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Autumn
Wanting to impart more to his students than mere facts and figures, an aging schoolteacher revels in his last days of teaching in a quaint New England village.
116 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1921
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About the author
Robert Nathan
97 books60 followersRobert Gruntal Nathan was born into a prominent New York Sephardic family. He was educated in the United States and Switzerland and attended Harvard University for several years beginning in 1912. It was there that he began writing short fiction and poetry. However, he never graduated, choosing instead to drop out and take a job at an advertising firm to support his family (he married while a junior at Harvard). It was while working in 1919 that he wrote his first novel—the semi-autobiographical work Peter Kindred—which was a critical failure. But his luck soon changed during the 1920s, when he wrote seven more novels, including The Bishop's Wife, which was later made into a successful film starring Cary Grant, David Niven, and Loretta Young.
During the 1930s, his success continued with more works, including fictional pieces and poetry. In 1940, he wrote his most successful book, Portrait of Jennie, about a Depression-era artist and the woman he is painting, who is slipping through time. Portrait of Jennie is considered a modern masterpiece of fantasy fiction and was made into a film, starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.
In January 1956 the author wrote, as well as narrated, an episode of the CBS Radio Workshop, called "A Pride of Carrots or Venus Well-Served."
Nathan's seventh wife was the British actress Anna Lee, to whom he was married from 1970 until his death. He came from a talented family — the activist Maud Nathan and author Annie Nathan Meyer were his aunts, and the poet Emma Lazarus and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo his cousins
During the 1930s, his success continued with more works, including fictional pieces and poetry. In 1940, he wrote his most successful book, Portrait of Jennie, about a Depression-era artist and the woman he is painting, who is slipping through time. Portrait of Jennie is considered a modern masterpiece of fantasy fiction and was made into a film, starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.
In January 1956 the author wrote, as well as narrated, an episode of the CBS Radio Workshop, called "A Pride of Carrots or Venus Well-Served."
Nathan's seventh wife was the British actress Anna Lee, to whom he was married from 1970 until his death. He came from a talented family — the activist Maud Nathan and author Annie Nathan Meyer were his aunts, and the poet Emma Lazarus and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo his cousins
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 13, 2017
I make lists. One of the lists I'm proudest of recently is a list of 800+ more or less significant novels published during the 1920s. I haven't read all of them, or anything close (only a fifth of them were even written in English, and most of the rest haven't been translated). But researching it, going through Wikipedia rabbit-holes and Britannica entries and surfing scholarly histories on Google Book previews and plunging through magazines of contemporary criticism on, for example, unz.org, was a perpetual delight, made all the more so by offhand references to other important books which I'd never heard of and had to hare off in search of.
One of these offhand references, I think in the pages of the Bookman, was to this book, warmly praised there as a singularly beautiful, poetic but unsentimental short novel that, to the (forgotten) reviewer's mind, was the sort of thing that young people should be writing in the 1920s, and not the cynical or deleterious trash that made the news (like This Side of Paradise, today much better remembered). Robert Nathan would eventually be remembered, but mostly as a writer of books that got made into movies in the 1940s, like The Bishop's Wife and Portrait of Jennie. Unlike them, Autumn doesn't have a playfully supernatural element to the plot (unless the occasional twee anthropomorphization of animals' thoughts count), but Nathan seems to always have had a sort of wistful, elegiac, sentimentally ironic "oh you foolish mortals" tone.
Autumn is a novella about a couple of seasons in a Vermont farming town; although there is a central character (or to put it musically, a dominant repeated theme), an elderly and dreamy schoolteacher, it's more an ensemble piece than anything, and reading it reminded me strongly of the later Anne of Green Gables books, in which Anne herself nearly disappears amid the rambunctious youngsters and colorfully loquacious elders. It's the first year after the Great War, and there's friction between young and old, and the not-so-young and the very old, and many very beautiful passages about the countryside, and some trite heresies wrapped up as hand-me-down philosophy; Nathan's being of Sephardic background makes the occasional tweaks at conventional Christianity less wearisome than they might be if they were merely Menckenian.
In all, I quite enjoyed this brief interlude even though I feel as though I'd seen most of it before, though not necessarily better. One thing it absolutely is not, though, is unsentimental. Of course, 1921 standards of sentimentality are something quite different from the post-Hemingway standard of sentimentality, but it's oozing with the stuff. You can practically hear the flute from Peer Gynt every time dawn breaks.
One of these offhand references, I think in the pages of the Bookman, was to this book, warmly praised there as a singularly beautiful, poetic but unsentimental short novel that, to the (forgotten) reviewer's mind, was the sort of thing that young people should be writing in the 1920s, and not the cynical or deleterious trash that made the news (like This Side of Paradise, today much better remembered). Robert Nathan would eventually be remembered, but mostly as a writer of books that got made into movies in the 1940s, like The Bishop's Wife and Portrait of Jennie. Unlike them, Autumn doesn't have a playfully supernatural element to the plot (unless the occasional twee anthropomorphization of animals' thoughts count), but Nathan seems to always have had a sort of wistful, elegiac, sentimentally ironic "oh you foolish mortals" tone.
Autumn is a novella about a couple of seasons in a Vermont farming town; although there is a central character (or to put it musically, a dominant repeated theme), an elderly and dreamy schoolteacher, it's more an ensemble piece than anything, and reading it reminded me strongly of the later Anne of Green Gables books, in which Anne herself nearly disappears amid the rambunctious youngsters and colorfully loquacious elders. It's the first year after the Great War, and there's friction between young and old, and the not-so-young and the very old, and many very beautiful passages about the countryside, and some trite heresies wrapped up as hand-me-down philosophy; Nathan's being of Sephardic background makes the occasional tweaks at conventional Christianity less wearisome than they might be if they were merely Menckenian.
In all, I quite enjoyed this brief interlude even though I feel as though I'd seen most of it before, though not necessarily better. One thing it absolutely is not, though, is unsentimental. Of course, 1921 standards of sentimentality are something quite different from the post-Hemingway standard of sentimentality, but it's oozing with the stuff. You can practically hear the flute from Peer Gynt every time dawn breaks.
October 3, 2024
🖍️ Autumn takes the reader on a story through the Vermont farming population after World War I, with all its strengths and weaknesses, ups and downs, and life’s gifts. I like author Robert Nathan’s writing style – easy, familiar, and it packs a punch. Nathan is also the author of The Bishop's Wife and Portrait of Jennie (both made into movies), among other novels, poems, et cetera. Autumn was a nice change of pace for me, as it was refreshing, enjoyable, and poignant.
📙Published in 1921.
*•̩̩͙ *How I came across this book: I was looking for books with an autumn theme or title.
જ⁀➴🟢The e-book version can be found at Project Gutenberg.
🟣 Kindle.
✴︎⋆✴︎⋆✴︎⋆✴︎
✧⋆˚₊˚⋆✧ Excerpts of note:
📙Published in 1921.
*•̩̩͙ *How I came across this book: I was looking for books with an autumn theme or title.
જ⁀➴🟢The e-book version can be found at Project Gutenberg.
🟣 Kindle.
✴︎⋆✴︎⋆✴︎⋆✴︎
✧⋆˚₊˚⋆✧ Excerpts of note:
🔹 On the way home she sat smiling and dreaming. The horse ran briskly through the night mist; and the wheels, rumbling over the ground, turned up the thoughts of simple Thomas Frye, only to plow them under again. "Ann," he said when they were more than half-way home, "don't you care for me . . . any more?" As he spoke, he cut at the black trees with his long whip.
🔸 And so they rode on in silence, with pale cheeks and strange thoughts.
October 5, 2012
I recently read this author's Portrait of Jennie and liked it, and so tried this. Unfortunately I couldn't even stick with it past two chapters. If you can't tell from the blurb, the prose is cloying, and unlike Jennie, there's no real story in the chapters I read. Mister Jeminy is a bad teacher, plusses and minuses make people hard, and then a brief snapshot of a girl in love. All sentimentality mixed with boring farming life and no real plot.
March 1, 2016
This was painful. I loved the same author's story Portrait of Jennie and the movie is a classic favorite so I assumed I would at least enjoy this a little. I barely finished it and only because I wanted to say I did. It was disjointed, without any real story and I was could it was boring.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews