Beecher

by Dan McCall

When asked, “Who is the American of our time?” Abraham Lincoln said, “Beecher.” Henry Ward Beecher, golden-tongued pastor of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church, whose sermons made the multitudes gasp and swoon, was a celebrated public figure and peerless moral force. Thus the nation was flabbergasted when the eminent Beecher was accused of seducing the wife of his protégé.

This spirited, highly original novel re-creates the tumult of the Beecher trial, bringing on a marvelous cast of characters. First and foremost is Beecher himself, staunch abolitionist and early supporter of the feminist movement, outrageous in his own defense, sniffing violets and dropping them to the floor at telling moments….

Paperback

First published September 28, 1979

About the author

Dan received his Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University, later attending Columbia University for his PhD. Upon graduation in 1966, he came to Cornell University where he taught American literature and creative writing to generations of Cornell students over the next 40 years. He is the author of several novels, including Jack the Bear (1974), Beecher (1979), Bluebird Canyon (1983), Triphammer (1990), and Messenger Bird (1993). Jack the Bear was translated into over a dozen languages, and was released as a 20th Century Fox film in 1993, starring Gary Sinise, Reese Witherspoon, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, among others. His critical and scholarly books include The Example of Richard Wright (1969), The Silence of Bartleby (1989), Citizens of Somewhere Else (1999) and the Norton Critical Edition of Melville's Short Novels (2002).

Reviews

[Tiffany · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Historical fiction about the Beecher family (Thomas Kinnicut Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc.) in New York, 1859-1887.

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"Beecher boys don't live up to Father." (21)

"'The reputation of the entire Beecher family for eccentricity is rank, but "Tom" Beecher is the worst of the lot.'" (22)

"today's Christian is but a man standing in the rain to admire and praise his noble house." (19)

"'you cannot love, and be examining your love at the same time'" (19)

"A man fed by inordinate vanity can never awake to a sane, reasonable estimate of himself." (91)

"Oh, we are the headlines we read, the distance between our petty lives and the glittering tribulations of the vigorously talented, mad in their talent. Life declines into literature--and explodes into tabloid. The nation will--give it time, give it time--begin to hunger for hunger--not the birth of tragedy, not the birth of comedy, no, said Tom Beecher, the birth of irony." (181)

"Dogmas do not die because they are refuted; they fade away because they are neglected." (189)

"women are not a different sex, they are a different race" (210)

"'All women, I am told, marry Gods, but sadly consent afterwards to live with men.'" (211)

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too overwritten and riddled with byzantine words, though author Dan McCall based a large part of the book on the sensational trial of Henry Ward Beecher and he carefully consulted the trial's original transcript so how much of this is his writing and how much archival material? This novel did remind me that Henry Ward Beecher was (as the award-winning biography puts it) "the most famous man in America" in his day, hobnobbing with the nation's elites and a pioneer in dramatic preaching.