People who say that so-and-so is "in a rut" and that something should be done about it are often the sort who will watch an ant working contentedly and then devise cunning obstructions to throw it off the track. Their idea that being in a rut is automatically terrible, either frustrating or deadening, is nonsense. There are good ruts and bad ones, and to an outsider they may look as alike as two pea-pods, but the person in the rut knows the difference. Those of us lucky enough to have fallen into the right rut-- compatible in shape, scenery, direction or lack of direction-- don't take kindly to change. In my own case, my surroundings and methods of working suit me so exactly that once when a prop was changed, the result was disastrous.

-- from "Pack Your Troubles and Sag"

Gradually, we began to think our new sister wasn't too bad. It's true that she was awfully dumb about talking-- at twelve months Bobby and I had given her up as a moron-- but she cooed prettily when she wasn't screaming or sleeping. When the baby was about eighteen months old, Paige and I were allowed to wheel her down Buffalo Street every afternoon after school. It got to be quite a game, after we had worked out three speeds for pushing the carriage. Speed One was sedate, a slow crawl , and used exclusively if our mothers happened to be sitting on the front porch. Two was brisker, but Speed Three was really a honey.

"Now Three," I would yell, and we'd charge downhill with the baby carriage at break-neck speed, like runaway horses. My little sister seemed enchanted with this, and when Paige and I would stop at the foot of the hill panting, she'd gurgle for more. However, for several years after this, she was an extremely nervous, high-strung child, and sometimes I think I know why.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

At thirty-three, she had pushed herself into thinking like a wryly amused spinster as part of her careful pattern of convalescing, of making sure she'd never be struck down again by youthful emotions. But even when she had first come to New York and moved into the brownstone on Ninth Street, she had never identified herself with the girls in the apartment upstairs. They seemed to her as flighty and chattery as starlings.

There were always three of them in the floor-through apartment, but never the same three for long. Every time one got married and moved out, another one moved in. Most of the newcomers would come to her door smiling prettily, wanting extra ice cubes, or to chat with the only other tenant near their own age. They go the ice cubes and pleasant words, but they never got beyond the foyer. The way she turned herself off was a subtler form of the householder's dousing all the lights as a caller comes up the walk.

from Open the Door (1966)

By 1859, the pretty public square in the center of town had already been cleared of unwanted stumps, but with plenty of elms left to spread their dappled green shade over anyone strolling across to Elk Street from the United States Hotel or the courthouse. As the county seat, Franklin already had a population of 936, and a settled, respectable air. It looked rather disdainfully on hovel heaps like Cornplanter, six miles up the Allegheny. As a mark of cosmopolitan elegance, Franklinites could even rent a long-trotting sulky at Pinney's Carriage Repository. Several daughters of local merchants and lawyers went to Olome Institute for Young Ladies at Canonsburg, which cost $56.50 a term, with pew rent seventy-five cents extra, and "Each lady will find her own light."

Jimmy Lamberton, one of the half-dozen dry goods merchants in town, advertised such citified ware s as Fancy Cold Taffeta Eugenie, Black Shotted Silks and Lace Vizettes, along with Curry Combs. He enticed farmers in by announcing, "Highest Prices Paid for Sheep Pelts." Jimmy was a fine figure of an Irishman, flamboyant as a shamrock, with the shiniest silk hat and fastest twirling cane around. It is claimed that when he first came to Franklin, he pointed his cane at a turtle ambling along in the mud and roared, "Shure, and what manner of country is this, where a cow turd walks?"

--from The Great Oildorado (1959)

She kept saying, "But if you have any suggestions at all...so easy to change...lots of other scenes that just cry out to be illustrated." I didn't know how often she let art directors fling her last-minute jobs with too-tight deadlines, or how often they wanted changes, partly because Lolly was so over-eager to oblige. But as I listened to her, I felt vaguely exasperated by her girlish attitude toward her work, and I thought suddenly, She should never have lost her amateur standing. I remembered a literary agent saying about a mutual acquaintance of ours who had brought him a manuscript, "She's too nice and good-natured to be a real writer." The same thing was true of Lolly. Her small pleasant talent, with no integral drive behind it, no pivoal core of self-center-- I was frankly astonished that it had ever got her so far from home.

-- from A Growing Wonder (1957)

When an old lawyer in Franklin died and his office furnishings were being sold, Mother said to my father: "Cliff, if you can get those office chairs of his at fifty cents apiece, I want them." My father thought Mother was daft to want the homely old things, but she persisted, until all eight chairs were in our dining room. Recently a man who's a decorator came to my apartment in New York, with some friends. He saw two of the same chairs, which mother had sent me years ago in a generous truckload of furniture from home. "Where did you get those?" he asked, in the tone one would normally use to inquire after the crown jewels. I told him what I remembered of the original transaction, while he scrambled around the floor on his hands and knees, examining the chairs' bottoms.

"Hand-doweled," he muttered, lying with his chin hooked on a chair rung. "Too marvelous." He used a lot of other adjectives I've deliberately forgotten, due to the fact that decorators' phrases, if taken internally, have a tendency to make my stomach rumble. However, I do remember that he offered to buy the chairs at forty dollars apiece, whenever I felt like selling. "Early Pennsylvania Dutch," he said. "Practically museum pieces." Since then, I've viewed the chairs with proper respect, as a nest egg in case of emergency. Every free-lance writer needs a couple of early Pennsylvania Dutch chairs to fall back on.

-- from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

As a writer...

As a writer, I'm procrastinating and moody, with the added disadvantage that I have to think, or at least some editors expect me to think, which is equally debilitating. I am also hogtied by knowing at least a few of the rudiments and hazards of my profession, so I'm continually stuck with such artistic problems as "If the magazine said they want a thousand words, will they count 'a' and 'the'? And if I switch the first paragraph to the end and the last paragraph to the middle and the middle to the first, will that improve the story line?" But as an amateur painter, I merely keep going till the paper is covered with color. During the entire process-- about twenty minutes for a painting-- my most serious problem is: "Shall I wash the brush or make the dog purple, too?"

-- from "Look! I'm Framed" (1949)

Clonk, thud, a grrrr scraping sound as if some large, bony, inanimate object were being dragged against its will-- the noises finally seeped through her tight-woven concentration and took shape, as she sat working at her desk. She glanced up at the high ceiling thinking. Another one's found a mate.

-- from Open the Door (1966)

Of all her books, I think I like this one best, and so am a bit more reluctant to cut pieces loose from it for this website. This first paragraph is, for instance, genius-- simple on the face of it, but capturing everything that is to come near-complete in three quick sentences. Let me make explicit what every post in this blog implies-- you should read this woman's work. This would not be a bad place to start.

As Lucy Ramsdale said when the news reached her, "If Grace's papa could hear this, he wouldn't turn over in his grave-- he'd levitate."

--from A Dying Fall (1973)

Three years ago, when I first began painting as a hobby, I would say eagerly to strangers at parties, "You must come up and see my pictures sometime." The men to whom I addressed this invitation must have thought I was using a hand-colored variation of the old come-see-my-etchings line. Once in my apartment, they were startled to find I had been speaking literally. They were even more startled by the paintings. One or two callers recovered their voices enough to point and ask hoarsely. "wh-what's it supposed to be?" The others simply stood, like a one-man petrified forest, until they'd thought of some intelligent, critical comment, such as "Wow!" or "Wait till my analyst hears about this."

--from "Look! I'm Framed." (1949)

Franklin, Pennsylvania, where I grew up and where my parents still live, is not an especially tolerant town, nestling as it does in the beautiful hilly region so rich in oil and old-line Republicans. During the oil boom in the last century, plenty of its citizens made lush fortunes and equally lush scandals almost overnight. Part of the money still remains above the surface, although spread rather thin over most of the population of ten thousand, and concentrated in only a few choice spots. As for the scandals, they've been decently buried by well-behaved descendants, and it would take a brave dog to dig up those juicy old bones.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

The friend who told me about the onion cure for insomnia said she'd come across it while looking for a saw in Gimbel's basement. She had stopped to listen to a bald demonstrator giving a spiel about a potato peeler, and she insisted that he suddenly announced to his drifting audience, "If you have trouble sleeping at night, here's what you do." He told them to slice a large onion and make a sandwich with rye or whole-wheat bread. He warned them that white bread wouldn't do at all. This was to be taken with a glass of milk at bedtime. I asked whether the onion was to be peeled, because I was puzzled as to why a man demonstrating potato peelers would branch off into a cure for insomnia. My friend said no, not to peel the onion, just cut off a quarter-inch-thick slice with an ordinary kitchen knife. She said it had workwed miraculously for her. Her husband had complained that she reeked of onion clear across the bedroom; but she implied delicately that as I wasn't married, this was a technical drawback that needn't concern me.

from "Say 'Hemlock' and Flop"

It was the day of my first dancing-school party, and I meant to be as ravishing as possible. In fact, I had just quietly snitched a handful of my mother's bath salts, when I discovered that the tub was already occupied by two fish. My ten-year-old brother Bobby had caught them that afternoon in a creek about a mile from our house. As bass go, they weren't very big, but even a middle-sized bass can look rather large in a bathtub, especially if you come upon it suddenly. Bobby had managed to bring the fish home alive, and he meant to keep them there until father got home from the office and could observe the catch at its fullest glory. To do Bobby justice, he honestly tried to be helpful. "Go ahead, you can get in the tub with them,' he told me. "Even if they sort of nibble at you, it won't hurt."

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

The Evans back yard was on the bank of French Creek, a few hundred feet from the spot where a young surveyor named George Washington crossed in December of 1753. Of course he crossed the Delaware too, but the difference is that he didn't fall in there. He fell into French Creek when his canoe overturned in the icy water, and it's a wonder that we didn't lose the Father of Our Country right then and there, at the downy age of twenty-one.

He had been sent to western Pennsylvania by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to find out what the French were up to, in their forts of LeBoeuf and Presque Isle (later Erie) sixty miles above Franklin, and he was on the way there when he got the dunking in French Creek. He dried out his clothes and spent the night in the only cabin in Franklin. It had been built a few years before by an English gunsmith, John Frazier, who traded with the Seneca Indians and kept records of sales that slangily up to date now: "Sold Eight Bucks worth of Goods Today." It's still good deer country.

--from The Great Oildorado (1959)

Drillers' apprentices, tool dressers-- toolies-- wore railroad boots that cost $1.50 and could thump to a fiddle and foot a fast hoedown to the music of "Chase the Squirrel" or "Money Musk." Most of the toolies were as lively and agile as monkeys; one of their chores was to climb to the top of a derrick to grease the crown-pulley, and it was toolies who rigged up the penants that floated and flapped above the derricks derisively: Big Bologna, Old Misery, Scared cat, The Vampire, Sleeping Beauty.

Toolies made $2 to $3 a day, for a twelve-hour shift, and spent it as freely as oil. To accommodate the day and night shifts, saloons kept jumping around the clock, and there were always self-styled ladies handy, in what a preacher called "suspicious houses." But the soiled doves's patrons-- rig-builders, toolies, teamsters, drillers-- even when they came away with cleaned-out pockets, weren't suspicious; they seemed to feel they'd got their money's worth, and they drowned out Methodist dissenters with their roar of approval:

"The Oil Creek girls are the dandy girls
For their kiss is most intense.
They've got a grip like a rotary pump
That will lift you over the fence."

--from The Great Oildorado (1959)

I am also a little weary of explaining to people that even though my name is Dutch and I was born in Pennsylvania, that doesn't make me Pennsylvania Dutch, by a long shot. Up in Western Pennsylvania we have none of those fast and loose phrases such as "The pie is all" and "Papa goes already yet." It's true that we talk of "redding up the room," meaning to empty ash trays, pick up the newspapers, and flick a dust cloth over the most noticeable pieces of furniture. When I came to New York years ago, this phrase was soon knocked out of me, but I've regretted it ever since. How else can you say so much for so little? Besides, to "tidy up a room" sounds prissy, and "to clean a room" implies more than I am prepared to give. The Dutch who scour all surfaces with sand are not my branch of the family. Therefore, even though I may not say it out loud, I still redd up.

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

The small hinged door in the side of the porch foundation was approximately three feet high. Addison Stubbs was approximately six feet three inches, and at the age of thirty-five he still had a harried resemblance to n adolescent who is growing faster than his clothes. Somehow he managed to crawl through the opening, drag his feet in after him, and push the door shut. There was room to lie luxuriously at full length, beside the bag of cement. One hand reached out and patted the bag weakly, with affection. He lay with his cheek against the damply cool ground.His head pounded so violently and his inside heaved so ominously that it felt as if the earth under him were lurching. He grabbed at the sack of cement, to steady himself and the earth. Hilaria's voice came from the walk right beside him, but it seemed to be much further away. "Addison," he heard her call. "Addison, where are you?" Because he has always answered when she called, in all the nine years of their marriage, instinctively he raised his head and opened his mouth ready to say, "Here. I'm under the porch." Raising his head made the earth lurch even more sickeningly. He fell back to the ground and lay very still. If Hilaria went on calling him, and saying aloud with resentment, "He must have run all the way down to the corner, to get out of sight so fast," Addison never heard. He had blacked out. It was 6:59 daylight savings time, of a gentle June twilight.

--from The Husband Who Ran Away (1948)

For a week or so, Freda paid very little attention to me. When I begged for more work to do, she tossed me a few minor bits of copy to write. "Lay off the cat-licked adjectives," she said. "In home-furnishings copy, you have to give facts. If you're selling a housewife on the idea of buying a mattress and springs at thirty-nine-ninety-five, you have to tell her what percentage is horsehair and what's hog, and how the coils are tied, and whether the springs are open or inner."

My blank look betrayed me.

"But everybody knows the difference between open and inner springs," Freda said. "You've made a bed, haven't you?"

I said apologetically that I'd never noticed the springs. Freda quizzed me more and more incredulously, and soon she knew the sum of my home-furnishings knowledge: Mahogany is reddish brown. Oriental rugs have designs on them and broadloom doesn't. A long stuffed thing is a sofa.

--from "Proletariat with Duncan Phyfe Legs" (1951)

Chester Humboldt got there a few minutes late, so he missed the alert on earwigs and Alicia Thorne. He wouldn't have cared anyway; his gardener coped with bugs and he had never heard of Alicia Thorne.

He sat down in the empty back row, on one of those folding chairs unstacked for funerals. It was so inadequate for a tall, well-built man who did push-ups every morning that it made him feel at once uncertain and too big for his britches.

from Heat Lightning (1969)

Most husbands reach the place in a marital relationship at which they must either swear out loud, go to Joe's Bar and Grill, or retreat ostrich-fashion into a love nest. In the case of Addison Stubbs, none of these outlets was feasible. He had a shockingly poor memory for swear words; he would have felt as diffident as a giraffe at Joe's Bar and Grill; and Hilaria, his wife, had the run of his only love nest, a work bench in the cellar. For these reasons, perhaps it was inevitable that he should have crawled under the porch to hide.

-- from The Husband Who Ran Away (1948)

He looked even smaller in my living room than he had in the hallway. He wasn't quite as tall as I am in flat heels-- five feet four-- and he wore a cream-colored jacket that was too wide and too long for him, chocolate gabardine slacks, and brown-and-white buckskin shoes. He was perhaps twenty-five, and his face and head were too pointed for his stubbly crew cut, but his brown eyes were round and friendly. On his upper lip there was a faint little mustache-- the sort you'd draw with a burnt natch-- and it gave him a look of hopeful innocence.

-- from "Give a Sharp Leap" (1959)

Forty-niners who'd passed through the gold rush and now swaggered to Oil Creek expecting a rather panty-waist operation with effete Easterners and rubes, complained that conditions here crazier than anything they'd ever seen. One miner said that if a new well brought up huge gold nuggets, the owner would throw them back and go on drilling -- for oil. This may have been a slight exaggeration.

--- from The Great oildorado (1959)

A radiant new capitalist, I commuted to New Jersey six days a week from Greenwich Village and shared an office with Freda Kordhauser. She was a tall woman, deliberate in movement, with big breasts, big hips, and unexpectedly slim legs. Her hair was Indian-black and long. When it was coiled into a glossy knot, and when she wore powder and lipstick, she had a kind of ugly-woman attractiveness. On her bad days, her hair and clothes seemed to be all loose ends, and the sallow skin on her large face, always faintly mottled, would flame with red markings. On my first day at work I thought she was rather repellent. She must have thought the same thing about me. Taking me around to introduce me to my colleagues, she was wearily polite, but once, when I acknowledged an introduction by bobbing and smiling, she said, "Out here, it isn't really necessary to curtsy."

--from "Proletariat with Duncan Phyfe Legs" (1951)

If you read this collection of first-person pieces straight through in one sitting, you may end up wanting to shoot the author between the I's. So let's not be too hasty. The great advantage of a book of this sort is that you can put it down at any time, even in the bathtub, or read it in dribbles between War and Peace, or lend it to a ten-month-old baby who likes something soft to chew on.

At the time I knew Lolly best, she was in her late thirties. I first met her when she was illustrating a story of mine for a ladies' magazine that specialized in recipes with happy endings. She phoned to ask if she might come to see me and get my ideas, which surprised me because usually illustrators seem to prefer not even to read the story aloud, for fear their imaginations might get mucked up by the facts.

-- from A Growing Wonder (1957)

On the blossoming May day the wagonload pulled up before the Drakes' little rented house (they had long since moved out of the hotel), Drake was too ill to take Smith to the well, but he sat up in bed talking feverishly to the solid-as-a-barrel blacksmith. Later he said thankfully, "I could not have suited myself better if I could have had a man made to order." They must have made a strange twosome; Smith, called "Uncle Billy," was a short, broad, hefty, laconic man who might have posed for Longfellow under a spreading chestnut burr. Whether or not he really believed in the [project at first, he soon felt a protective devotion to Drake. When he was offered a smithy job in Franklin at $4 a day, he told his son, "I can't quit Drake now."

from The Great Oildorado (1959)

In all the excitement after his well came in, poor Edwin Drake got shoved aside and nearly lost in the rush. He was the hero, all right, but one of those heroes who seems to have been chosen in a game of blindfold, like Pin the Tail on the Donkey. To tell you the truth, if this were fiction, I'd invent a new hero, more in the style to which we're accustomed in glossy biographical novels, with large, firm sins and virtues.

-- from The Great Oildorado (1959)

Lolly Ellender had a real talent for being taken advantage of, but if you think of her as a door mat, it's all wrong-- too flattened and inert. Instead, she was more like foam rubber, with a cheery, bouncy consistency, so that often people who walked on her found themselves springing up and down, up and down, until they were either dizzy or cold sober and rather tired, ready to surrender to her buoyant goodness.

--from A Growing Wonder (1957)

What kind of husband are you hoping to capture, by the way? Women who've set their hearts on a millionaire play-boy may end up with no man at all. Never try to aim far beyond your own limitations, mentally or socially. And don't let some glamorous, movie-bred notion of the ideal romance blind you to a prospective husband at close hand. Remember that perfection is at a premium, and that you probably don't deserve perfection, anyway.

There are some women who feel they'd rather be old maids than acept a man with the normal set of masculine failings. Most of them regret that, before they die. And women who fall deeply in love are even more at fault, if they lose a man because of their own stubborn intolerance.

Never be taken in by that line about "marriages are made in Heaven." They're made right here on earth. And they're well worth the labor, both for you and your man.

--from How About a Man (1938)

If you do decide after a gradual approach that you want to have an affair, walk into it with both eyes open. It gives you a much better balance than being swept in overnight. No matter how deeply you care for a man, try hard to preserve some balance during the affair. Don't let him feel that he owns you completely, or that you want to keep him tied hand and foot. Don't act too desperately intense, and pull that line of "I've given you everything, and I hope you appreciate my sacrifice." In the first place, men hate having that thrown up to them. In the second place, sex isn't a human sacrifice. Women would be better off if they tinged its spiritual content with a dash of earthy humor. An affair should be an important, exciting experience for both of you. Then why should a woman pull this martyr stuff. Nobody knocked her over the head and forced her into it. If she took enough time to decide for herself, she should have made up her mind it was worth it. Unless you're a half-wit, you know you'll have some unhappiness to swallow. You'll get your share in any emotional tie-up, whether it's an affair or marriage. A lot of nice women are treated shabbily, but some of them bring it on themselves.

-- from How About a Man (1938)

On the way home, he wondered if New York was full of women who had three brandies and then wanted to go to bed. The idea should have been exhilarating; six hours ago he'd been hoping to find even one female open to suggestion. The trouble was that Miss Jepley was too open, to the point of suggesting everything herself. And yet she wasn't a floozy. He thought it was too bad she couldn't get married. Then he thought gloomily that marriage was no solution.

-- from The Form Divine (1951)

Don't get the idea that you can burst into tears anytime, and get a husband as a consolation prize. We simply mean that you needn't be afraid to turn to a man for sympathy, when you're feeling sunk. One last warning along that line: Never infer that you want to get married because you're so sick of supporting yourself.

-- from How About a Man (1938)

Sex isn't like warm milk. You can't just gulp it down to make you sleepy.

-- from The Form Divine (1951)

Regrettably, there are moments when a woman doesn't want to know what's what or even where she's going, preferring the unexplored road that looks as if it would end in a perfect little spot for a picnic, although it may well wind up at a garbage dump. The atmospheric winds had already wafted to Lucilla a sniff of something not quite pleasant, but Derek as scenery was still so delightful and novel to look at that she couldn't bear not to continue around the next curve.

-- from The Form Divine (1951)

In describing the Bump-Wump and rope-jumping sessions to Derek, the second time they met in the cocktail lunge, Lucilla managed to make herself appear as an amused bystander to the antics of Paris and her other classmates. She had already sensed that the way to make Derek happy was to tear apart people he knew, and now she fed him pieces of her friends as a mother robin feeds bits of worm to her young.

--from The Form Divine(1951)

Stop right now and digest the fact that men generally have the upper hand because they have more to do than women. You wouldn't have any respect for a man who thought about you every minute, who neglected his work and friends and hobbies entirely, for your sake. Then see to it that you don't get in that state, either. Get it through your head that no man can fill up your life completely, and start finding more things to think about.

---from How About a Man(1938)

Drinking with a man isn't important in itself. It's the way you do or don't drink that matters. If you have no head for the stuff, never down it because you think he'll like you better. Plenty of girls who go out five nights a week either drink very little or not at all. Naturally, you shouldn't go in for pursed lips or a conspicuous display of virtue. A casual "No, thanks" or "I;m on the wagon" is enough. The men who keep insisting on your drinking generally aren't worth the bother. If your escort gets very tight, get home as soon as possible, and don't lecture him on the way. If he behaves stupidly, there's no point in telling him about it while he's drunk. Discipline him subtly, not shrewishly, when he's more able to take in what you're saying. And whatever you do, don't ever try to trap a man while he's in that vague condition. It's a shoddy and all too temporary trick. There's always a sober tomorrow when he'll resent it savagely

--- from How About a Man (1938)

CHAPTER ONE
Wanted: A Man

And you can't just advertise in the Personal Column. That would be the simplest, but not very subtle. It's much better to quietly organize your own man-hunting expedition, without benefit of gun, camera, or unpleasant publicity. Without benefit of clergy, too, if you prefer it that way. You don't have to be matrimonially inclined to flick these pages. You may not want a man as a permanent acquisition. Our own amiable premise is that every woman needs a man in her life, and she might as well have him, and keep him as long as she wants him. What she wants him for is her own business (and his, we might generously add).

--from How About a Man (1938)