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The short concluding section of this book—that relating to Dr. Gowdy andthe Squash—is reprinted by permission from Harper's Magazine. All theremaining material appears now for the first time.
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With the publication of his first book, This Weary World, Abner Joyceimmediately took a place in literature. Or rather, he made it; the bookwas not like other books, and readers felt the field of fiction to be thericher by one very vital and authentic personality.
This Weary World was grim and it was rugged, but it was sincere and itwas significant. Abner's intense earnestness had left but little room forthe graces;—while he was bent upon being recognised as a "writer," yetto be a mere writer and nothing more would not have satisfied him at all.Here was the world with its many wrongs, with its numberless cryingneeds; and the thing for the strong young man to do was to help setmatters right. This was a simple enough task, were it but approached withcourage, zeal, determination. A few brief years, if lived strenuously andintensely, would suffice. "Man individually is all right enough," saidAbner; "it is only collectively that he is wrong." What was at fault wasthe social scheme,—the general understanding, or lack of understanding.A short sharp hour's work before breakfast would count for a hundredtimes more than a feeble dawdling prolonged throughout the whole day.Abner rose betimes and did his hour's work; sweaty, panting, begrimed,hopeful, indignant, sincere, self-confident, he set his product full inthe world's eye.
Abner's book comprised a dozen short stories—twelve clods of earthgathered, as it were, from the very fields across which he himself, afarmer's boy, had once guided the plough. The soil itself spoke, theintimate, humble ground; warmed by his own passionate sense of right, itsteamed incense-like aloft and cried to the blue skies for justice. Hepleaded for the farmer, the first, the oldest, the most necessary of allthe world's workers; for the man who was the foundation of civilizedsociety, yet who was yearly gravitating downward through new depths ofslighting indifference, of careless contempt, of rank injustice and grosstyranny; for the man who sowed so plenteously, so laboriously, yet reapedso scantily and in such bitter and benumbing toil; for the man who livedindeed beneath the heavens, yet must forever fasten his solicitous eyeupon the earth. All this revolted Abner; the indignation of a youth thathad not yet made its compromise with the world burned on every page. Someof his stories seemed written not so much by the hand as by the fist, afist quivering from the tension of muscles and sinews fully ready to actfor truth and right; and there were paragraphs upon which the intent andblazing eye of the writer appeared to rest with no less fierceness,coldly printed as they were, than it had rested upon the manuscriptitself.
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