August First

August First is a short novel or novella by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, the American writer who lived from 1860 to 1936 and who produced substantial popular fiction for American magazines and book publishers across a long working career. Andrews was a regular contributor to Scribner’s Magazine and various other major American monthlies and produced several substantial popular successes alongside the substantial body of her shorter magazine work.

Andrews’s best known work was The Perfect Tribute of 1906, the short story or novella that imagines a young Confederate soldier’s encounter with President Abraham Lincoln on a train shortly after the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s recitation of the address to the soldier. The story was enormously popular and was widely reprinted, becoming one of the most successful pieces of American Lincoln fiction of the early twentieth century. It was eventually adapted into a film in 1935.

August First takes a different historical setting, with the title referring to August 1, the date of various historical events that the story could draw on. The most likely reference in early twentieth century American writing is to August 1, 1914, the date on which Germany declared war on Russia and effectively initiated the broader First World War in Europe. American writers in the years during and just after the war produced substantial fiction set around the August 1914 outbreak of the war, often dealing with American characters in Europe at the moment when the war began and with the substantial dislocations that the war produced for everyone caught in continental Europe at the moment of the outbreak.

Andrews characteristically combined romantic and dramatic plot material with substantial moral and historical reflection in her fiction. The August First novella likely uses a particular dramatic situation set on or around the date of the title to explore broader themes about war, civilian experience, personal commitment, and the substantial moral questions that the war years raised for American readers.

The book is of interest now to readers of early twentieth century American popular magazine fiction and to historians of the American literary response to the First World War. It pairs naturally with The Perfect Tribute and with the substantial broader American war fiction of the period including Edith Wharton’s wartime writings.