Charles Warren Stoddard

Stoddard's enchanting account of cruising through Polynesia, Tahiti, and the Hawaiian Islands. Lyrical descriptions of island life and tropical landscapes in the Victorian Pacific. This Naval Classics edition features RKHS (Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space) analytical enrichments including surprisal analysis, narrative complexity metrics, and computational literary analysis that illuminate the text from a modern data-science perspective.

Summer Cruising in the South Seas, stands as a beacon in the world of books, bridging the gap between past and present. Once considered among the old books, this classic work-like so many forgotten and ancient books-has shaped our understanding of culture and history. It's a remarkable example of history books that have influenced generations, and now, through the dedication of Alpha Editions-your trusted book publisher-it's reborn in a fresh, elegant format. We've carefully retyped, redesigned, and improved this book so it's much more than just another title to read. Now you can enjoy clear, easy-to-read pages without any blurry scans or faded text. By choosing this edition, you're investing in more than a book-you're safeguarding a legacy. Your support keeps a remarkable piece of human heritage alive, ensuring its lessons and inspirations continue to resonate well into the future.

Charles Warren Stoddard (August 7, 1843 - April 23, 1909) was an American author and editor best known for his travel books about Polynesian life. Stoddard began writing verses at a young age amid the growing literary climate of California. His first published work saw print in The Golden Era for September 1862 under the pseudonym "Pip Pepperpod". He later recalled how he clandestinely slipped his contribution into the Era's mailbox without anyone knowing: "No member of my family suspected that I was so bold as to dream of entering the circle of the elect who wrote regularly every week for the chief literary organ west of the Rocky Mountains".

South-Sea Idyls, a classical book, has been considered important throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

Charles Warren Stoddard (1843–1909) was, during his life, an acclaimed and prolific writer in multiple genres: poetry, travel sketches, personal memoir, and conversion narrative. His most popular works were dispatches primarily from the South Sea Islands but also extended into Palestine, Egypt, and what would become known as Hawai'i, most of which were published in the San Francisco Chronicle and then collected into books. For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City, Thrice Told (1903) is Stoddard's only novel. This new edition, as with other works in Penn Press's series Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century, returns and reframes an important queer literary text to print. Set mostly in and around San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, the novel features a protagonist, Paul Clitheroe, who is an aspiring writer living among the Bohemian artistic circles of that place and time—the same circles Stoddard himself inhabited. The novel is both formally experimental and largely autobiographical. Thus Paul comes into contact, as Stoddard did, with writers, artists, actors, directors, priests, adventurers, and many others as he attempts to begin his career. Bohemian artistic life and erotic experimentation go hand in hand here: Paul has multiple relationships with other men even as he writes a novel that features similar liaisons. At the very end of the story, while on a cruise in the Pacific, Paul impulsively leaves his ship and disappears in a canoe with some young Hawaiian men. This parallels Stoddard's life too: he spent many long periods of his life in Hawai'i, where he found the local homoerotic customs to his liking. This Q19 volume also includes three of Stoddard's Hawaiian travel sketches, which chronicle his intimate personal relationship with a Hawaiian youth he calls Kána-Aná. The volume contains a full critical introduction as well as extensive annotations explaining textual references of various kinds and identifying parallels with Stoddard's own life.

For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City (1903) is a novel by Charles Warren Stoddard. Published toward the end of Stoddard’s career as a poet and travel writer whose friends included Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City is a pioneering novel that explores the ambitions of a young artist while illuminating the struggles of gay men in a society that failed to accept them as equals. At 25 years of age, Paul Clitheroe is “master of himself, but slave to fortune.” A struggling writer, he lives a life of ennui and excess, looking for love and success without being sure of the shape of either. In the Misty City, he has begun making a name for himself among local editors and readers, finally finding publication for his work. Despite this modest success, he remains unsatisfied, unsure of himself, and increasingly restless. Are his mixed feelings merely a symptom of his poetic outlook, or something else altogether? When the debonair Foxlair invites Paul to join him on a voyage to the South Seas, a land of promise where gay men can live without fear of reprisal, he wonders if there is a place for him after all. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Charles Warren Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City is a classic work of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City (1903) is a novel by Charles Warren Stoddard. Published toward the end of Stoddard’s career as a poet and travel writer whose friends included Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City is a pioneering novel that explores the ambitions of a young artist while illuminating the struggles of gay men in a society that failed to accept them as equals. At 25 years of age, Paul Clitheroe is “master of himself, but slave to fortune.” A struggling writer, he lives a life of ennui and excess, looking for love and success without being sure of the shape of either. In the Misty City, he has begun making a name for himself among local editors and readers, finally finding publication for his work. Despite this modest success, he remains unsatisfied, unsure of himself, and increasingly restless. Are his mixed feelings merely a symptom of his poetic outlook, or something else altogether? When the debonair Foxlair invites Paul to join him on a voyage to the South Seas, a land of promise where gay men can live without fear of reprisal, he wonders if there is a place for him after all. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Charles Warren Stoddard’s For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City is a classic work of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Reproduction of the original: Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska by Charles Warren Stoddard