A Certain Hour (1922) is a collection of stories by James Branch
Cabell. Recreating the lives of some of history's most celebrated poets,
A Certain Hour is a relative outlier among Cabell's body of work, and
is included in a series of novels, essays, and poems known as the
Biography of the Life of Manuel. "Indisputably the most striking
defect of this modern American literature is the fact that the
production of anything at all resembling literature is scarcely anywhere
apparent. Innumerable printing-presses, instead, are turning out a vast
quantity of reading-matter, the candidly recognized purpose of which is
to kill time, and which--it has been asserted, though perhaps too
sweepingly--ought not to be vended over book-counters, but rather in
drugstores along with the other narcotics." Moving away from his usual
setting of 13th century France, Cabell begins his collection with an
impassioned essay decrying the state of American literature in the early
twentieth century. Interested in the nature of literary genius, he
imagines the lives of such poets as Robert Herrick and Alexander Pope,
whose wit and wisdom remain essential centuries after their deaths. A
Certain Hour is a captivating collection of tales from a historical
period not so different from our own. Cabell's work has long been
described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and
obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read A Certain
Hour, however, is to understand that the issues therein--the struggle
for power, the unspoken distance between men and women--were vastly
important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own,
divisive world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally
typeset manuscript, this edition of James Branch Cabell's A Certain
Hour is a classic of fantasy and romance reimagined for modern readers.
