The Project Gutenberg EBook of Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And
Contradictions, by Slason Thompson

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Title: Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions

Author: Slason Thompson

Release Date: July 22, 2004 [EBook #12984]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: Portrait of Eugene Field in 1885.]

EUGENE FIELD

A STUDY IN HEREDITY AND CONTRADICTIONS

By SLASON THOMPSON

With Portraits, Views and Fac-Simile Illustrations

VOLUME I

Published, December, 1901
Charles Scribner's Sons
New York

1901

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Not as other memoirs are written would Eugene Field, were he alive,
have this study of his life. He would think more of making it reflect
the odd personality of the man than rehearse the birth, development,
daily life, and works of the author. If he had undertaken to write his
own life, as was once his intention, it would probably have been the
most remarkable work of fiction by an American author that ever
masqueraded in the quaker garments of fact. From title-page to
colophon--on which he would have insisted--the book would have been
one studied effort to quiz and queer (a favorite word of his) the
innocent and willing-to-be-deluded reader. "Tell your sister for me,"
I recall his saying, "what a kind, good, and deserving man I am. How I
love little children and [with a dry chuckle] elderly spinsters.
Relate how I was born of rich yet honest parents, was reared in the
'nurture and admonition of the Lord,' and, according to the bent of a
froward youth, have stumbled along to become the cynosure of a ribald
age."

Field's idea of a perfect memoir was that it should contain no facts
that might interfere with its being novel and interesting reading both
to the public and its subject. He set little store by genius, as he
tells us in one of his letters, and less by "that nonsense called
useful knowledge." His peculiar notions as to the field of biography
were once illustrated in one he furnished to a New York firm, which
proposed a series of biogr