Irving Bacheller

Bacheller, Irving (26 Sept. 1859-24 Feb. 1950), novelist and publishing executive, was born Addison Irving Bacheller in Pierrepont, St. Lawrence County, New York, the son of Sanford Paul Bacheller and Achsah Ann Buckland, farmers. Irving attended local schools in Pierrepont, then switched to an academy in Canton, New York, after his family moved there. His secondary education at Clinton Academy was sporadic, however, as he spent long periods during his teenage years working at various jobs--telegraph operator, laborer, post office clerk, bookkeeper, salesman, teacher--to help support the family.

Despite his lack of a high school diploma, Bacheller was admitted to St. Lawrence University, in Canton, as a special student in 1878 and received a bachelor of science degree four years later. Although he majored in the natural sciences, Bacheller served as president of the St. Lawrence literary society and was also an active debater. He began writing verses and short stories for his own amusement, but at this time he did not intend to pursue a literary career.

After college Bacheller moved to New York City, where he worked for several months on the staff of a hotel trade journal. He then joined the Brooklyn Daily Times, first as military editor and then as drama editor. Years later he told an interviewer that the Times had hired him on the strength of a piece of light verse he had submitted, a poem about an all-too-common tragedy occurring in New York City in the nineteenth century: country visitors had blown out the gaslights in their hotel room, thinking they were candles, and were killed in their sleep by the fumes.

In 1884 Bacheller arranged for the publication in the Times of a series of interviews of prominent literary figures by British popular novelist Joseph Hatton. He also arranged for the series to appear in several other big-city newspapers, paving the way for the formation later that year of the New York Press Syndicate, the first major metropolitan press syndicate in the world. Under the management of Bacheller and his partner, James W. Johnson, the syndicate grew rapidly; by the early 1890s it was sending fiction and feature stories to leading newspapers throughout the United States. Bacheller's organization introduced many leading British writers to American readers, serializing works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad, among others. He also published emerging American writers, including Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane; in 1893 Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage appeared for the first time in print as a serial distributed by Bacheller's syndicate.

Bacheller's financial success enabled him to return to St. Lawrence for part-time graduate study in the sciences; he received a master of science degree in 1892. Increased self-confidence also led him to launch his own literary career in the early 1890s when he began publishing his verses and short stories in national magazines, including The Independent and Cosmopolitan. His first two novels, The Master of Silence, published in the United States in 1892, and The Still House of O'Darrow, which appeared in England two years later, were met with lukewarm response by both critics and the reading public. In 1896 Bacheller sold his syndicate in order to work full time on a third novel but returned to newspaper journalism two years later as Sunday editor of the New York World.

Bacheller's third novel, Eben Holden (1900), was an immediate bestseller; it eventually sold more than a million copies. A romanticized account of rural life in the St. Lawrence valley, the novel was based largely on Bacheller's childhood memories and offered readers a story that its author characterized as "clean" and "uplifting." Praised by many mainstream American literary figures, including William Dean Howells, Eben Holden paved the way for Bacheller's successful career as a popular novelist.

During the next four decades Bacheller wrote more than thirty novels, many of them bestsellers, as well as short stories, essays, and poems; he also published three volumes of personal reflections and memoirs. The subjects and settings of Bacheller's fiction were varied, ranging from a historical romance set in ancient Rome (Vergilius, 1904) to a saga of George Washington and the American Revolution (The Master of Chaos, 1932). War was a frequent theme in his work; he experienced it firsthand in the late summer and early fall of 1917, when he traveled to France as a guest of the British government to gather material on the world war for a series of magazine articles and was injured by a shell fragment.

The popularity of Bacheller's fiction made him virtually a household name in the first half of the twentieth century. In an interview in the New York Times in December 1941, the year Bacheller published his last novel, Winds of God, critic Robert van Gelder characterized him as "just about the dean of producing American novelists." Many Americans were introduced to his fiction as teenagers: A Man for the Ages (1919), the first in a three-volume series of historical fiction about Abraham Lincoln, was the best known of several Bacheller works required or recommended in U.S. high school English classes from the 1920s through the 1950s. Bacheller's many awards and honors included membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Bacheller married Anna Detmar Schultz in 1883, and they adopted a son. Bacheller and his family moved to Riverside, Connecticut, from New York City in 1905 and lived there for twelve years. In 1917 they moved to Winter Park, Florida, but returned to Riverside each summer. Bacheller's wife died in 1924, and the following year he married a widow, Mary Elizabeth Leonard Sollace, of Flushing, New York; they had no children. Bacheller died in White Plains, New York.

Bibliography

Accounts of Bacheller's life, work, and philosophy are in his three volumes of reminiscences: Opinions of a Cheerful Yankee (1926), Coming Up the Road (1928), and From Stores of Memory (1938). Additional biographical information is in Robert van Gelder, "An Interview with Irving Bacheller," New York Times Book Review, 21 Dec. 1941. A. J. Hanna, A Bibliography of the Writings of Irving Bacheller (1939) includes a list of all of Bacheller's publications up to that date. An obituary is in the New York Times, 25 Feb. 1950.

Ann T. Keene

Source:

Ann T. Keene. "Bacheller, Irving";

http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00061.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Access Date: Mon Jul 22 2013 14:57:43 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)