Masterpieces of Adventure, Nella Braddy
Masterpieces of Adventure, Nella Braddy
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Masterpieces of Adventure
Stories of Desert Places

Author: Nella Braddy, Bret Harte, O. Henry, Egerton Castle, Stephen Crane, Thomas Hardy, Selma Lagerlöf, others, W. H. Hudson

Narrator: Jack de Golia

Unabridged: 4 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Spoken Realms

Published: 11/24/2020


Synopsis

Nella Braddy (1894–1973), a pioneer among female editors, compiled this seven-story collection and published Masterpieces of Adventure: Stories of Desert Places in 1922. It features seven authors: Egerton Castle, Stephen Crane, Selma Lagerlöf, Bret Harte, Thomas Hardy, O. Henry, and W. H. Hudson. It’s a stellar group.Braddy went on to write and edit more articles and books, including two more in the Masterpieces of Adventure series, one focused on Helen Keller’s breakthrough teacher, Anna Sullivan Macy, and a biography of Rudyard Kipling.Once inside Stories of Desert Places, though, listeners will soon realize that Braddy treats the idea of “desert” very loosely. Perhaps it’s about what’s in a protagonist’s mind or heart, rather than the actual setting of the story that Braddy felt evoked the idea of “desert.”It’s left to us to find the “desert”—physical or metaphorical—of an eastern European castle on a snowy night, somewhere in the American West, Norway, early day California, a rainy night in England, in Texas near the Rio Grande, and Argentina. In these stories, people strive, often foolishly, and yet they persevere in unexpected ways.

About Bret Harte

Francis Bret Harte (1836–1902) was an American short-story writer, poet, and humorist. Best remembered for his stories fiction stories concerning the California Gold Rush, featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures. He helped create the American local-colour writing style, which attempted to better represent the particularities of a place and its inhabitants through elements such as dialect, landscape, and folklore. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction.

About O. Henry

O. Henry (1862–1910), born William Sydney Porter in Greensboro, North Carolina, was a short-story writer whose tales romanticized the commonplace, in particular, the lives of ordinary people in New York City. His stories often had surprise endings, a device that became identified with his name. He began writing sketches around 1887, and his stories of adventure in the Southwest United States and in Central America were immediately popular with magazine readers.

About Egerton Castle

Egerton Castle (1858–1920) was born in London to a wealthy family, which included the publishing magnate, his grandfather Egerton Smith. Castle grew up to be an author, an antiquarian, and a swordsman. He was a champion in reconstruction of historical fencing techniques, and was even the captain of the British épée and sabre teams in the 1908 Summer Olympics. He wrote important books on the art and history of fencing and became an expert on and collector of bookplates. Many of his fiction novels were adapted into films in the early twentieth century, and he even co-wrote many other novels with his wife, Agnes Castle (née Sweetman).

About Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was an American novelist, poet, and journalist. He worked as a reporter of slum life in New York and a highly paid war correspondent for newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. He wrote many works of fiction, poems, and accounts of war, all well received but none as acclaimed as his 1895 Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage. Today he is considered one of the most innovative American writers of the 1890s and one of the founders of literary realism.

About Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840 and became an apprentice architect at the age of sixteen. He spent his twenties in London, where he wrote his first poems. In 1867 Hardy returned to his native Dorset, whose rugged landscape was a great source of inspiration for his writing. Between 1871 and 1897 he wrote fourteen novels, including Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. This final work was received savagely; thereafter Hardy turned away from novels and spent the last thirty year of his life focusing on poetry. He died in 1928.

About Selma Lagerlöf

Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) was a Swedish author. The first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, she is most widely known for her children’s book, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.

About Jack de Golia

Jack de Golia has narrated over seventy-five audiobooks in a wide range of genres. His narrations include the Project series by Alex Lukeman and Remembering the Battle of the Crater by Kevin Levin.


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Quotes

“This far-reaching collection of short stories featuring desert settings contains some of the most engaging tales in the Western canon. The audiobook is delivered at just the right pace by Jack de Golia. Narrating energetically, he takes on the characters’ voices with a chameleon-like effect. His ability to inhabit the spirit and sound of the French, Spanish, and Russians, young and old, highborn and low, elevates these classics…Edited by Nella Braddy in 1922, these adventures have stood the test of time and keep the listener rapt.” AudioFile