The OF Blog: Fiction or Non-Fiction?

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Fiction or Non-Fiction?

Here are some quotes taken from certain volumes of the Library of America that I own.  Some will be fiction, others non-fiction.  Can you identify which is which? (bonus if you can pinpoint the author(s) as well):

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.  I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.  With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.  This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

The guitars cried out "Polk Country," "Red River" and just instrumental hits with no name, that still are played by all good box pickers.  The dancing was hilarious to put it mildly.  Babe, Lucy, Big Sweet, East Coast Mary and many other of the well-known women were there.  The men swung them lustily, but nobody asked me to dance.  I was just crazy to get into the dance, too.  I had heard my mother speak of it and praise square dancing to the skies, but it looked as if I was doomed to be a wallflower and that was a new rôle for me.  Even Cliffert didn't ask me to dance.  It was so jolly, too.  At the end of every set Joe Willard would trick the men.  Instead of calling out the next figure as expected he'd bawl out, "Grab yo' partners and march up to de table and treat."  Some of the men did, but some would bolt for the door and stand about the fire and woof until the next set was called.

When John Burns, the great English labor leader and present member of the Cabinet, visited Chicago, he was asked by a reporter for his opinion of that city.  "Chicago," he answered, "is a pocket edition of hell."  Some time later, when Burns was going aboard his steamer to sail to England, he was approached by another reporter, who wanted to know if he had yet changed his opinion of Chicago.  "Yes, I have," was the prompt reply.  "My present opinion is that hell is a pocket edition of Chicago."

An army of cavalry and foot was passing.  It moved like a mob; its lines broken, as though fleeing from some terrible defeat.  The dolmans of the hussars, the heavy shakos of the guards, Hanoverian light horse, with their flat leather caps and flowing red plumes, were all jumbled together in bobbing disorder.  Behind the cavalry came the infantry, a wild sea of waving sabertaches, sloped muskets, crossed shoulder belts and swinging cartridge boxes.  Tod recognized the scarlet infantry of England with their white shoulder pads, the black infantry of the Duke of Brunswick, the French grenadiers with their enormous white gaiters, the Scotch with bare knees under plaid skirts.

As we travelled towards a land of liberty, my heart would at times leap for joy.  At other times, being, as I was, almost constantly on my feet, I felt as though I could travel no further.  But when I thought of slavery with its Democratic whips – its Republican chains – its evangelical blood-hounds, and its religious slave-holders – when I thought of all this paraphernalia of American Democracy and Religion behind me, and the prospect of liberty before me, I was encouraged to press forward, my heart was strengthened, and I forgot that I was tired or hungry. 

It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is gone through.  There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there may be a caster of state.  How they use the salt, precisely – who knows?  Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad.  Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?  Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing.  In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.  As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.


1 comment:

James said...

I answered correctly for each, but since I checked my answers against Google, I'm not going to list them.

I did have to completely guess at that last one though.

 
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