The Bad Old Days in St. Paul—and “the Ingersoll Girls”

BackgroundTo explore the relationships between childhood friendship and depression among older adults in China, and provide evidence for policy-making to promote the mental health of older adults from a novel perspective.MethodsData from the China Longitudinal Study of Health and Retirement (CHARLS) were used in this study. Logistic regression models were adopted to assess the association between childhood friendships and depression symptoms. Additionally, trend tests were used to investigate the possible dose–response relationships.ResultsA total of 6,395 participants aged 60 and above were included in this study. After adjusting for covariates, individuals with poor childhood friendship experiences showed a higher risk of late-life depression compared to respondents with better friendship experiences in childhood (OR = 1.64, 95% CI 1.22–2.21, P = 0.001). Cumulative childhood friendship score associated with late-life depression exhibited a dose response. Friendship-related loneliness was most closely associated with depression in later life compared to low friendship frequency and low friendship quality (OR = 0.58, 95% CI 0.48–0.68, P < 0.001). The association between childhood friendship and late-life depression was particularly significant in younger, less educated people. In addition, these associations were statistically significant in the subgroups based on sex and address.ConclusionPoor childhood friendship experience was an independent risk factor for depression in later life. Health-related departments should emphasize the construction of good relationships in early life to prevent the occurrence of depression in later life.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40359-025-03111-2.

Effect of family-related adverse childhood experiences on self-rated health in childhood and adulthood——childhood friendships as moderator

Objectives: This study examines the long-term relationship between early life circumstances and later life cognitive aging. In particular, we differentiate the long-term effects of early life circumstances on level of cognitive deficit and rate of cognitive decline. Methods: Cognitive trajectories were measured using three waves of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Surveys (CHARLS 2011-2015). Linear mixed-effect model was used to decompose the individual level of cognitive deficit and rate of cognitive change in a sample of Chinese middle-aged and older adults 45-90 years of age (N=6,700). These two dimensions of cognition were matched to four domains of early life circumstances using CHARLS Life History Survey (2014), including childhood socioeconomic status, neighborhood environment, social relationships and health conditions. Their associations were examined by linear regressions. Stratification analysis was further conducted to investigate the mediating effect of education on early life circumstances and cognitive aging. Results: Childhood socioeconomic status, childhood friendship and early life health conditions were significantly associated with both the level of cognitive deficit and rate of decline. In contrast, the community environment, including childhood neighborhood safety and social cohesion, only affected the baseline level of cognitive deficit; and childhood relationship with parents only affected the rate of cognitive decline. Moreover, education was found to be a mediating factor of these relationships. Conclusion: Exposure to disadvantaged early life circumstances have significant negative effects on later life cognitive deficit as well as rate of cognitive decline. Nevertheless, these long-term impacts can be partially ameliorated by higher educational attainment.

This study investigates the impact of childhood circumstances on health inequality in later life, with a particular emphasis on frailty among older adults in the United States, highlighting the significance of early life historical and social factors. We employed data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), incorporating the 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 waves along with the 2015 Life History Mail Survey (LHMS). Using innovative conditional inference trees and forests, we evaluated 43 distinct childhood factors and their contribution to the Inequality of Opportunity (IOP) in health outcomes. The circumstances in both countries can be divided into seven domains: 1) war or economic crisis at birth; 2) regional and urban/rural status at birth; 3) family SES in childhood; 4) parental health status and health behaviors in childhood; 5) health and nutritional status in childhood; 6) relationship with parents in childhood; 7) friendship in childhood. We found that key early-life predictors identified include experiencing the Great Depression, adverse childhood events, socioeconomic status, and access to educational resources, all of which play critical roles in determining frailty in older adults. The machine learning models, particularly conditional inference forests, significantly outperform traditional analytical methods in predicting health inequality, with the best out-of-sample performance. The findings demonstrate the importance of early-life circumstances in shaping later health outcomes and stress the early-life interventions for health equity in aging societies.

Friends are an important part of social circles tm late infancy through late adulthood. tey help us get along in life by modeling social engagement, offering emotional support, providing camaraderie, challenging unexamined assumptions, listening to deep concerns, just being there, and a host of other mundane and special contributions to our well-being (Rawlins, 2016). Life span development and life-course perspectives posit that earlier life experiences influence later life outcomes (Dannefer and Settersten, 2010), so understanding friendship in old age requires examining it at multiple earlier periods. What were friend relationships like for the youth and emerging adults comprising the baby boomer cohort during the Summer of Love? How did those friendship patterns play out across their young adult and middle-age years, and what are they like now for aging baby boomers?Historical context and cohort experiences matter (Dannefer and Settersten, 2010), so we sought to answer these questions by looking for research findings from studies of baby boomers in the United States, conducted when they were young (approximately age 20), in middle-age (around age 45), and in old age (ages 65 and older). Participants in the Summer of Love were teenagers and young adults at the leading edge of the baby boomer cohort, so, allowing a few years for research to be conducted and published, we searched for research related to their friendships published in (or using data collected in) the 1970s and early 1980s, in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, and after 2011, to capture the three adult stages of the cohort that began in 1946. Note that friendship only emerged as a significant topic of research in the 1980s, despite the fact that friendship has been discussed since the time of Aristotle (Rawlins, 2016).Also, friendship in childhood and late adulthood has been studied far more than friendship in young and middle adulthood. Thus, available evidence from the relevant historical periods is not as robust as we would have liked. Nevertheless, we present a representative sampling of the kinds of information about friends available at each period of the baby boomers' adulthood. Of course, cohorts are not homogeneous, so our interpretations are tempered by acknowledgement of a great variety of opportunities and constraints, personalities, political stances, and many other features that shape diversity within a cohort's set of experiences and outcomes over the years.Friendships of Baby Boomer Youth and Young AdultsResearch published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the baby boomers were teenagers and young adults, was much more likely to focus on parent-child relations, school performance, and problems such as juvenile delinquency than on friendship. Thus, we found few studies of baby boomers' friendships when they were teens and young adults and we were unable to identify any studies focused on friendships of Summer of Love participants per se.Research shows that friends of early adult baby boomers were similar in demographic characteristics and attitudes (Kandel, 1978). Not only did they have personal backgrounds in common, but also, same-sex friendships prevailed. Friends enjoyed mutual interactions that contributed to their co-constructing of insights into and understandings about themselves and their social relationships (Hunter, 1984).The most important characteristics of friendship (in order of endorsement by college students) were dependability (55 percent), honesty (47 percent), understanding (45 percent), and trust (43 percent), followed by enjoyment (37 percent), being a confidant (37 percent), and a host of other aspects mentioned by smaller proportions of young adults (Tesch and Martin, 1983). College men and women at that time did not differ in number of friends, time spent with friends, or the perceived value of intimacy. However, women emphasized the importance of emotional sharing and selfdisclosure among friends, whereas men emphasized mutual interests and activities (Caldwell and Peplau, 1982). …

Building a Professional Profile: Charles Dickens and the Rise of the “Detective Force”

308 WAL 36.3 F A L L 2001 From the thinly veiled names (Earth Forever!, Axxam Corporation) to treesitters (remember Julia Butterfly Hill?) to apocalyptic floods, Boyle taps into the cultural pulse of contemporary western environmentalism. A t the core, A Friend of the Earth suggests that both greens and non-greens are doomed because of consumerist tendencies. Environmentalists already recognize this as a central dilemma. But Boyle does question, in a fantastically written and entertaining way, what gains have been made and what approaches are avail­ able to activist organizations attempting to become friends of the earth in the midst of rampant consumption. Straight White M ale. By Gerald W. Haslam. R eno: U n iversity o f N ev ad a Press, 2000. 274 pages, $17.00. Reviewed by Delbert E. Wylder Tem ple, Texas Gerald Haslam is known on the West Coast as a “California” writer and, in short stories, novels, and essays, the chronicler of the Okie experience in the Central Valley, particularly the area around Bakersfield and its oil fields. That localizing critical perspective has always seemed a bit limiting, and it is espe­ cially so for this superb novel. All realistic novels must be set somewhere, and this is set in the Central Valley, though the Upton family has moved north from Bakersfield. It is also true that most of the characters are displaced “Okies,” who are being acculturated into Californians, but, because they are human beings, are having a diffi­ cult time of it. Old patterns, including patterns of speech, and old loyalties make adaptation to new ways almost, at times, impossible. Authors of realistic novels must also create “realistic” characters, those human beings caught in a changing world, carrying with them the baggage, both good and bad, given them by their parents and the culture their parents had adapted to, but which, over the years, has changed along with the radical phys­ ical and mental changes caused by the sun, work, pleasures, and just plain living. Leroy Upton, the narrator of both parts of the novel and a member of the “middle” generation, is responsible for a type of gritty realism that results from his refusal to leave behind the language and attitudes of his high school friends when they sometimes gather together. As Juanita, the wife of his friend Travis Plumley, says, they talk like “white trash” (130). Then there are Leroy’s realis­ tic, detailed descriptions of his father’s physical failings: the incontinence, fear of falling, and eating problems. Equally disturbing are the scenes where he describes visiting his mother in a nursing home, and we hear the sounds in all such places: the cries for help, the grunts, the howls of loneliness. The first two chapters of the novel roughly delineate the time frame: the first is dated 1952, the date of Leroy’s marriage to the pregnant Yvonne Trumaine, while the second is dated 1989, a preparatory scene for the final chapters, and B o o k R e v i e w s 309 one which emphasizes Leroy’s inability to come to terms with Yvonne’s early sex life and his vague doubts about the paternity of their first child. Outside of this time frame, three out of four chapters concentrate on the lives of the Upton family after they’ve moved to Northern California. Every fourth chap­ ter is dated and allows Leroy, still as first-person narrator, to describe significant events in his early life. By chapter 49, the last of Leroy’s autobiographical chap­ ters, he has brought his life to the point of his first date with Yvonne, an almost frantic sexual encounter. The remaining three chapters are, I’m sure, the most powerful writing Haslam has produced. He couldn’t have created anything more emotionally charged, more perfectly stated. The publicity statements about the novel suggest a comparison of Haslam’s realism with Steinbeck’s. In most respects, this novel is quite different, pri­ marily because of the first-person narration and the frequent linguistic crudi­ ties. In some respects, however, there is a striking similarity. In The Grapes of Wrath, there is one character who holds the family...

Among all Chinese women writers of the 1920s and 1930s, Ling Shuhua (1900–1990) is probably one of the most frequently anthologized. However, due to a marginalization of modern Chinese women writers in the study of Chinese literature, up to now scholars have not paid sufficient attention to her writings. Aggravating the difficulty of producing a comprehensive assessment of her writing career is Ling’s use of both Chinese and English in her writings, her low-profile and peripatetic lifestyle, and the antileftist political stand of her husband, Chen Yuan (1896–1970), who wrote under the pen name Xiying. Though recent years have witnessed the republication of many of her works in China, in particular her short stories, few scholars have paid attention to her 1953 English memoirs Ancient Melodies (published under the name Su Hua Ling Chen). In fact, these memoirs did not appear in China and in Chinese until 1994 when the Overseas Chinese Press in Beijing published them. It is sad and ironic that decades after she disappeared from China’s literary scene, she had to rely on her identity as an overseas Chinese to secure the publication of her memoirs in her homeland. In the English-speaking world, the past two decades have seen only a few English studies on Ling Shuhua. These include Rey Chow’s 1988 essay “Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Stories by Ling Shuhua” and half of a chapter in Shu-mei Shih’s 2001 monograph The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. Chow’s essay is inspiring in that it provides us with a new way of looking at modern Chinese women writers and their very act of writing. At the outset of her essay, Chow attacks commonly adopted criteria for evaluating

Editor’s Introduction

270 Western American Literature I found the book enjoyable in its recounting of some of Hemingway’s early life and later exploits but the constant lecturing on psychoanalysis was intrusive. The book was uneven in chapter length (2.5 pages to 11), and in continuity. One chapter would describe several episodes, the next would discuss psychoanalysis. In my opinion, the treatment was too brief, not integrated and less than original. The recent Hemingway biography by Kenneth Lynn is a similar fictional account. Hemingway had little use for psychiatrists and psy­ chologists and I don’t believe this book would have changed his opinion. CARL D. CHENEY Utah State University European Perspectives on Hispanic Literature of the United States. Edited by Genevieve Fabre. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1988. 160 pages, $8.50.) Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Litera­ ture. Edited by Maria Herrera-Sobek and Helena Maria Viramontes. (Hous­ ton: Arte Publico Press, 1988. 190 pages, $10.00.) Both collections contain material from conferences on Hispanic cultures and literature, one held in Paris in 1986, the other in Irvine in 1987. The title, European Perspectives on Hispanic Literature of the United States, is, in fact, misleading since the Paris conference united European and American scholars in order to “celebrate and discuss the esthetics, history and contributions of literature produced by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and other Hispanics of the United States.” There are also inconsisten­ cies between what is announced in the introduction and on the back cover and what the book actually covers. For example, the cover mentions a study of Sandra Cisneros; this, however, is not included. Nevertheless, the collection affords a unique opportunity to compare and contrast European and American approaches to Hispanic literature, and the eleven critical essays are of consistently high quality. They use a broad range of methodological approaches but are unified in their concern for the identifica­ tion of the socio-historical experience and the cultural situation of Hispanics as expressed in literature. While a few essays examine Nuyorican poetry, those on Mexican American literature occupy the central position and are of special interest to western American studies. It is interesting to compare and contrast French and American perspec­ tives on major Chicano writers. For example, in discussing Rudolfo Anaya’s Heart of Aztlan, French critic Jean Cazemajou applies Roland Barthes’ eurocentric theory of “l’ecriture,” whereas Alurista explores the indigenous myth of Aztlan in the novel. Two articles focus exclusively on Chicana writing. Gloria Velasquez-Trevino examines early Chicana writers and argues against the Reviews 271 common belief that they were “assimilationist, tame and imitative, romantic and pastoral.” And French feminist critic Marcienne Rocard discusses recent Chicana poetry to prove her contention that the Chicana is not twice but four times a minority. Entirely devoted to recent Chicana writing is the anthology Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature. The editors compiled this collection of poetry, prose, and critical essays in order to “celebrate” the conference on Mexican American Women’s Literature held in Irvine, California, in the spring of 1987. The book is an ambitious venture. The editors claim to have included works that are innovative in form and content. In their words the collected works are “daring inroads into ‘new frontiers’ which the authors make in their writings. The poets, short story writers and critics are all taking risks, they are expanding the boundaries of Chicana literature and literary criticism, offering new vistas and new possi­ bilities.” The poetry section, consisting of poems by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucha Corpi, Evangelina Vigil-Pinon, and Denise Chavez, is daring in its exploration of often repressed topics such as Chicana sexuality and eroticism. The prose fiction section bears witness to the innovativeness of Chicana writing. Denise Chavez blurs traditional genres by combining “theatre, sculp­ ture, folk belief and folk art” in her Novena Narrativas y Ofrendas Nuevomexicanas . Roberta Fernandez’ short story “Andrea” is an effective combination of a narrative and a history of Mexican American theatre. And in her short story “Miss Clairol” Helena Maria Viramontes deals with a factory worker, by now representative of a large segment of the Chicana population. The five critical essays...

"A Lot Up For Grabs":The Idiosyncratic, Syncretic Religious Temperament of Kate Chopin David Z. Wehner Luis Buñuel and Ingmar Bergman represent "one of the most compelling, if uncategorizable, intellectual tendencies of the twentieth century: that of religious temperament without religious faith." —Carlos Fuentes A search for Kate Chopin's name in the online MLA Bibliography turns up 652 articles published over the past forty years, but only one—published in 1982 by a scholar at Loyola University—mentions Catholicism in its title.1 This void exists despite the fact that Chopin's family raised her as a practicing Catholic, she did all of her schooling in Catholic institutions, she went to communion on her honeymoon, and references to Christianity fill her work. Of her ninety-six short stories, she set five at Christmas and four at Easter, and religious diction suffuses all her stories: awakening, rapture, ecstasy, transfiguration, miracles, Christ, the Holy Ghost, Eve, and Assumption. The title of her most-studied novel, The Awakening, represents a trope that runs throughout Christian conversion narratives. The novel starts on a Sunday with most of the Grand Isle vacationers attending Mass, except for the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, and a week later on the next Sunday, Edna's awakening begins as she first realizes her feelings for Robert Lebrun. Edna's foil in the novel, Adele Ratignolle, is described as "a faultless Madonna," "a sensuous Madonna," while the Farival twins always dress in blue and white because at their baptism they were dedicated to the Blessed Virgin.2 An unnamed woman dressed all in black counting her beads floats in and out of the pages of the novel for no apparent reason. Still, scholars remain relatively silent on Chopin's interaction with religion and instead focus on the problematics of gender. Certainly, Chopin's life, work, and reception history lend themselves well to a feminist reading. In the 1890s, Chopin enjoyed a nice literary career and reputation until in 1899 she published The Awakening, whose protagonist challenged cultural norms around female sexuality, motherhood, [End Page 154] and marriage. The novel's reception, harsh and critical, convinced Chopin's publisher to cancel her already-accepted third collection of short stories, A Voice and a Vocation. The author's literary output fell off from the productivity of the 1890s, and she died of a stroke five years later in 1904. Over the next sixty-five years, the scholarship on her remained scant and spotty until Per Seyersted in 1969 published a biography of her along with The Complete Works. Seyersted's work coincided with the second wave of feminism's project of recovering lost women writers, and perhaps because of this coincidence, thirty-five years later we continue to read Chopin's oeuvre as if the question of gender drives her body of work. In this emphasis, our scholarship separates out questions of religion, though clearly Chopin did not separate the questions of gender and religion. Indeed, Chopin's unorthodox views on female sexuality, marriage, and motherhood grew out of her unorthodox views on religion and her attempt to reconcile the Catholicism of her early life with her later reading in writers like Charles Darwin. This article will offer a reading of Chopin that foregrounds her engagement with the tension between religion and secularism in the late-nineteenth century. By the time Chopin began her writing career, as with Luis Buñuel and Ingmar Bergman, her religious faith had faded, but religious temperament remained; her work, then, demonstrates a steady, clear articulation of this idiosyncratic, syncretic temperament.3 Chopin and Christian Asceticism: Nuns and Monasteries In the attached photograph of Kate Chopin, dating to 1877 (figure 1), the writer is twenty-seven years old, living in New Orleans with her husband, Oscar, and her first four children. In the photograph, a large cross hangs around her neck—a cross so big it represents not a demure piece of jewelry but rather a loud proclamation of faith. In 1889, twelve years after this picture, Chopin published her first short story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. By the time Chopin published The Awakening (1899), Seyersted tells us, she was "a Catholic in name only...

Angus Wilson is unusual among twentieth-century British writers in at least two ways. He seems, in the first place, never to have served a literary apprenticeship or to have experienced any difficulty in getting his first work published. He speaks of having contributed pieces to the school magazine of his preparatory school, and one short story to The Elizabethan, the school magazine of his public school, Westminster,' but, apart from these juvenilia, Angus Wilson wrote nothing until the age of thirty-three, when in a single Sunday in November 1946 he produced his short story, Raspberry Jam. Together with eleven other stories written in rapid succession on subsequent weekends, this was published in 1949 in his first collection, The Wrong Set. Only three of these stories had previously appeared in print, but these came out in excellent magazines: Realpolitik in The Listener, Mother's Sense of Fun and Crazy Crowd in Cyril Connolly's Horizon. Such prestigious first appearances, coupled with the willingness of an important firm, Secker and Warburg, to bring out as part of a collection nine stories not previously published, is impressive testimony to the power of Wilson's late-flowering talent, and to the authority with which he was able to handle material drawn from the experiences, opinions and emotions of his earlier life. Since 1949 and his emergence fully-armed on the literary scene as a writer of short stories, Angus Wilson has become one of Britain's most important post-war novelists. In his entry in Who's Who Angus Wilson lists his recreations as gardening, travel, so revealing in the simplest form the sense of contrast on which his view of the world is based. The cultivation of a garden implies rootedness, or at least usually involves being settled in a particular place, and since the mid-1950s Wilson has lived in a small village in Suffolk, near Bury St. Edmunds. But he has also traveled

Casts fresh light on the formative years of one of the twentieth century’s most important literary figures Ernest Hemingway’s early adulthood (1917–1929) was marked by his work as a journalist, wartime service, marriage, conflicts with parents, expatriation, artistic struggle, and spectacular success. InWar + Ink, veteran and emerging Hemingway scholars, alongside experts in related fields, present pathbreaking research that provides important insights into this period of Hemingway’s life. Comprised of sixteen elegantly written essays, War + Ink revisits Hemingway’s formative experiences as a cub reporter in Kansas City. It establishes a fresh set of contexts for his Italian adventure in 1918 and his novels and short stories of the 1920s, offers some provocative reflections on his fiction and the issue of truth-telling in war literature, and reexamines his later career in terms of themes, issues, or places tied to his early life. The essays vary in methodology, theoretical assumptions, and scope; what they share is an eagerness to question—and to look beyond—truisms that have long prevailed in Hemingway scholarship. Highlights include historian Jennifer Keene’s persuasive analysis of Hemingway as a “typical doughboy,” Ellen Andrew Knodt’s unearthing of “Hemingwayesque” language spread throughout the correspondence penned by his World War I contemporaries, Susan Beegel’s account of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic and its previously unrecognized impact on the young Hemingway, Jennifer Haytock’s adroit analysis of “destructive spectatorship” inThe Sun Also Rises, Mark Cirino’s groundbreaking discussion of the instantaneous “life review” experienced by Hemingway’s dying characters (an intrusion of the speculative and the fantastic into fiction better known for its hard surfaces and harsh truths), and Matthew Nickel’s detailed interpretation of the significance of Kansas City in Across the River and Into the Trees. A trio of scholars—Celia Kingsbury, William Blazek, and Daryl Palmer—focus on “Soldier’s Home,” offering three very different readings of this quintessential narrative of an American soldier’s homecoming. Finally, Dan Clayton and Thomas G. Bowie reexamine Hemingway’s war stories in light of those told by today’s veterans. War + Ink offers a cross section of today’s Hemingway scholarship at its best—and reintroduces us to a young Hemingway we only thought we knew.

Cyrillic Cycles:

Wessex, Hardy and the Nature Novelists