Herman Knickerbocker Vielé

Herman Knickerbocker Vielé (January 31, 1855 - December 14, 1908), was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet.

Biography

He was the son of Teresa (Griffin) Viele (author of a memoir of army life, Following the Drum) and Egbert Ludovicus Viele, a Union Army officer and later U.S. Representative from New York. His paternal grandfather John L. Viele was a New York politician, and his brother Francis Vielé-Griffin and sister Emily Vielé Strother were both writers.[1][2]:18–19 He married Mary Ashurst.

The writer Thomas Allibone Janvier considered his first book, The Inn of the Silver Moon, his best work.[3] In his second novel, The Last of the Knickerbockers (1901), Vielé — himself a descendant of the Knickerbockers of Schagticoke, New York — celebrated and mythologized the Dutch-descended families of New York, especially the idea that they represented a kind of surviving "old stock" that was nobler than other more recently arrived Americans.[4]

His last book, a story collection entitled On the Lightship, was published posthumously. Among the ten stories, "The Girl from Mercury: An Interplanetary Love Story" stands out as a piece of early science fiction.[5] Vielé introduced it thus: "Being the interpretation of certain phonic vibragraphs recorded by the Long’s Peak Wireless Installation, now for the first time made public through the courtesy of Professor Caducious, Ph.D., sometime secretary of the Boulder branch of the association for the advancement of interplanetary communication."[6]

His books were popular in Europe, and Heartbreak Hill (1908) was translated into German.[7] One critic wrote that his death "robbed America not only of one of her most brilliant novelists, but of a poet of fine flavour".[8]

Books
  • The Inn of the Silver Moon (novel, 1901)
  • The Last of the Knickerbockers: A Comedy Romance (novel, 1901)
  • Myra of the Pines (novel, 1902)
  • Random Verse (poems, 1903)
  • Heartbreak Hill: A Comedy Romance (novel, 1908)
  • On the Lightship (story collection, 1909)

References
  1. "Chronicles and Comment". The Bookman, December 1915, p. 367.
  2. Kuhn, Reinhard Clifford. The Return to Reality: A Study of Francis Vielé-Griffin. Paris: Librairie Minard, 1962.
  3. Janvier, Thomas A. "Introduction". In Herman Knickerbocker Vielé, On the Lightship, 1909, pp. 12–17.
  4. Patell, Cyrus R. K., and Bryan Waterman, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, pp. 36-37.
  5. Vielé, Herman Knickerbocker. "The Girl from Mercury". In The Wit and Humor of America, vol. 4, Marshall P. Wilder, ed. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1911, pp. 779-802.
  6. Vielé, Herman Knickerbocker. On the Lightship. New York: Duffield, 1909, p. 166.
  7. "Chronicles and Comment". The Bookman, September 1913, p. 4.
  8. Phelps, William Lyon. The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century, 1918
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