In Pastures New

Dodo Collections brings you another classic from George Ade ‘In Pastures New.’

‘In Pastures New’ is a humorous account of travels, chiefly in London and Egypt. Many of the letters appearing in this volume were printed in a syndicate of newspapers in the early months of 1906. With these letters have been incorporated extracts from letters written to the Chicago Record in 1895 and 1898.

George Ade (February 9, 1866 – May 16, 1944) was an American writer, newspaper columnist, and playwright.  Ade's literary reputation rests upon his achievements as a great humorist of American character during an important era in American history: the first large wave of migration from the countryside to burgeoning cities like Chicago, where, in fact, Ade produced his best fiction. He was a practicing realist during the Age of (William Dean) Howells and a local colorist of Chicago and the Midwest. His work constitutes a vast comedy of Midwestern manners and, indeed, a comedy of late 19th-century American manners. In 1915, Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford professor and man of letters, while on a lecture tour in America, called George Ade "the greatest living American writer.

Ade's fiction dealt consistently with the "little man," the common, undistinguished, average American, usually a farmer or lower middle class citizen. (He sometimes skewered women, too, especially women with laughable social pretensions.) Ade followed in the footsteps of his idol Mark Twain by making expert use of the American language. A striking and unique feature of Ade's essays was the creative and liberal use of capitalization. George Ade is one of the American writers whose publications made him rich.