-- from "Charles Dudley Warner's 'Little Journey in the World,' " by Eugene E. Leach
"Charles Dudley Warner strolled out of the world on October 20, 1900. After lunching with some old Hartford friends, he was taking his daily walk when he began to feel faint. Moments later he expired on a cot in a nearby house. Warner could not have wished for himself an exit more in keeping with his ideal of gracious living -- friendly farewells still on his mind, giving no trouble, feeling little pain. Never at ease in the 1890s, he had sampled a year of the unpromising new century and then decorously withdrew.
"For three decades, Warner had been a squire of Nook Farm, the colony on Hartford's Farmington Avenue that rivaled Concord, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a center of New England literary life after the Civil War. He had shared an apprenticeship in fiction with one of his neighbors, Mark Twain, by collaborating on The Gilded Age. But the curve of Warner's career more closely paralleled that of another Nook Farm neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe. For like Stowe, Warner shepherded his readers away from the intense religious and reform commitments of the pre-war years, toward polite appreciation of domesticity, local color, and nostalgia. He approved Stowe's retreat from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Oldtown Folks; in his last years he acted as patron to Sarah Orne Jewett. As his friend Howells suggested, Warner rode currents that carried New England letters out of stormy engagements with political and economic developments during the Gilded Age. By celebrating the values of Nook Farm, Warner invited sensitive men to join their wives in the safe harbors of middle-class literary culture.
"Nook Farm represented to Warner a sanctuary of New England decencies in an America poisoned by corruption, philistinism, and false progress."
