The Man from Home

Wilson, Harry Leon, 1867-1939Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.4

Word count: 156K words
Chapters: 16

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.The Man from Home by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon WilsonAuthor: Wilson, Harry Leon, 1867-1939,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: May 18, 2005

Editor's review

The Man from Home is a play co-written by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson, part of the light comedy tradition in American literature. The story centers on a plain-spoken figure from the American Midwest who navigates European aristocratic circles with down-to-earth wisdom, generating comedy through mistaken identity and cultural collision. The dialogue is brisk and the characters are vividly drawn, making the play a useful sample of early twentieth-century American popular drama. Readers can see how American society of the time mocked Old World aristocratic culture and expressed homegrown confidence. As a dramatic text, it is dominated by scenes and dialogue with little narrative description, so readers need to reconstruct the stage action in their minds. The Project Gutenberg electronic edition is easy to search and cite, suiting theater enthusiasts, students of American literature, and readers who want a light introduction to an English-language play.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who want to understand the tradition of American popular drama through an original English-language play
Literature enthusiasts interested in cultural clashes between America and European aristocracy
Learners who need a short play for intensive English reading or dramatic rehearsal
Literature students studying the work of Tarkington or Wilson

Not a good fit for

Readers who prefer long narrative novels and are unaccustomed to dialogue-driven texts
Beginners who want a systematic understanding of American theater history and need annotations and background guidance
Contemporary readers who find early twentieth-century values and comedy conventions alienating

Reading tips

Read through the whole play first to grasp character relationships and scene changes, then return to key dialogue for close reading
Mark stage directions and entrance/exit cues while reading, and reconstruct the performance rhythm in your mind
Read alongside other American plays of the same period to appreciate the linguistic character of homegrown comedy
If using it for English study, single out cultural allusions and colloquial expressions for separate review

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.

FAQ

Is this play suitable as an introductory text for reading English originals?

It can serve as light introductory material, but it is a play rather than a novel, with dense dialogue and brief stage directions, so readers need to be comfortable inferring situations from conversation. If you already have some English reading ability, it is short and conversational and fairly easy to read; complete beginners may struggle because of the cultural background and dramatic format.

What background should I know before reading this play?

It helps to have a rough understanding of early twentieth-century American social attitudes, specifically the contrast between homegrown American values and European aristocratic tradition. Knowing that popular comedies of the time often used cultural dislocation to create humor will help you enter the text more quickly. There is no need to study the authors' biographies in depth; the situations in the play itself are enough to support reading.

How does reading an electronic edition differ from reading a paper copy of a play?

The electronic edition makes it easy to search character names and keywords throughout the text and to copy quotations; but reading a play depends on quickly flipping between scenes and the character list, and a paper copy is more intuitive for cross-referencing. With the electronic edition, you can keep a separate note recording character relationships to make up for the inconvenience of paging back and forth.

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About the author

Wilson, Harry Leon, 1867-1939 Author

Harry Leon Wilson (1867–1939) was an American writer; public information about his life and education is limited. Thirteen of his works are held here, showing considerable variety of subject matter, with humorous and satirical fiction as his hallmark. Ruggles of Red Gap follows an English manservant in an American Western household and was later adapted for stage and screen; Merton of the Movies satirizes the dream-making machinery of early Hollywood; The Boss of Little Arcady and The Spenders depict small-town life and the manners of a new American generation. He also wrote Old West tales such as The Lions of the Lord and folksy works such as Ma Pettengill. His writing is marked by a light touch in characterization and social caricature, giving him a place in early twentieth-century American popular literature.