II. Joseph A. Altsheler
To Anne Carroll Moore, supervisor of work with children in the New York Public Library, I am indebted for the best picture of what Joseph A. Altsheler’s work signifies. Both at the time of his death and since, he was and has been and is the most popular author of books for boys in America. He is more popular than James Fenimore Cooper, to whose work his own is probably most closely allied. He wrote over again, as Miss Moore has pointed out, the tales of our pioneer life and struggle “with a fresh sense of their reality.” His “deep love of nature, the ability to select from historical sources subjects of strong human interest, a natural gift for storytelling, and great modesty” were other qualities which the youthful reader senses and appreciates. “Boys who clamor for Altsheler,” says Miss Moore, “read history and biography as a natural and necessary accompaniment. Nor do they neglect Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or The Boys’ Life of Mark Twain. Never in the history of writing for boys has an author attained universal popularity on so broad a foundation of allied interests in reading.”[77]
Cooper wrote when American history was brief; another century and the breadth of a continent unrolled itself before Altsheler, who set about in quiet patience to make all that spaciousness and all those crowding events intelligible for the American boy. And because in modesty and patience he had gone far to achieve just that—taking the average boy into the wilderness, as Miss Moore says, “so that he may realize his heritage in the history of his country and take his place there more intelligently”—his death is a sharp loss. Miss Moore has told how, on 7 June 1919, boys came all day long to the New York Public Library, some with clippings from the newspapers telling of their favorite’s death. There they could look upon a full set of all his works, and his picture. Said a 17-year-old:
“He looks young in that picture but he could have lived all through American history—he makes it so true. You couldn’t do better than to read his books. You can even answer some of the Regents’ questions out of Altsheler’s books. I read every one of them and I got an A-1 mark for history.”
Eyes roved along the shelves over the volumes of the Young Trailers’ Series, the Texan Series, the French and Indian War Series, the Civil War Series, and the rest. They picked out individual titles—always simple and always touched with the imagination of a man who knew supremely how to kindle the youthful mind. Altsheler, indeed, surpassed himself in the titles of the eight books of his Civil War Series, a beautiful crescendo:
| The Guns of Bull Run |
| The Guns of Shiloh |
| The Scouts of Stonewall |
| The Sword of Antietam |
| The Star of Gettysburg |
and then the point of rest, on a great chord, followed by a resolution and a final cadence:
| The Rock of Chickamauga |
| The Shades of the Wilderness |
| The Tree of Appomattox |
—guns, scouts, sword, star, rock! The words sing. Then the shades of anguish, weariness, impending defeat, and at last the peace of the spreading tree....
Joseph Alexander Altsheler was born at Three Springs, Kentucky, 29 April 1862. As a boy he would lie on his back in the woods of the Daniel Boone country and dream of the pioneers until they came to have as strong a fascination for him as the myths of Greece have had for other minds. There were not many books, but he heard over and over again the stories of woodsmen and fighters, for he was descended on his mother’s side from Virginia and Kentucky borderers. And as a boy he knew personally Civil War veterans, both blue and gray, such as General Simon Bolivar Buckner, General Don Carlos Buell, and General Frank Wolford. The one writer who captivated him completely and to whom he afterward said he owed the most was Francis Parkman.
He was educated at Liberty College, Glasgow, Kentucky, and at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Then he went to work on the Louisville Evening Post. A year later he moved over to Henry Watterson’s Courier-Journal, for which he became the political reporter and legislative correspondent at Frankfort, the State capital.
After service as city editor of the Courier-Journal and as an editorial writer, he joined the staff of the World, New York. He covered the World’s Fair in Chicago and the events attending the dethronement of Liliuokalani in Hawaii, and then became editor and manager of the tri-weekly edition of the World, a job he continued to hold until his death. His first book of consequence was The Sun of Saratoga (1897), which still sells. The first of his boys’ books, so-called, was The Young Trailers (1906), written when his own son was eleven or twelve years old. But he made it a practice never to allow thought of the age of his readers to affect his treatment of a subject; and while this accounts for the number of older readers who enjoy his books, it probably also goes far to account for the success of his books with boys. He never wrote down to them.
His accuracy and his sense of reality are beyond praise. But the finest tribute to him is the fact that, as Miss Moore testifies, he is the only author whom older boys absolutely insist on having, for whose books they wait in line in the library, refusing to be put off with other titles.