Tales of Men and Ghosts

Name: Tales of Men and Ghosts
Author: Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

Pages: about 340
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 6.2 h at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 3.5 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

“I have given the matter my best consideration for the last month, and it’s no use--the play won’t do. I have talked it over with Miss Melrose--and you know there isn’t a gamer artist on our stage--and I regret to tell you she feels just as I do about it. It isn’t the poetry that scares her--or me either. We both want to do all we can to help along the poetic drama--we believe the public’s ready for it, and we’re willing to take a big financial risk in order to be the first to give them what they want. But we don’t believe they could be made to want this. The fact is, there isn’t enough drama in your play to the allowance of poetry--the thing drags all through. You’ve got a big idea, but it’s not out of swaddling clothes.
“If this was your first play I’d say: Try again. But it has been just the same with all the others you’ve shown me. And you remember the result of ‘The Lee Shore,’ where you carried all the expenses of production yourself, and we couldn’t fill the theatre for a week. Yet ‘The Lee Shore’ was a modern problem play--much easier to swing than blank verse. It isn’t as if you hadn’t tried all kinds--”
Granice folded the letter and put it carefully back into the envelope. Why on earth was he re-reading it, when he knew every phrase in it by heart, when for a month past he had seen it, night after night, stand out in letters of flame against the darkness of his sleepless lids?
“It has been just the same with all the others you’ve shown me.”
That was the way they dismissed ten years of passionate unremitting work!
Good God--as if he were likely to forget it!

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Tales of Men and Ghosts

From the opening

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