About+Stockton

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The Floating Prince and Other Fairy Tales


**Francis Richard Stockton**:

"I was very young when I determined to write some  fairy tales because my mind was full of them.  These were constructed according to my own ideas.  I caused the fanciful creatures who inhabited the world of  fairy-land to act, as far as possible for them to do so, as if  they were inhabitants of the real world. I did not dispense  with monsters and enchanters, or talking beasts and birds,  but I obliged these creatures to infuse into their extraordinary  actions a certain leaven of common sense."

Frank R. Stockton, born Francis Richard Stockton on April 5th, 1834 in Philadelphia, was an American humorist and beloved writer of children’s literature renowned for his unique “pure and simple” humor and stories that cheer the soul yet quietly poke at the foibles of humanity.Stockton’s fairytales, unlike most children’s literature at the time, did not take a specific moral or ethical tone; instead, his stories were characterized by whimsical quality of illusory realism which was meant for unfettered enjoyment. His stories told of the most fantastical environments and events in a very realistic tone; this vraisemblence – the ability to make the reader believe in the possibility of his stories – is what made Stockton a pioneer in the development of the American fairy tale and one of “America’s most popular novelists” of his time. Stockton’s humor has been described as “spontaneous and sparkling, bubbling up as if from an inexhaustible fountain, and in 1889 the The Literary News stated that “many of his short stories and fairy tales [were] rich in quaint philosophy which [did] much to help one ‘suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’” – suggesting that even Hamlet would have risen from his state of constant disconsolation had he read Stockton. Although, underlying this jocosity, Stockton’s writing always contains a gentle prod at the conventions and standards of American society. In his early days as a journalist he contributed frequently to magazines such as The Philadelphia Post and the New York Hearth and Home. It was through his journalistic endeavors that Stockton realized he had a penchant for children’s stories and in 1867 he had his first big success with his Ting-a-Ling Stories. “Fantastical tales about a fairy," the Ting-a-Ling Stories were first written for a manuscript magazine for the Forensic and Literary Circle Club, of which Stockton was a member. Almost immediately afterwards, it was printed in The Riverside Magazine, and only a year later, in 1868, Ting-a-Ling was published in book form – it was Stockton’s first book publication. Due to his success with Ting-a-Ling­, Stockton became assistant editor and chief contributor to the children’s section of Health and Home; consequently, Stockton had officially “abandoned engraving forever to become a full-fledged literature.” In 1872 Stockton moved from his home in Philadelphia and took up residency in New York City when his short story, Stephen Skarridgers Christmas, gained him a position at Scribner’s Monthly – Charles Scribner’s Sons would later become one of his regular publishers. Only a year after his move to New York, in 1873, Stockton, due to his growing success as a children’s writer, acquired a position as assistant editor to the St. Nicholas magazine. Unfortunately, in 1878, just five years later, Stockton was forced to retire from his editing positions due to failing eyesight, but he continued to contribute to each magazine and pursue his writing career, which was soon to break through to greatness. In 1879 Stockton published his first major success, Rudder Grange, a short story about a “young married couple keeping house on a canal-booat.” Rudder Grange has been described as “a fresh and entertaining portrayal of a picturesque American life,”and The Literary News stated that Stockton’s writing “possesses intangible charm that causes one to read and reread it…it recalls Dickens and David Copperfield.” Stockton’s unique sense of humor and sense for the playful and fantastical was very well received and even compared to genius. Stockton created a new world for his characters, “transporting [them] out of the humdrum round of our daily experience into a far country,” and readers loved his stories for exactly that manner of fanciful escapism; as The Literary News explained, “to be merry to forget even occasionally the struggle of living, is to renew one’s youth.” In 1882 Stockton published his most famous work, The Lady, or the Tiger? in The Century, a magazine which had replaced Scribner’s Monthly. A story about the daughter of a Barbaric King and her lover, a man from a lower social station. The lovers are caught in the act, and the King sentences the young man to punishment in the arena where he has to pick from two doors: one, holds a lady-in-waiting who will become his future-wife as soon as the door is opened, the other, holds a voracious tiger that will devour him in an instant. Terrified and unsure, the young man glances at the princess who watching from the stands points at a particular door; reassured, the young man reaches for the knob…and the story ends. It is the ambiguity of the end that had readers in a tizzy, rereading the story again and again for a hint of the end. Did the princess lead her lover to death, rather than watch him marry another woman? Or did she save his life? The Lady, or the Tiger? was said to “belong to an order of literature that he [Stockton] may be said to have invented”; in fact, it attained such high levels of popularity that it has been adapted into a play and later into a film. Stockton continued to write and publish children’s short stories and novels with much success, and in his lifetime received two Lewis Carroll Shelf Awards (LCSA) for The Griffin and the Minor Canon in 1963 and The Story Tellers Pack: A Frank R. Stockton Reader in 1969. The LCSA was given annually from 1970 to 1979 for those titles which possessed enough qualities of Alice in Wonderland to enable them to sit on the same bookshelf, the “aim was to assemble a list of great children’s books of all time” and the award was given by the University of Wisconsin, in Madison. Historian Edwin Bowen, states that Stockton, with his unparalleled humor, has “placed American literature under a lasting obligation to his genius and art.” Stockton died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 20, 1902 in Washington DC.

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