What Iowans Were Reading in 1876

 

In 1876, books were like pets. You didn’t have many, and if you lost one, you never got over it.

 Iowans were still clutching Uncle Tom’s Cabin like it was the last moral compass on earth. It had been out for years, but everyone was still crying over it. Pretending they’d learned something about humanity. Spoiler: they hadn’t.

 

Little Women was everywhere. Every girl wanted to be Jo; nobody wanted to be Beth (because, you know, death). The boys pretended they didn’t read it while secretly flipping through for the fight scenes. Louisa May Alcott had basically hacked the female brain: and given them sisterhood, heartbreak, and just enough sass to make it feel rebellious.

 

Charles Dickens still haunted America. Christmas wasn’t Christmas without A Christmas Carol, and you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a copy of David Copperfield or A Tale of Two Cities. Every time someone picked one up, they said, “I’ll just read a few pages.” Three weeks later, they were still trapped in Victorian fog.

Davenport Writers Group

 

Members of the Davenport Writers Group engaged in a heated literary discussion. left to right: Arthur Davison Ficke, Floyd Dell, Suasan Glaspell, and George Cram Cook.

Arthur Davison Ficke Poet Joker Lawyer

Arthur Davison Ficke

Arthur Davison Ficke liked precision. The feel of a line snapping into rhythm. A rhyme that hit clean. He didn’t chase chaos—he tamed it. Some called him old-fashioned. Some called him a master. Either way, he stood out—a poet from the Iowa plains who wrote like a man from another century.

 He grew up in Davenport, born in 1883 to money and culture. His father was a lawyer and art collector; his mother sharp and literary. The house smelled of books and Japanese prints. While other kids were climbing trees, Ficke was memorizing sonnets. “The law,” he said later, “is the prose of life. Poetry is the appeal.”

 

At Harvard, he studied under William James, traded poems with Witter Bynner, and learned how words could turn philosophical and dangerous at the same time. Then, back to Iowa. Law school. Courtrooms. Briefs by day, poetry by night. He wrote like a man with two hearts—one bound to duty, one drunk on beauty. “The secret joy of writing,” he once said, “is that it never quite obeys you. You aim for truth and end up confessing something else.”

 

His early books were careful, polished things—From the Isles, The Happy Princess, Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter. He wrote about art, love, and the uneasy grace of seeing clearly. “There are years that ask questions,” he wrote, “and years that answer.” Critics praised him for form, scolded him for restraint. He didn’t care. “I’ll write it clean,” he told a friend, “even if the world’s gone dirty.”

Elias Parker Butler He Made the World Laugh

Elias Parker Butler

Ellis Parker Butler didn’t look like a rebel. He looked like a man who’d sell you a life insurance policy, then slip a punchline into the fine print. Born in Muscatine, Iowa, in 1869, he grew up surrounded by cornfields, Methodists, and people who thought laughter was fine—as long as it didn’t interfere with work.

Butler thought work was the joke. “The world,” he wrote, “is so full of serious people that a little nonsense is downright necessary for balance.” Another time, he said, “A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”

He sold insurance by day and wrote stories by night, hammering them out after dinner in rented rooms and sending them to any magazine that would listen. Most didn’t. He kept writing anyway. “I write because silence makes me nervous,” he said. “And because somewhere, someone might need a good laugh more than I do.”

Then came 1905—and Pigs Is Pigs.

It was the story of a railway clerk who refused to release two guinea pigs until the buyer paid the livestock rate instead of the pet rate. The animals multiplied. The paperwork multiplied faster. Soon, the absurdity of bureaucracy had reproduced itself into immortality.

Floyd Dell An Author Who Dared to Tell the Truth

Floyd Dell

Floyd Dell was born in Barry, Illinois, in 1887 and grew up across the river in Davenport, Iowa—a good town for hardware, a bad one for dreamers. He quit school at sixteen, took a job in a bookstore, and decided reading was as close to freedom as he could get. “I wanted to know everything immediately,” he said, “without waiting for it to happen to me.”

By twenty, he was reviewing books for the Davenport Times and running with a small gang of misfits—Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, Arthur Davison Ficke—the Davenport Group. They met in parlors, drank weak coffee, and talked about socialism, sex, and art in a state that preferred silence. “We were,” Dell said, “the only people in Iowa who thought talk was a form of action.”

He drifted to Chicago, where the air smelled like ambition and slaughterhouses. He joined The Masses, a radical magazine that mixed cartoons with revolution and prose with profanity. Dell’s essays hit like manifestos in disguise. “The artist,” he wrote, “is the only man who dares tell the truth.” He believed literature had a moral duty—to shake the country awake. “We want a literature,” he said, “that comes out of life, not out of libraries. It should have dirt under its fingernails.”

When The Masses was shut down for its antiwar views in 1917, Dell and his fellow editors were hauled into court for sedition. He stood before the jury and said, “If I’m guilty of anything, it’s believing the world can still be improved by telling the truth.” The jury acquitted him, but just barely. The New York Evening Sun called him “dangerously articulate,” which delighted him. “That’s all any writer ever wanted to be,” he told a friend.

Another Look at George Cram Cook

George Cram Cook

Susan Glaspell was already making a name for herself as a reporter when she met George Cram Cook — “Jig,” as his friends called him. She’d been covering murder trials and city politics for the Des Moines Daily News, trying to make sense of the world through facts. He was trying to make sense of it through philosophy. The University of Iowa had hired him to explain Shakespeare, but he preferred explaining freedom. It didn’t go well.

He was a Harvard man in sandals. She was a small-town girl in sensible shoes. “Art must be dangerous, or it isn’t art,” he liked to say. She listened, smiled, and made a note of it. Iowa wasn’t sure what to do with either of them. People there were still arguing about whether corn or beans made a better crop, and here came George Cram Cook, talking about Nietzsche and the soul of art.

They got married in 1913 — a philosopher and a journalist — and went looking for a place big enough to hold both of their ideals. They found Greenwich Village, where everyone was broke, brilliant, and talking too loudly. It was the kind of place where George could deliver a two-hour lecture on “spiritual democracy” to people who’d just stopped in for coffee. Susan wrote short stories that actually sold. One of them brought in twenty-five dollars — enough to cover rent, groceries, and one more week of George’s grand ideas about saving humanity through beauty.

They had an unspoken agreement: he dreamed, she edited. When he declared, “The artist must create a new moral order,” she replied, “Fine, but we still need milk.”

George Cram Cook Iowa Author and Dreamer

George Cram Cook

George Cram Cook was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1873 — which was bad timing if you planned to be a philosopher. Everyone else in Iowa was planting corn. George was planting ideas. They didn’t grow as well.

 He came from money, went to Harvard, studied Greek, and returned home like an over-educated comet. “He was too smart for his own good,” one former student said, “and knew it.” He got a job teaching English at the University of Iowa and told his students to stop writing about kings and start writing about life.

 

Cook said, “Books ought to have the smell of sweat and the dirt of the fields on them.” The dean disagreed. Iowa City wasn’t ready for a professor who quoted Nietzsche between puffs of his cigarette and told students honesty mattered more than grammar. The school quietly pushed him out. Cook called it “the first moral victory of my career.”

 

He moved to Stanford, hoping the Pacific air would cool him down. It didn’t. A student remembered his lectures as “a cross between a sermon and a tornado.” Cook spoke about the “moral duty of the artist” as if it were a religion. “Art,” he told his class, “is man’s rebellion against the stupidity of fact.” Another professor muttered, “He’s either a genius or a lunatic.” Cook didn’t mind either label.

Kurt Vonnegut at the Iowa Writer's Workshop

 

It was 1965. Kurt Vonnegut was forty-two, broke, and tired. He’d written Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle, but money was scarce and readers scarcer yet. He was raising a house full of kids, patching together teaching jobs, and wondering if he should quit writing altogether. Then Paul Engle, from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, called. Robert Lowell had backed out, and he needed someone fast. Vonnegut said yes.

So here he was: a chain-smoking satirist from Indianapolis, driving into Iowa City in a beat-up car, wearing a brown jacket and a mustache that looked like it could write its own novel. Vonnegut wasn’t an academic. He wasn’t polished, and he didn’t have a college teaching degree. He was just trying to stay afloat.

He moved into a rented house on Summit Street, filled it with kids and typewriters, and made himself a routine. Up at 5:30. Write until eight. Teach during the day. Drink Scotch at 5:30. Cook dinner. Sleep at ten. Then do it all again. “Mornings are for writing,” he said. “And so are most of the afternoons.”

He found his rhythm again. Between classes and whiskey, the story that had haunted him for twenty years took shape—the bombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five started there, in the flat light of Iowa City.

In the classroom, Vonnegut was everything students didn’t expect. He didn’t lecture. He laughed, doodled, told war stories, and called everyone “kid.” One student said, “He was passionate, indignant. He laughed at his own jokes. He was shy and kind.” Another remembered, “His classes were looser, funnier, more forgiving.”

Vonnegut didn’t believe in literary theory. He believed in people. “Every character should want something,” he told his students, “even if it’s only a glass of water.” He warned them not to show off, not to fake meaning. “Be cynical and religious,” he wrote in one assignment. “Love mystery. Love truth.”

Susan Glaspell Author & Playwright

 

Susan Glaspell

Susan Glaspell grew up in Davenport, Iowa, a town buzzing with riverboats, factories, and immigrant families trying to build new lives. Born in 1876, she always had a book in one hand and a question in the other. Teachers spotted her quick wit early on. She devoured the classics, argued in debates, and seemed destined for something bigger.

After high school, she cruised into the newspaper world. Most girls her age were expected to type, sew, or marry. Susan grabbed a pencil and notebook instead.

Her assignments started small—school contests, local fairs, church bazaars. She made them sparkle anyway. A strawberry social sounded like Shakespeare when she wrote about it. Before long, editors trusted her with meatier stories.

She left Davenport for Des Moines, where she landed a job at the Daily News. It was there that she got her first taste of crime reporting. The Daily News didn’t coddle her with “ladies’ page” fluff. They sent her to courtrooms, into the thick of murder trials, and out onto snow-covered farm roads.

The biggest story of her young career broke in December 1900. A farmer named John Hossack had been bludgeoned in his bed with an axe. His wife, Margaret, said she was asleep beside him and never saw the killer, but suspicion quickly fell on her. Neighbors whispered about fights in the marriage, about Margaret being stern, about years of quarrels that made her seem cold.