Southampton, England and operated by Carnival UK. It has been a leading operator of passenger ships on the North Atlantic for over a century...

 liner rather than with the first class passengers in the salon of that liner. He loathed cities, and his fictional heroes were country people and working men. The heroine of his late novel, Barbry, was an indentured servant girl.

It is appropriate that Maine lumberjack songs and sea chanteys recorded by Rideout are preserved on wax cylinders in the archive of the American Folklife Center
American Folklife Center
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife" . The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, established at the Library in 1928 as a repository for American folk music...

 at the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...

. The Dictionary of American Biography contains an entry for Henry Milner Rideout with information supplied by his widow.

In his valedictory 1928 review, John Macy pays tribute to Rideout's work:

Novels

  • The Siamese Cat (1907)
  • Admiral's Light (1907)
  • Dragon's Blood (1909)
  • The Twisted Foot (1910)
  • White Tiger (1915)
  • The Far Cry (1916)
  • Tin Cowrie Dass (1918)
  • Boldero (1918)
  • The Key of the Fields (1918)
  • Fern Seed (1920)
  • The Winter Bell (1922)
  • The Footpath Way (1923)
  • Barbry (1923)
  • The Man Eater (1924)
  • Dulcarnon (1925)
  • Lola the Bear (1928)


(Most of these were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971.-History:...

, as were
the greater number of the short stories and novellas listed below.)

Short stories, novelettes and novellas

  • Wild Justice (1903)
  • Blue Peter
  • Captain Christy

(The first two appeared in The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...

 and all three were published in one volume in 1906, titled Beached Keels.)
  • Hantu (The Atlantic Monthly
    The Atlantic Monthly
    The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...

    , 1906, and later in The Spinner's Book of Fiction, 1907)
  • The Padre's Volcano (Everybody's Magazine,1906)
  • Bull's Eye (1909)
  • Fair Play (1910)
  • The Hand of Glory (1915)
  • The Rainbow (1915)
  • Parimban's Daughter (1916)
  • The Camellia Tree (1916)
  • Hury Seke (1917)
  • After Dark (1918)
  • Goliah (1918)
  • Surprising Grace (1918)
  • The Golden Wreath(1919)
  • Saxby Gale (1918)
  • Fortune's Darling (1919)
  • Runa's Holiday (1919)
  • The Toad (1920)
  • The Other Day, Powers of Darkness, "The Seeds of Time, "Old Things, The Old Fighter's Children,
  • The Sunny Pool, "The Fat Nun's Blue Parrot, Man-Woman Free, and
  • Surf Rats (Short stories collected as Tao Tales, 1927).

Memoir


Textbooks

  • Letters of Thomas Gray (1899) (Edited with Charles T Copeland)
  • Tennyson's "The Princess" Nineteenth century literature (1899) (Gateway Series)
  • Freshman English and Theme-Correcting in Harvard College (1901) (With Charles T. Copeland)
  • Selections from Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Browning (1909)

External links

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