The Reading Hour

In Episode 52, Newland Archer meets with Ellen about her proposed divorce, attends the melodramatic comedy and romantic farce The Shaughraun while May and her family take their annual trip to Florida's St. Augustine.

In Episode 51, Newland Archer seeks ways of imbuing his marriage to May with Ellen Olenska's vitality; as a junior partner of a legal firm, he is consulted regarding the prudence of Ellen's suing for divorce from the Count. The hour concludes with a reading of Article I of the U.S. Constitution, and future episodes will include this foundation document's subsequent articles and amendments.

Episode 50 introduces us to the reserved Louisa and Henry van der Luyden, at the tip of the New York elite's "slippery" social pyramid, as they seek to rectify a slight against another high-stationed family. Meanwhile, Newland Archer becomes more familiar with the eccentricities of Madame Olenska.

Episode 49 relates the first of Newland Archer and May Welland's betrothal visits to the house of Mrs. Manson Mingott, Mr. Sillerton Jackson's dinner with the Archers, and the rarefied life of the New York elite "in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs." A brief overview of Wharton's life is also...

In episode 48, The Reading Hour begins its fourth season with the opening three chapters of The Age of Innocence (1920), in which Edith Wharton introduces us to the milieu of New York City's Gilded-Age elite including the Pulitzer-winning novel's three main characters: Newland Archer, May Welland, and Countess Ellen Olenska. The relevance of Wharton's co-authoring the interior design manual The De...

Episode 47 concludes our reading of My Ántonia with the remaining two and a half chapters of Book V, "Cusak's Boys," in which Jim Burden recalls his lifelong Bohemian friend's generous, generative firing of "images in the mind that did not fade—that grew stronger with time."

Episode 46 includes all of Book VI, "The Pioneer Woman's Story," in which the elderly Widow Steavens relates the tale of Ántonia Shimerda's betrothal and motherhood. Jim Burden then jumps forward to relate, in Book V ("Cusak's Boys"), his visit two decades later with her burgeoning family.

Episode 45 presents the whole of My Ántonia 's short third book, entitled "Lena Lingard," in which narrator Jim Burden relates highlights of his first year as a student of Classics in Lincoln. (I offer my insights regarding Cather's references to Paestum, Virgil's Georgics , and Dante's Christian version of the epic Latin poet Statius in the Purgatorio .) The four chapters also relate Jim's intere...

Episode 44 concludes the second book of Willa Cather's My Ántonia , "The Hired Girls," with chs. 12 through 15, in which Jim Burden delivers his Commencement address, enjoys a restful day on the river among the blossoming elders, and grapples with Ántonio's employer, Wick Cutter.

Episode 43 begins with a warning about ch. 7 of Book II, in which the fictive narrator Jim Burden describes a "negro" entertainer in language that listeners may find prejudicially pejorative. (Those who wish to skip the chapter may scroll ahead to minute 21:00.) Much of today's reading from My Ántonia concerns how the arrival of a dancing tent in Black Hawk brought about Tony's departure from the...

Episode 42 introduces the second of My Ántonia 's five books, which begins a couple of years after Book I left off. First Jim then Ántonia move to Black Hawk and adjust to life in town.

Episode 41 concludes the first of My Ántonia 's five books with Jim's account of his and the Shimerdas' first year in Nebraska. Even as spring and summer return, a chill settles over the former friendship between those on the Burdens' farm and the Bohemian family, but Grandfather Burden effects a reconciliation.

Episode 40 continues with five chapters from Book 1 of My Ántonia in which Jim Burden describes his first Christmas in Nebraska, a blizzard, and a death in the Shimerda family. The hour ends with two poems by the modernist America poet Marianne Moore: "Critics and Connoisseurs" and "A Grave."

Episode 39 offers our second reading from Cather's 1918 novel, My Ántonia , in which Jim and "Tony" visit Russian Peter and Pavel, encounter an enormous rattlesnake, hear a harrowing tale of wolves at a winter wedding, and continue to befriend each other.

Episode 38, the first of The Reading Hour's third season, begins the American novelist Willa Cather's fourth book of plainspoken narrative fiction, My Ántonia (1918), which seeks to depict the spark and tenacity of a Bohemian who has come with her family to farm in Nebraska as she matures from girlhood into womanhood.

Episode 37 concludes Thoreau's The Maine Woods with the final three days of the journey south and east along the East Branch of the Penobscot. An excerpt from the Appendix about how to outfit oneself for such an excursion is included. We finish out the hour with a reading of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning."

In Episode 36, Thoreau loses track of his companion as night sets along the Webster Brook, a cow-moose is shot and skinned, and the party heads south and east on the Grand Lake Matagamon to the East Branch of the Penobscot, eating handfuls of blueberries and raspberries at each carry.

Episode 35 is only the second of season 2's episodes not to include a reading from Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor , which concluded in Episode 34; the full hour is devoted to "The Allegash and East Branch," in which Thoreau and his companions begin to return from their north-most excursion, making their way toward then along the headwaters of the Penobscot River's east branch.

Because we conclude A Country Doctor therein, Episode 34 begins with Jewett then rounds out the hour with additional pages from the third essay of The Maine Woods , in which Thoreau enters Apmoojenegamook (the largest of the Allegash lakes) and then the Allegash River itself, heading north.

Episode 33 continues with Thoreau and his companion striving to navigate the carry to Mud Pond on foot then catalogues the molesting insects encountered before concluding the day with observations about the loon; the climactic, penultimate chapter of Jewett's A Country Doctor follows.

In Episode 32, Thoreau paddles through narrow waterways and seeks to carry his sixty-pound sack to Mud Pond by a path more swamp-like than muddy; we then conclude the 19th "Friends and Lovers" chapter of Jewett's A Country Doctor , the second half which registers Nan's perspective on her relationship with George Gerry.

Episode 31 continues with Thoreau's third adventure in the Maine woods, during which he interests himself in his Indian guide's sensibilities regarding how to conduct oneself on a Sunday; the episode concludes with the first half of A Country Doctor 's 19th chapter, in which the young Dunsport lawyer recognizes ponders the degree to which his affection for Nan is reciprocated.

Episode 30 continues our reading from "The Allegash and East Branch," wherein Thoreau wakes in the night to discover "phosphorescent wood," which delights him; following a re-cap of Nan's adventures with George Gerry on the river, we then eavesdrop upon "A Serious Tea-Drinking" at Mrs. Fraley's in ch. 18 of A Country Doctor.

In Episode 29, we venture further up Moosehead Lake with Thoreau and Joe Polis to camp and do a bit of botanizing at Mount Kineo, which rises on a peninsula within the lake. We then continue with Nan's visit to Dunport in chapter 17 of A Country Doctor.

Episode 28 introduces the third, final essay of Thoreau's The Maine Woods , "The Allegash and East Branch," then continues Jewett's A Country Doctor with its 16th chapter, in which Nan acquaints her Dunport aunt and a new friend with her vocational plans.