The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck: A Comedy of Limitations

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The Rivet in Grandfathers Neck (1921) is a comic romance novel by James Branch Cabell. Set in a world where history and fantasy collide, where the laws of chivalry and honor continue to hold sway in postbellum South, The Rivet in Grandfathers Neck is included in a series of novels, essays, and poems known as the Biography of the Life of Manuel. For Colonel Musgrave was by birth the lineal head of all the Musgraves of Matocton, which is in Lichfield, as degrees are counted there, equivalent to what being born a marquis would mean in England. Handsome and trim and affable, he defied chronology by looking ten years younger than he was known to be. A man of honor and tradition, Colonel Musgrave comes from a prominent family whose wealth and power once depended on its ownership of slaves. Despite his illustrious title, won by four years of arduous service at receptions and parades while on the staff of a former Governor of the State, Musgrave is a librarian whose influence in town depends largely on the esteem of his ancestors. When a distant cousin visits Lichfield, bringing with her the intellect and wit of a modern woman, Colonel Musgrave finds how easily traditions can falter. Set in a fictionalized Southern town, The Rivet in Grandfathers Neck is a captivating, hilarious tale of chivalry and romance. 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 The Rivet in Grandfathers Neck, 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 The Rivet in Grandfathers Neck 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.