Joseph Crosby Lincoln

Joseph C. Lincoln was one of the most popular authors of the early 20th century, " the man who made Cape Cod famous." ________________________________________________________________ Lincoln, Joseph Crosby (13 Feb. 1870-10 Mar. 1944), writer and editor, was born in Brewster, Massachusetts, the son of Joseph L. Lincoln, a sea captain, and Emily Crosby. Although Lincoln lived in other places during his life, Cape Cod was forever a part of who he was. In a conversation with the poet Joyce Kilmer, Lincoln stated, "I am a Cape Codder." His heritage of generations of Lincolns and Crosbys living on Cape Cod became the bedrock on which his poems, sketches, short stories, and novels were based.

Lincoln's father, grandfather, and uncles were ships' captains, and his mother sailed with her husband, as was common during that time, to Europe, South America, and Asia. When Joseph was ten months old, his father died of a fever on a voyage south in Charleston, South Carolina. Emily Lincoln brought up her only child in Brewster until they relocated to Chelsea, Massachusetts, so she could work as a dressmaker. Joseph was thirteen years old when they left Cape Cod, but he continued to spend his summers in Brewster and Chatham, visiting his grandmother and cousins.

In Chelsea, Lincoln edited his school paper and graduated from the Williams Grammar School (ninth grade) in 1885. He was sixteen years old when he took his first full-time job in 1886 as a runner for George T. Sears, a wholesale salt dealer in Boston. In 1887 he took a position as a clerk in a brokerage house in Boston, followed by another clerking job. By 1895 he had moved to a bookkeeping position for the Swift Desk Company in Boston.

These jobs paid the bills, but they were not what he wanted to do with his life. From 1894 to 1896 Lincoln was a pupil of Henry (Hy) Sandham, a well-known Boston artist who specialized in painting historical events. In 1896 Lincoln and Howard Reynolds, a fellow student at Sandham's, set up a commercial art studio in Boston. Lincoln gave up his bookkeeping job, determined to become a full-time artist.

Lincoln and Reynolds also collaborated on a short story, "The Studio Puzzle," which was published in the ten-cent magazine The Owl, and worked together on some verses and sketches. After the partners split at the end of 1896, Lincoln moved to his own studio. He did not have much success, and when he was asked to come on staff as an illustrator for the League of American Wheelmen's L. A. W. Bulletin, he accepted. The magazine, with a circulation of more than 100,000 bicycle enthusiasts, published both his poetry and his sketches.

In 1897 Lincoln married Florence Elry Sargent, of Chelsea, a bookkeeper. That year he became an associate editor of the magazine and had shifted his focus from commercial art to poetry. But with the increasing use of the automobile, the bicycle was becoming less important in American life, a fact that was reflected in declining sales of the magazine.

Lincoln left the L. A. W. Bulletin at the end of 1898, and he and Florence moved to Brooklyn, New York. His objective was to become a professional writer, and Lincoln saw the greatest opportunities in New York City. However, finances dictated that he write by night and on weekends and earn money by day as the editor of a banking magazine.

His first major breakthrough as a writer was the publication of the short story "Mrs. Phidgit's System" in Harper's Bazaar in January 1900. This year also saw the publication of three of Lincoln's short stories and two of his poems in the Saturday Evening Post, and Joseph and Florence's move to Hackensack, New Jersey. Their only child was born that year as well.

Lincoln's first book, Cape Cod Ballads and Other Verse (1902), with drawings by Edward W. Kemble, included all the poems previously published in a variety of magazines. These poems were based on recollections of his boyhood on Cape Cod. But it was the almost overnight success of his first novel, Cap'n Eri, a Story of the Coast (1904), that allowed him to give up his day job at the bank and devote his time exclusively to writing.

Cap'n Eri tells the story of three retired sea captains who flip a coin to decide which of them will advertise for a wife, not for romantic reasons but rather to keep house for them. The story is filled with the dry humor and memorable characters that would become earmarks of Joseph C. Lincoln's style. Although the plot works out predictably, the complications are entertaining, as are such characters as M'lissy Busteed: "She'd be a good one to have on board in a calm. Git her talkin' abaft the mains'l and we'd have a twenty-knot breeze in a shake."

Lincoln was a prolific writer. He wrote forty-six books, including five short story collections, two collections of poetry, a play, two books of essays, and thirty-seven novels. Three of the novels were coauthored with his son Freeman: Blair's Attic (1929), The Ownley Inn (1939), and The New Hope (1941). All Lincoln's manuscripts were written by hand on yellow, ruled legal paper. He did not type or dictate to a secretary, yet he managed to write about a book a year until his death. His last novel, The Bradshaws of Harniss, was published in 1943.

The focus of Lincoln's work was Cape Cod, centering on places he knew well, although he did not give them their true names. For example, Orleans and Eastham become Orham in Lincoln's world. The books are filled with typical Cape Cod activities. His second book of essays, Cape Cod Yesterdays (1935), includes information about the cranberry industry, stagecoach rides, even recipes, evoking a way of life in a unique location. All Lincoln's books sold very well, and his novel The Portygee (1920) made the annual bestseller list for that year. This was the first of his novels to be published in serial form; it ran in the Delineator from October 1919 to June 1920. Later the Ladies' Home Journal would serialize four Lincoln novels: Fair Harbor (1922), Queer Judson (1925), Silas Bradford's Boy (1928), and Blowing Clear (1930).

In addition to being a writer, Lincoln was a popular lecturer and would read from his own works to church groups and at dinners. When his son was at Harvard, he lectured there about being a writer and read poems and told Cape Cod tales to the dramatic club.

Lincoln was also interested in the theater. He sponsored the Unitarian Dramatic Club in Hackensack and wrote and directed many of the productions, which played to capacity audiences. Lincoln even acted in some of these plays. The only play that was published was The Managers, a Comedy of Cape Cod (1925) in one act. His novel "Shavings" (1918), however, was dramatized by Pauline Phelps and Marion Short and played in Boston and on Broadway in 1920.

Several novels were made into films. Rugged Water (1925) starred Wallace Beery; Cap'n Eri was filmed in Rhode Island in 1915, as was Partners of the Tide (1905), Lincoln's second novel, in 1916. Partners was filmed again in 1921. Mary 'Gusta (1916) became the film Petticoat Pilot in 1918. The Rise of Rosco Paine (1912) was produced in 1922 as No Trespassing, with Irene Castle. And Doctor Nye of North Ostable (1923) became the film Idle Tongues in 1924. Lincoln completed only the ninth grade, but in 1935 his literary achievements were recognized with an honorary degree of doctor of literature from Rollins College.

Although Lincoln lived in Hackensack until 1925 when he moved to Villa Nova, Pennsylvania, and wintered from 1930 to 1944 in Winter Park, Florida, he always returned to Cape Cod for the summers. In 1916 he built "Crosstrees" in Chatham as his permanent summer home. He died in Winter Park and is buried in the Union Cemetery in Chatham.

Lincoln's novels evoke a world that is now lost. Although he did not use the actual names of the Cape villages, he did recreate their essence. The sense of place and of the people living there, the ship's captains, storekeepers, coach drivers, and spinsters, are depicted with their idiosyncracies and their "Yankee" virtues of hard work, ingenuity, honesty, and thrift. Lincoln himself was concerned about the future of a changing Cape Cod, and in a letter to the editor of the Boston Traveler on 26 December 1935 he stressed the "preservation of Cape Cod as Cape Cod is" and stated: "how important it is to save our towns and villages from becoming mere copies of towns and villages elsewhere." Sadly, the old Cape Cod of Joseph C. Lincoln's memory lives only within the pages of his books.

Bibliography

Lincoln manuscripts and memorabilia are housed in the Old Atwood House Museums in Chatham, Mass. A complete list of his writings can be found in the descriptive bibliography, edited by Stephen W. Sullwold, appended to Percy F. Rex's biography of Lincoln: The Prolific Pencil (1980). The Joseph C. Lincoln Reader (1959) is edited and introduced by his son Freeman Lincoln. Loring Holmes Dodd includes a chatty sketch of Lincoln in his Celebrities at Our Hearthside (1959). An obituary is in the New York Times, 11 Mar. 1944.

Marcia B. Dinneen

Citation: Marcia B. Dinneen. "Lincoln, Joseph Crosby"; http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00996.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Copyright à 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press.
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New York Times. Mar 11, 1944. pg.13

JOSEPH LINCOLN, AUTHOR, IS DEAD

Writer of Many Novels About Sea Captains and Cape Cod Stricken in Florida at 74

AVERAGED BOOK A YEAR

His Heroes Were New England Characters He Had Known From His Own Boyhood

Special to The New York Times.

WINTER PARK, Fla., March 10 — Joseph C. Lincoln, author of Cape Cod stories, died here today of a heart ailment in his apartment at the Virginia Inn. His age was 74.

He leaves a widow, a son, Maj. Joseph Freeman Lincoln of Philadelphia and Washington, now overseas with the Intelligence Department; and two grandchildren.

Wrote With Stubby Pencil

" For more than forty years Joseph Crosby Lincoln had turned out books, on an average of more than one a year, dealing with Cape Cod folks, their ways, their thoughts, their surroundings and above all the tales they told. His prolific pen (in his case really a stubby pencil) was devoted exclusively to Cape Cod, but his more than two score of novels, short stories, sketches and verse commanded wide popular renown, an uncommon occurrence for substantial literary works.

Mr. Lincoln wrote of another, a more leisurely but none the less exciting age, an age of sailing ships, of bearded New England sea captains setting out to trade in far-off places and of the picturesque little towns on the rugged coast where they made their homes.

It was not his destiny to go out in these ships, only to write about them, the men who manned them and their womenfolk. For this his heritage amply qualified him. He was born on the Cape in the quaint little town of Brewster on Feb. 13, 1870, not many miles from the spot where the Pilgrims had landed from the Mayflower 250 years before. He grew up in the midst of the sea atmosphere and among the sea cap'ns who had made the Cape famous and who figure so delightfully in almost every story that he wrote.

Male Relatives All Sea Captains

His father (he was the son of Joseph and Emily Crosby Lincoln) was a captain and so were his grandfather and all his uncles. In fact the village was populated almost exclusively by sea cap'ns and their families.

As a boy he roamed the Cape, fishing, riding in the old stagecoach from Harwich to Chatham, and learning much of the lives and thoughts and humble aspirations of lightkeepers, fishermen, life savers and the cracker-barrel oracles who abounded in every village store.

Young Lincoln, everyone assumed, would go to sea, but his father had died of a fever in Charleston, S. C, when the boy was a year old, and relatives shipped the youth off to Boston. There he was placed in a banking house, but figures and accounts soon proved distasteful to his probing and fanciful mind. He began to draw and illustrated his sketches with bits of verse and jokes. He found that these sold better than his pictures and he abandoned his drawings to tell in swinging meter of the Cape and its folk. Turning to the short story, he sold his first to The Saturday Evening Post, and succeeding ones appeared in many other magazines while his verse found an audience in Harper's Weekly, Puck and other journals.

Edited bicycling Bulletin

About this time bicycling came into its hey-day and for three years Mr. Lincoln acted as associate editor of the Bulletin of the League of American Wheelmen. When this "fad" waned, he devoted himself wholly to the literary field.

His first book was "Cape Cod Ballads," a collection of his verses published in 1902. His first novel was "Cap'n Eri," a story of three old sea captains who advertise for a wife, published two years later.

A succession of books, principally novels, followed through the years, each finding more favor than the last Some of his best liked are "Quahaug," 1914; "Shavings," 1918; "The Portygee," 1919; "Galusha, the Magnificent," 1921; "Rugged Water," 1924; "The Aristocratic Miss Brewster," 1927; "Silas Bradford's Boy," 1928, and "Blowing Clear," 1930.

With his son, known as Freeman, the father collaborated on a novel ("Blair's Attic," 1929) in the fashion of the famous writing team of Alexandre Dumas, pere and fils.

Mr. Lincoln's last novel, "The Bradshaws of Harniss," published in December— some forty years and forty books after his first— makes a concession to time only in telling of old Zenas Bradshaws nephew winning the Distinguished Flying Cross and the efforts of small business men to keep themselves going.

    "Otherwise," wrote a reviewer, "nothing has changed * * * neither the manner nor the basic matter of these books."

In recent years Mr. Lincoln spent part of the winter in Florida, far from his beloved Cape Cod, but where he could still hear the surge of the sea. His home was at Villanova, Pa., but to the last he maintained a summer place on the Cape, at Chatham.

On May 12, 1897, he married Florence E. Sargent."
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