Out of the Hurly-Burly; Or, Life in an Odd Corner

Charles Heber ClarkProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2
Word count
541K words
Chapters
55

Tags

English Originals Social Fiction Everyday LifeCharacter SketchSlow ReadingHumorous SatireQuirky StyleComic NarrativeAmerican HumorSatirical StyleRural CustomsUrban Life

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Out of the Hurly-Burly; Or, Life in an Odd Corner by Charles Heber ClarkAuthor: Clark, Charles Heber, 1841-1915,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Feb 25, 2013

Editor's review

This work is a collection of sketches in novel form, published under a pen name by the nineteenth-century American humorist Charles Heber Clark. It revolves around everyday life in an eccentric small town, recording neighborhood quarrels, social farces, and vignettes of ordinary people in an exaggerated yet restrained tone. Its value lies not in plot progression but in the language itself: the narrator's deadpan absurdity is an entry point into the American local humor tradition. The chapters are relatively independent, suited to fragmented reading—one or two chapters on a commute or before bed is no effort. For readers interested in nineteenth-century American periodical literature, humorous essays, or small-town life writing, it offers vivid primary material; for general readers, it is light reading that can be set down and picked up at any time. Note that its humor depends on the cultural context and wordplay of its era, and some passages feel slow-paced today; readers should approach it in the spirit of reading old newspaper columns rather than expecting a tightly plotted story.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read in chapter order but feel free to skip around, treating each chapter as an independent column piece
  2. Mark dialect, puns, or period references first, then revisit them after finishing a passage
  3. Read alongside background material on nineteenth-century American humor literature for best results
  4. Read one or two chapters a day and jot down interesting expressions to avoid fatigue from reading straight through

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a short-story collection? It is closer to a series of connected sketches set in the same small town, with relatively independent chapters and no strong through-line. You can read it as a collected series of columns and needn't worry about losing the thread after a break.
Can readers with average English read it? The original is nineteenth-century English with dialect and period slang; the vocabulary isn't very difficult, but the feel of the language is old. Intermediate reading ability or an annotated edition and dictionary tools are recommended; start with shorter chapters to get used to the style.
Why don't the jokes land clearly? The humor relies heavily on the social context, newspaper tone, and wordplay of the time; without that background, some passages fall flat. Learning the common devices of nineteenth-century American local humor first and then returning to the book makes its absurdity easier to catch.

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About the author

Charles Heber Clark Author · American · 1841–1915

Charles Heber Clark (1841–1915) was an American novelist and humorist who published much of his work under the pen name Max Adeler. Born in Berlin, Maryland, he worked early in his career as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and as an editor at the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. He rose to fame in 1874 with Out of the Hurly-Burly, a light and witty portrayal of everyday life that established his reputation as a humorist. His other notable work, Elbow-Room: A Novel Without a Plot, continues in the same loose and casual narrative style. He also wrote Frictional Electricity. In later years Clark ran a textile-industry journal, and he died in 1915 in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania. His popular, humorous writing earned him a place in nineteenth-century American humor.