Charles Dudley Warner

Oft quoted but seldom credited,Charles Dudley Warner’s My Summer in a Garden is a classic of American garden writing and was a seminal early work in the then fledgling genre of American nature writing. Warner—prominent in his day as a writer and newspaper editor—was a dedicated amateur gardener who shared with Mark Twain, his close friend and neighbor, a sense of humor that remains deliciously fresh today. In monthly dispatches, Warner chronicles his travails in the garden, where he and his cat, Calvin, seek to ward off a stream of interlopers, from the neighbors’ huge-hoofed cows and thieving children, to the reviled, though “propagatious,” pusley weed. To read Warner is to join him on his rounds of his beloved vegetable patch, to feel the sun on his sore back, the hoe in his blistered hands, and yet, like him, never to lose sight of “the philosophical implications of contact with the earth, and companionship with gently growing things.” This Modern Library edition is published with an extensive new Introduction by Allan Gurganus, author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and The Practical Heart.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America - an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peace-time optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naivete of their own time in a work which endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.

Cited in Adirondack Life as one of the twenty-five most collectible books about the Adirondacks ever to appear, these essays were first published in book form in 1878. Warner’s main theme is the small, often-ludicrous figure that the human being cuts in the wilderness. His urbane satire takes the starch out of "the tin-can and paper collar tourists" who were beginning to flock to the Adirondacks.Warner also appeals to the sensibilities of his readers, then and now, as in the piece on "A-Hunting of the Deer," which is written from the deer’s point of view. And in dead pan worthy of his friend and neighbor Mark Twain, he frequently pulls the reader’s leg, as in his description of a hastily built woods "shanty": "It needs but a few of these skins to cover the roof, and they make a perfectly watertight roof, except when it rains."Warner’s love of nature, combined with his humor and social satire, makes In the Wilderness as good a read now as it was more than a century ago.