The Certain Hour

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

A Certain Hour (1922) is a collection of stories by James Branch Cabell. Recreating the lives of some of historys most celebrated poets, A Certain Hour is a relative outlier among Cabells body of work, and is included in a series of novels, essays, and poems known as the Biography of the Life of Manuel. Indisputably the most striking defect of this modern American literature is the fact that the production of anything at all resembling literature is scarcely anywhere apparent. Innumerable printing-presses, instead, are turning out a vast quantity of reading-matter, the candidly recognized purpose of which is to kill time, and whichit has been asserted, though perhaps too sweepinglyought not to be vended over book-counters, but rather in drugstores along with the other narcotics. Moving away from his usual setting of 13th century France, Cabell begins his collection with an impassioned essay decrying the state of American literature in the early twentieth century. Interested in the nature of literary genius, he imagines the lives of such poets as Robert Herrick and Alexander Pope, whose wit and wisdom remain essential centuries after their deaths. A Certain Hour is a captivating collection of tales from a historical period not so different from our own. Cabells work has long been described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read A Certain Hour, however, is to understand that the issues thereinthe struggle for power, the unspoken distance between men and womenwere vastly important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own, divisive world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of James Branch Cabells A Certain Hour is a classic of fantasy and romance reimagined for modern readers.

Author Bio

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer of escapist and fantasy fiction. Born into a wealthy family in the state of Virginia, Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he graduated in 1898 following a brief personal scandal. His first stories began to be published, launching a productive decade in which Cabell's worked appeared in both Harper's Monthly Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next forty years, Cabell would go on to publish fifty-two books, many of them novels and short-story collections. A friend, colleague, and inspiration for such writers as Ellen Glasgow, H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser, James Branch Cabell is remembered as an iconoclastic pioneer of fantasy literature.