Java Head

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - Very late indeed in May, but early in the morning, Laurel Ammidon lay in bed considering two widely different aspects of chairs. The day before she had been eleven, and the comparative maturity of that age had filled her with a moving disdain for certain fanciful thoughts which had given her extreme youth a decidedly novel if not an actually adventurous setting. Until yesterday, almost, she had regarded the various chairs of the house as beings endowed with life and character; she had held conversations with some, and, with a careless exterior not warranted by an inner dread, avoided others in gloomy dusks. All this, now, she contemptuously discarded. Chairs were - chairs, things to sit on, wood and stuffed cushions. Yet she was slightly melancholy at losing such a satisfactory lot of reliable familiars: unlike older people, victims of the most disconcerting moods and mysterious changes, chairs could always be counted on to remain secure in their individual peculiarities.

Joseph Hergesheimer was an early twentieth-century American writer best known for his realism novels depicting decadent life among the wealthy. Hergesheimer was born February 15, 1880 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended a Quaker school and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Hergesheimer released his debut novel, The Lay Anthony, in 1914. Three Black Pennies, published in 1917, detailed the imaginary lives of three generations of Pennsylvania ironmasters and established the author's approach of dealing with upperclass characters through a floridly descriptive manner known as "aestheticism." Hergesheimer's fame varied dramatically over his lifetime, from a high point of praise and popularity in the 1920s to near-total obscurity by the time he died. Java Head, a miscegenation story told from multiple perspectives that is widely regarded as his best novel, was a huge success, and his flamboyant, ornate, highly descriptive style (best seen in works such as the travelogue San Cristobal de la Habana) was praised for its elegance and power.