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Satan Sanderson
Satan Sanderson
"To my son Hugh, in return for the care and sorrow he has caused me all the days of his life, for his dissolute career and his desertion, I do give and bequeath the sum of one thousand dollars and the memory of his misspent youth."
It was very quiet in the wide, richly furnished library. The May night was still, but a faint suspiration, heavy with the fragrance of jasmin flowers, stirred the Venetian blind before the open window and rustled the moon-silvered leaves of the aspens outside. As the incisive professional pronouncement of the judge cut through the lamp-lighted silence, the grim, furrowed face with its sunken eyes and gray military mustaches on the pillow of the wheel-chair set more grimly; a girl seated in the damask shadow of the fire-screen caught her breath; and from across the polished table the Reverend Henry Sanderson turned his handsome, clean-shaven face and looked at the old man
"To my son Hugh, in return for the care and sorrow he has caused me all the days of his life, for his dissolute career and his desertion, I do give and bequeath the sum of one thousand dollars and the memory of his misspent youth."
It was very quiet in the wide, richly furnished library. The May night was still, but a faint suspiration, heavy with the fragrance of jasmin flowers, stirred the Venetian blind before the open window and rustled the moon-silvered leaves of the aspens outside. As the incisive professional pronouncement of the judge cut through the lamp-lighted silence, the grim, furrowed face with its sunken eyes and gray military mustaches on the pillow of the wheel-chair set more grimly; a girl seated in the damask shadow of the fire-screen caught her breath; and from across the polished table the Reverend Henry Sanderson turned his handsome, clean-shaven face and looked at the old man
274 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1907
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About the author
Hallie Erminie Rives
60 books5 followersHallie Erminie Rives (May 2, 1874 – August 16, 1956) was a best-selling popular novelist and wife of the American diplomat Post Wheeler.
She was born in Kentucky, the daughter of Stephen Turner Rives and Mary Ragsdale. Her father was from a prominent Virginia family. She was a distant cousin of the novelist and poet Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy. An author's biography in one of her books notes that her father, who had fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War and spent two years in a Northern prison camp, had "made her his little comrade" when she was a child and she was an excellent rifle shot and a bareback rider who was called "the Rives' little wildcat" by outsiders. Her father allowed her to spend so much time outdoors because her mother had been an invalid in the years before she died.
Rives wrote her first novel at age eight, though her writing was not encouraged by her parents. Her first novel was published when she was eighteen. In her novels she addressed politics between the Northern and Southern United States, issues of race, and sex, causing great debate among critics. Among them was Smoking Flax (1897), a novel controversial even at the time, which takes a favorable position on lynching. The novel is about an African American man accused of raping and murdering a white woman who was lynched after the governor commuted his sentence to life. Many of her novels were bestsellers. Other books she wrote were better received by critics than Smoking Flax. Her novel, The Castaway, is noted for being the subject of a Supreme Court copyright case, Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus, in which the US Supreme Court recognized the first sale doctrine, permitting purchasers of copies of books to resell them without seeking permission from the copyright holder.
She married Wheeler in 1906 in Tokyo. A wedding announcement noted that Wheeler initially considered Rives "rather severe on men" in her books and she considered him "none too charitable concerning the faults of women" in his book Reflections of a Bachelor. They met at a reception in New York and began a friendship that eventually led to marriage.[6] She accompanied him to posts across Europe, Asia and South America throughout his career in foreign service. She and her husband co-wrote Dome of Many-Coloured Glass in 1952 about their lives in the United States Foreign Service.[4]
She was born in Kentucky, the daughter of Stephen Turner Rives and Mary Ragsdale. Her father was from a prominent Virginia family. She was a distant cousin of the novelist and poet Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy. An author's biography in one of her books notes that her father, who had fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War and spent two years in a Northern prison camp, had "made her his little comrade" when she was a child and she was an excellent rifle shot and a bareback rider who was called "the Rives' little wildcat" by outsiders. Her father allowed her to spend so much time outdoors because her mother had been an invalid in the years before she died.
Rives wrote her first novel at age eight, though her writing was not encouraged by her parents. Her first novel was published when she was eighteen. In her novels she addressed politics between the Northern and Southern United States, issues of race, and sex, causing great debate among critics. Among them was Smoking Flax (1897), a novel controversial even at the time, which takes a favorable position on lynching. The novel is about an African American man accused of raping and murdering a white woman who was lynched after the governor commuted his sentence to life. Many of her novels were bestsellers. Other books she wrote were better received by critics than Smoking Flax. Her novel, The Castaway, is noted for being the subject of a Supreme Court copyright case, Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus, in which the US Supreme Court recognized the first sale doctrine, permitting purchasers of copies of books to resell them without seeking permission from the copyright holder.
She married Wheeler in 1906 in Tokyo. A wedding announcement noted that Wheeler initially considered Rives "rather severe on men" in her books and she considered him "none too charitable concerning the faults of women" in his book Reflections of a Bachelor. They met at a reception in New York and began a friendship that eventually led to marriage.[6] She accompanied him to posts across Europe, Asia and South America throughout his career in foreign service. She and her husband co-wrote Dome of Many-Coloured Glass in 1952 about their lives in the United States Foreign Service.[4]
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 23, 2023
This novel seemed to have potential at first, but it soon revealed itself as pure melodrama. That can be entertaining, though, and I was intrigued enough by the hero and heroine to stick with it. Sadly, long before the end, the author wore out my patience with a tortured plot and even more tortured prose. Sample: The suggestion would seem a mere bungling expedient to inject the tantalizing fillip of mystery and unbelievable Quixotic motive, and, lacking evidence to support it, would touch the whole fabric with the taint of the meretricious. Nothing worse than the taint of the meretricious, I always say. Think I'll give the rest of the Rives oeuvre a miss.
December 30, 2012
This is another one of those book from the early 1900's following the popular trend of having two characters exchanging identities.
Harry "Satan" Sanderson is the big party guru in college, leading a dissolute guys-gone-wild kind of life that we all secretly want to be leading. But as time goes on, Sanderson mellows out, settles down in maturity, and becomes a respected minister. His college party pal Hugh Stires, however, never does reform, leaving a trail of broken hearts and enemies in his wake. Sanderson is involved in a car accident that rattles his brain so bad he comes to believe that he is Stires. He goes about trying to atone for crimes he really didn't do. By the time he recovers his true memories, Sanderson finds himself facing a murder rap.
Harry "Satan" Sanderson is the big party guru in college, leading a dissolute guys-gone-wild kind of life that we all secretly want to be leading. But as time goes on, Sanderson mellows out, settles down in maturity, and becomes a respected minister. His college party pal Hugh Stires, however, never does reform, leaving a trail of broken hearts and enemies in his wake. Sanderson is involved in a car accident that rattles his brain so bad he comes to believe that he is Stires. He goes about trying to atone for crimes he really didn't do. By the time he recovers his true memories, Sanderson finds himself facing a murder rap.
January 28, 2014
I found this at a yard sale for a dollar, so I thought I'd give it a shot due to its title. I'm guessing it was a cheap, mass produced item of its day. One chapter, 17 pages worth, was completely missing, and it was the one where the minister who had lost his memory and was living life as an inveterate gambler finally regained his memory and realized that the woman who was secretly helping him did not realize that he wasn't her husband, who was another man who happened to look exactly like the minister but was living an even more dastardly life after swindling both of them. Highly melodramatic and even more highly contrived, it is no wonder this book is mostly lost in the in the mists of time.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews