Novel
The Hoosier Schoolmaster
The Hoosier School-Master
Edward Eggleston · 1871
Opening lines
"Want to be a school-master, do you? You? Well, what would you do in Flat Crick deestrick, I'd like to know?
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A thin young man applies to run the school at Flat Creek, an Indiana district where the older pupils drove out the last two masters and thrashed the one before. He is lodged in turn with the families, and the trustee predicts that he will be thrown out. He holds on. Around the school, the village lives on rumour; a gang of horse thieves and burglars operates in the shadows, and when the crowd turns on an old basket-maker, the master, who helped him flee, becomes a suspect in his turn.
Context
Editor-in-chief of Hearth and Home since August 1871, the author published the text there as a serial from 30 September to 30 December, then in volume form with Orange Judd. He drew his material from the recollections of his brother George Cary Eggleston, a schoolteacher in Indiana, and his method from Taine, for whom the artist must paint his own milieu; he would call himself the first in the line of the dialect novelists. The first printing numbered only two thousand copies, but sales soon ran to tens of thousands, and a condensed French translation appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes.
Who it is for
A short novel, whose Indiana dialect is both its difficulty and its interest. The 1892 edition carries notes by the author on the turns of phrase; the French translation of 1878 is condensed.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a foundational text of American regional realism, it was translated as early as the 1870s into French, German and Danish, and adapted for the screen three times.
Sources for this page 7
The pages consulted to check this page.