MEA young man returns from the west to catch up with his Aunt and Uncle,who raised him, and hopefully to start a business with the money he saved, only to find that they have lost their home and are now living in a poorhouse.

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Two great short stories from Edna Ferber for your enjoyment. When you listen to her writing style you begin tom appreciate how much she says with a minimum of words- yet we know her characters and learn her story completely.

Few people now recollect Edna Ferber, once a best-selling novelist. Nevertheless she numbered among her champions Somerset Maugham, who in 1948 told playwright Garson Kanin: "I admire Edna Ferber. She's a true professional." To Kanin's inquiry, "What sort of writer would you call her?", Maugham responded: "The best sort. She writes because she must, compulsively. She couldn't not write, if you take my meaning."

In this classic story by Guy de Maupassant a young man with a troubling past marries a young French girl, and during their wedding party a note is delivered to him that requires him to leave the party immediately.

He tells his new wife that an old friend is in dire trouble and he must go and help. As the hours pass the young bride awaits an unsure future.

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"On the Divide" is a short story by Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather. It was first published in Overland Monthly in January 1896.

Plot summary
On the Nebraska prairie, Canute takes to drinking to forget his boredom after spending the first forty years of his life in Sweden. Lena takes to teasing him and going to church with him. One day, he asks her father if he can marry her and the father says no. He then proceeds to drag Lena to his house by force, drag a priest there by force too, and get him to marry them without the girl or the girl's father's consent. Later the priest leaves and Lena is left alone in Canute's shanty. She is scared of the rattlesnakes and the coyotes, but he stays outside, in the snow. As she opens the door he is sobbing

DECORATION DAY by SARAH ORNE JEWETT

More about Sarah's story 'Decoration Day'

Three years after the Civil War ended, in 1868, General John A. Logan—the head of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans—established that May 30 should be set aside as Decoration Day, so-called from the tradition of decorating graves with flowers. More than five thousand participants gathered for the first Decoration Day in Arlington National Cemetery and lavished flowers and flags on some twenty thousand graves, and similar events took place in cemeteries all over the country. The commemoration spread more widely in subsequent years and by the 1880s the day was known in some places as Memorial Day, which over the course of the next century became the more common designation. It was only in 1968 that the federal government passed the law that, beginning in 1971, officially shifted the date to the last Monday in May.

On the morning of Decoration Day, in either 1889 or 1890, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote from her home in South Berwick, Maine, to her friend and companion Annie Fields in Boston about the events planned for that day:
There is going to be an unwonted parade in honor of the day and I am glad; for usually everybody trots off to Dover or Portsmouth and nothing is done here except to put the pathetic little flags about the burying-grounds. It seems to me that I have just begun to understand how grown people felt about the war in the time of it,—at any rate it brought tears to my eyes yesterday when John said that over two hundred men went from this little town to the war. You can see how many young sons of old farmers, and how many men out of their little shops, and people who had nobody to leave in their places, went to make up that number.
This “unwonted parade” almost surely inspired Jewett a couple of years later to write “Decoration Day,” in which a small group of aging Civil War veterans convinces the residents of their small Maine rural village to host a long-overdue procession honoring the local residents killed in the war.

After Jewett included the story in her collection A Native of Winby, the reviewer for The Writer singled it out as “one of the best stories that she has ever told,” and the poet John Greenleaf Whittier similarly wrote, just before his death, that the tale “was one of her very best.” In 1895 Jewett boasted to a reporter that the story had “kept its hold surprisingly and is making part of the exercises of the day this year.” And according to a handwritten note in a friend’s edition of A Native of Winby, Jewett later told a neighbor in Boston that “if she were remembered by any of her stories, she should be glad if it might be this one.”

In the last century, however, the opinions of critics have been decidedly mixed. When Willa Cather was assembling a 1925 edition of Jewett’s best writings, she belittled it as a “conventional magazine story” and recalled a conversation with Jewett two decades earlier. “When I told her that ‘Decoration Day’ to me seemed more like other people’s stories, she said with a sigh that it was one of the ones that had grown old-fashioned.” Cather convinced the editor at Houghton Mifflin not to include it in the volume.

Some of Jewett’s biographers have likewise dismissed the story as “sentimental.” But during his life the late Jewett scholar Richard Cary argued that the story is one of her finest—and by far the strongest of the many holiday-themed tales she published in magazines. The story “defines the pathos of short-lived gratitude,” Carey wrote, and Jewett “prevents pity from turning maudlin through an unexpected deliverance or a bracing touch of comedy.”

Decoration Day by Sarah Orne Jewett
This text is presented with the assistance of Terry Heller, Coe College, who writes, "'Decoration Day' first appeared in Harper's Magazine (85:84-90) in June 1892. It was later collected in A Native of Winby (1893). This text is from the 1893 edition." Dr. Heller’s annotated text can be read at the Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project website.

Two years before the publication of "Decoration Day," South Berwick erected a soldiers monument in honor of those who had sacrificed during the Civil War.

Ceremony at the South Berwick Soldiers Monument c. 1900

The small park in which the monument still stands was at first sometimes called Jewett Park, as two Jewett family homes and Jewett Avenue stand nearby. This part of South Berwick Village, at the intersection of Portland Street and Agamenticus Road today, was once known as the Plain or Plains.

Sarah Orne Jewett

A group of women form a society to determine what it is that men bring to this life-so they start asking questions but find themselves getting limited answers. As a late "Gilded Age"piece of work it challenges the status quo in 1921 at the beginning of an era when women no longer were required to being 10 or 15 children into the world- that education was important- and that men really didn't seem to know it all. I think all who listen to this story will have a different take- and thats what makes it enjoyable.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (/wʊlf/;[ née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device.

Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London as the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen. She grew up in a blended family of eight that included her sister, modernist painter Vanessa Bell. From a young age, she was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature. Between 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history. There, she encountered early reformers advocating for women's higher education and the women's rights movement.

After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to Bloomsbury, a more bohemian neighbourhood. There, alongside her brothers' intellectual friends, she helped form the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which went on to publish much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and permanently settled there in 1940.

Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. During the inter-war period, Woolf became an important part of London's literary and artistic society, and its anti-war position. In 1915, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928). She is also known for her essays, such as A Room of One's Own (1929).

Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism. Her works, translated into more than 50 languages, have attracted attention and widespread commentary for inspiring feminism. A large body of writing is dedicated to her life and work. She has been the subject of plays, novels, and films. Woolf is commemorated by statues, societies dedicated to her work, and a building at the University of London.

The sad fact of rural life in "the gilded era" was that most folks, especially after the children were grown up and gone, werepoor and lonely, and often caring for the elders. Mary E.Wilkins (thats how she signed her books) was a good storyteller in this genre- and the people were often siomple and honest and hardworking.

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