The Life and Work of Writer Annie Trumbull Slosson: A Connecticut Local Colorist

by Ed Ifkovic

Annie Trumbull Slosson (1832-1926) was an important short story writer who epitomized the American local color movement that flourished after the Civil War and ended at the beginning of the twentieth century. Along with writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, she helped establish the popular and critical model of the short story in which location and idiosyncratic characterization identified a particular region of the United States. In New England women dominated the genre, for the isolated farms and desolate villages were often places where women and old men lived - the young men had died in the war or had gone west in search of gold. Slosson's first work, The China Hunter's Club (1878), helped establish the viability of local dialect, building on the tradition established by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Sedgwick. But in her two most important volumes, Seven Dreamers (1890) and Dumb Foxglove and Other Stories (1898) she reached full maturity, with stories that developed the mystical/psychological ramifications of her characters, mostly older women who abandoned the old-style Congregational/Calvinist puritanism of their forebears and

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0773463968
• ISBN13: 9780773463967
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
• Length: 481 Pages