Ptomaine Street: The Tale of Warble Petticoat

Wells, Carolyn, 1862-1942Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
127K words
Chapters
13

Tags

English Originals Social FictionForeign Literature Social ObservationSuburban LifePortrait GalleryPastimeAbsurd AtmosphereLight ReadingTall TaleWedding ComedyHumorous SatireFemale Protagonist

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.Ptomaine Street: The Tale of Warble Petticoat by Carolyn WellsAuthor: Wells, Carolyn, 1862-1942,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jun 1, 2005

Editor's review

This work is a satirical novel by Carolyn Wells, following the experiences of the protagonist Warble Petticoat and depicting social customs and human foibles in an exaggerated, humorous style. Wells is known for her brisk narrative pace and witty dialogue; the book's absurd treatment of everyday life is both amusing and quietly mocking of the social habits of its time. As a public-domain ebook, it serves as a sample of early twentieth-century American popular literature and is also useful to readers studying the tradition of humorous satire. Read it as a light comedy of manners and note how the author plants irony within trivial episodes; combined with the social background of the period, it yields additional meanings. It is short, suitable for reading in fragments of spare time and as an entry point to reading English originals.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read through once to grasp the plot, then go back over the irony and puns in the dialogue
  2. Consult background materials on early twentieth-century American society to understand the targets of the book's depictions of custom
  3. Jot down unfamiliar expressions and period language, and look them up together after finishing

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

FAQ

Is this book suitable for English beginners? Not really for complete beginners. The book was written long ago, its vocabulary and sentence patterns carry period features, and much of the humor depends on verbal wit. Readers with intermediate or higher English reading ability who are willing to look up words will appreciate it more.
Do I need to know the author's background before reading? Not necessarily. The novel's plot is relatively self-contained, and you can start reading directly. If you want a deeper understanding of what the satire targets, you can briefly learn about Carolyn Wells's writing style and the environment of American popular literature at the time after reading.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Wells, Carolyn, 1862-1942 Author

Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) was an American author. Public information on her life and education is limited, yet the 58 works held in this collection attest to the breadth of her output. Her subjects range widely: detective novels such as A Chain of Evidence, The Room with the Tassels, The Luminous Face, and The Vanishing of Betty Varian, which rely on carefully planted clues and mounting mystery, sit alongside parodic and light-hearted pieces like The Re-echo Club and The Lover's Baedeker and Guide to Arcady, while Rubáiyát of a Motor Car shows her knack for blending humor with popular themes. She was skilled at building suspense and layering twists, writing with wit and briskness, and combining popular entertainment with literary playfulness—earning her a place in the early twentieth-century Anglophone popular literary scene.