Born Philadelphia, April 5, 1834; graduate Philadelphia High School; journalist on Philadelphia and New York newspapers; began career as author (under name of Frank R. Stockton) by contributions to magazines; joined staff of Scribner’s Monthly, and later was asst. editor St. Nicholas. Author (juvenile books): “Roundabout Rambles;” “Tales Out of School;” “A Jolly Fellowship;” “Captain Chap;” “The Story of Viteau;” “Ting-A-Ling Stories;” “What Might Have Been Expected;” “The Floating Prince Kobel Land;” “The Bee Man of Orn;” “The Clocks of Rondaine;” “Personally Conducted;” “Stories of New Jersey;” “Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coast.” Novels and Stories: “The Lady or the Tiger;” “The Young Master of Hyson Hall;” “The Late Mrs. Null;” “The Great War Syndicate;” “The Hundredth Man;” “Stories of Three Burglars;” “A Chosen Few;” “Adventures of Captain Horn;” “Mrs. Cliff’s Yacht;” “The Great Stone of Sardis;” “The Girl at Cobhurst;” “Rudder Grange;” “The Rudder Grangers Abroad;” “Pomona’s Travels;” “The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine;” “Christmas Wreck and Other Stories;” “The Dusantes” (sequel to Mrs. Lecks & Aleshine); “Amos Kilbright;” “Ardis Claverden;” “The Merry Chanter;” “The House of Martha;” “The Watchmaker’s Wife;” “A Story Teller’s Pack;” “The Associate Hermits;” “The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander;” “Afield and Afloat;” “Bicycle of Cathay.”

Personal

  Mr. Stockton’s habit of dictating was acquired when his days were given to editing. Then it rested him to be able to register his ideas without the intervention of a pen. Now, he would find it difficult to write freely in any other way. With the regularity of the clock he begins his morning’s work at ten. If he is drawing on his store-house of finished stories he dictates for two hours and a half, seldom longer. But if he is composing he gives his thoughts entirely to himself, with the same regularity as to time, and perhaps for many days together. Few changes, and these only verbal, are made in the first written draft; and while he always seeks to find the word of all words that would lend felicity and vigor to a phrase, he never polishes. Once penned, a story is seldom kept over night, but is at once sent to its destination. In the afternoon he goes forth for recreation and acquaintance with the world that he paints. He studies character everywhere, and in an imaginative way is as much given to models as any graphic artist.

  We see a quiet, mild-mannered man, slight of figure, vibrant of voice, strong yet mobile of face, with hair and mustache of iron-gray, and with large, dark, luminous eyes that behold everything about them,—responsive eyes that dance with merriment or deepen with feeling. This study, in which so much of his literary work has been done, is of all places the one most meet for a chat with the author concerning his books. It is a spacious, cheerful, pleasantly furnished apartment, with panelled ceiling, and with windows that look out upon an entrancing landscape of green and golden fields and farther forest-clad hills…. The usual disorder of manuscripts, papers, and books is conspicuously absent, and we look in vain for some justification of the averment of a visitor that, while the touch of the lady is seen in the other apartments, the tiger evidently holds undisputed sway in the study: except for an array of unanswered letters upon the desk, this room is as orderly as any other in that well-ordered house…. In this room he is, when at home, regularly engaged for about three hours of each morning. Seated in the easiest of easy chairs, or more often reclined in a hammock swung across a portion of the apartment, he dictates the first draft of his matchless stories, which usually—even to the conversations and the minutest details—have been constructed in his mind perhaps months before a word of them is written.

General

  It is scarcely four years since Frank R. Stockton broached the enigma of “The Lady, or the Tiger?” and ceasing to be only “a rising young man,” realized the complete success which he is now enjoying at the age of fifty-two. As he himself says, his career is an instance of “protracted youth.” Before he was twenty he had made up his mind to be an author, and during nearly thirty years of sporadic literary work his nimbus, like the northern lights, had flickered a little this side or that, or momentarily shown a spectacular glow. It was entirely visible to many when the “Rudder Grange” sketches appeared in a hap-hazard, transient way. But not until the little conundrum of three magazine pages had set everybody talking did he become a celebrity…. He is never loath to explain that from the first adventure of the fairy Ting-a-ling, through “The Floating Prince” series, and down to the recent story of “The Griffin and the Minor Canon,” all of his marvelous tales were written for grown people. But when editors of “grownup” magazines have objected to his “machinery,” he has been compelled to carry them to the children, who, to be sure, carry them direct to the grown people. In large part the humor of his fairy stories depends upon their travesty of the traditions of fairy literature; something that only the adult or maturing mind can fully enjoy; but with the humor, there is always a story of incident which satisfies a child’s love of adventure and of the marvelous…. Must stand [“Rudder Grange”] as a master-piece of fanciful, refined comicality, profound enough in its way to entitle the author to a seat in the American Academy. Nearly all of its incidents and characters are real. But who else would have seen fun and philosophy in them and touched them with the same life-giving art? Surely in its quiet, wholesome, fireside humor this book is inimitable…. Of “The Late Mrs. Null,” everybody has just made an opinion or is forming one. It has been praised with the criticism that it is too clever and running over with prodigality of invention and surprises of situation…. Though “The Late Mrs. Null” is a little uneven in texture, as might be expected of a first novel from a hand long practiced in the form of the short story, we may still think it the author’s deepest and broadest work. It certainly proves that he is perfectly at home in the region of novels, and it is no secret that his studio is now set with large canvasses.

  A delightful piece of delicate and humorous extravaganza, with a quality so distinctive and yet so difficult to characterize that this very difficulty bears witness to its originality.

  From one point of view Mr. Stockton may almost be said to have no style. There is nothing, one means, in the mere turn of his sentences, in his method of expression, that can be seized upon as characteristic, and laid away in memory as a sort of trademark by which the author’s other work may be tested, judged and identified. It is very plain, simple, flowing English, this style of Stockton’s, the sort of writing that appears to the inexperienced the easiest thing in the world to do—until they have tried. The art that conceals art, until it can pass for nature itself,—that, we are continually told, is the highest type, and the secret of that Mr. Stockton has somehow caught…. He has made for himself a place unique and unapproachable in the regard of those who love good literature. Original to the verge of eccentricity, he provokes no comparisons with any writer.

  He is of the few, of the little group sparely increased by the fastidious ages, whom we call masters. It is not my business to declare whether Mr. Stockton is one of these: I willingly leave that to the infant epoch, which is still too young to know if it be the Twentieth Century or not; but I am sure that his literary personality was as charming to me when I read a story of his last night as it was when I first made his acquaintance in fiction thirty years ago…. He has not changed, and I think he has been as good in some of the achievements least acclaimed, as in those which have spread his fame the widest, like “The Lady or the Tiger,” and “Negative Gravity,” although I will not allow that any man likes these more than I. The means in all have been the same: the quiet confidence that every intelligent person enjoys an absurdity reduced from the most logical argument; and prefers the wildest capers of the fancy performed with a countenance of the gravest sobriety…. I am not going to let the reader suppose that I think all Mr. Stockton’s work equally good, and so leave him to plume himself upon an apparent critical superiority. In fact, I have never been quite able to satisfy myself that among Mr. Stockton’s novels which I liked best there were any that I liked so well as his short stories. I have had my doubts whether he really has the long breath. But some of the novels—they are really romances in the truest meaning of the word—are so good that they have given me doubts of my doubts. When I think of “The Adventures of Captain Horn” and “The Merry Chanter,” I am not at all satisfied with my misgivings, and I am inclined to think it would be well for any doubter to read the romances in this new Shenandoah Edition again.

  The most elaborately and solemnly absurd of all our humorists. Everything his characters perpetuate is copiously justified, even urged plausibly upon us as obviously the only thing to do; and while we are vaguely aware that in our own world these people would all be labeled idiots, under his kindlier sky they invariably come to fortune, fame, and happy wedlock. His sea tales strike a more novel vein than Cooper’s. In one child’s story, “Old Pipes and the Hamadryad,” he tosses us, with a gentle grin, an exquisite, genuine mock-Hellenic myth. So it is possible our mirth is bought, in the case of Stockton, at the price of a poet’s birthright.

  Was a novelist who had to work and wait for many years before popularity came to him. Not that his work was of that extraordinary kind that does not lend itself to being easily labelled and assimilated by careless critics, but the public did not easily take to his quiet humour…. In 1879, on the publication of “Rudder Grange,” a world-wide fame was his reward. He never greatly varied from the level he had first attained; he helped to amuse people, but his whimsicality played on the surface of men and things, and therefore lacks to many minds the arrestive air of the best writings.