James Branch Cabell Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
James Branch Cabell was born on April 14, 1879, in Richmond, Virginia, into a prominent and historically minded family. His father, Robert Gamble Cabell Jr., and his mother, Anne Harris Branch, belonged to old Virginia lineages whose genealogies fascinated their son from a young age. Cabell attended the College of William and Mary, where he absorbed classical languages, French literature, and the ironies of history that would later permeate his fiction. He graduated in 1898 with a sensibility already divided between scholarly inquiry and urbane wit, a duality that became the signature tension of his work.

Apprenticeship in Journalism
After college, Cabell gained practical training in the newsroom. He worked as a reporter for the New York Herald and for newspapers in Richmond. The short deadlines and compressed storytelling of journalism sharpened his prose, while the city desk exposed him to human foibles and institutional absurdities that he would recast, with a sly smile, in his later romances and satires. The experience also acquainted him with editors and publishers who became crucial allies as he moved into book-length fiction.

Building a Literary Voice
Cabell began publishing novels and stories in the first decade of the twentieth century, including The Eagle's Shadow (1904) and The Cords of Vanity (1909). These early works show his evolution from social comedy to a more metaphysical and parabolic mode. He combined a polished, deliberately courtly diction with an ironic undercurrent that questioned the pretensions of love, honor, and success. The balance of charm and skepticism, along with a taste for genealogical puzzles, pointed toward the ambitious, interlinked project that would define his career.

The Biography of the Life of Manuel
Cabell's central achievement is the multi-volume cycle he called the Biography of the Life of Manuel, a mosaic of novels, tales, and essays bound together by recurring characters, motifs, and a playful architecture of cross-references. At its heart stands Dom Manuel the Redeemer, a legendary figure whose imagined descendants and chroniclers inhabit Poictesme, a fictional province suggestive of medieval France. Through titles such as Domnei (1913), The Cream of the Jest (1917), Jurgen (1919), Figures of Earth (1921), The High Place (1923), The Silver Stallion (1926), and Something About Eve (1927), Cabell staged a long debate about illusion and reality, desire and disenchantment, and the stories societies tell in order to live.

The cycle was not a serial in the ordinary sense; each book could stand alone, yet every one quietly reordered the reader's understanding of the whole. Cabell delighted in meta-fictional devices: mock-scholarly footnotes, invented sources, and genealogies that braided the works together. In the late 1920s he supervised the Storisende Edition (1927, 1930), an authoritative arrangement of the series by Robert M. McBride and Company, with Cabell's own prefaces and notes clarifying the grand design.

Jurgen and the Fight over Censorship
Jurgen (1919), the book that made Cabell nationally known, also drew him into a landmark battle over literary censorship. The novel's urbane treatment of erotic themes, cloaked in medieval fantasy and double entendre, offended the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, led by John S. Sumner. In 1920 the society seized the book and initiated an obscenity case against Cabell's publisher, Robert M. McBride. The legal struggle lasted until 1922, when the courts cleared Jurgen. The controversy galvanized defenders of literary freedom and helped expand the space in which American writers could address adult themes without resorting to euphemism or moralistic closure.

Friends, Collaborators, and Publishers
Cabell worked closely with Robert M. McBride, whose house issued many of his books and backed him through the Jurgen case. His fiction was often illustrated by Frank C. Pape, whose elegant, wry drawings mirrored the texts' mixture of romance and disillusion. H. L. Mencken, the influential critic and editor, championed Cabell's work in essays and reviews, praising the precision of his style and the independence of his mind. In Richmond, Cabell moved in a literary milieu that included the novelist Ellen Glasgow, with whom he shared a regional background and a cosmopolitan skepticism, and the historian-editor Douglas Southall Freeman, a figure of the city's intellectual life. The debates and friendships of this circle sustained Cabell through the peaks and troughs of his public reputation.

Later Work and Changing Tastes
Cabell remained productive through the 1930s and 1940s, refining and extending the Manuel cycle and publishing essays that reflected on craft, tradition, and the uses of make-believe. As American literary taste shifted toward social realism during the Depression and the wartime years, the market for his courtly satires narrowed; yet he persisted in the idiosyncratic register he had made his own, continuing to revise earlier texts and to assemble the cycle with a curator's tact. He also pursued family and regional history with the same exactitude he brought to his invented genealogies, bridging the worlds of fact and fable.

Personal Life
Cabell married Priscilla Bradley Shepherd in 1913. Their home in Richmond became both a workplace and a salon, a setting where publishing plans mingled with talk about books, music, and the city's history. After Priscilla's death in 1949, Cabell married Margaret Waller Freeman in 1950, a union that renewed his domestic stability in his later years. He remained deeply attached to Richmond throughout his life, preferring its familiar streets and archives to the more theatrical stages of Manhattan or Europe. Cabell died in Richmond on May 5, 1958.

Legacy
James Branch Cabell occupies a distinct niche in American letters: a craftsman of impeccable sentences and a builder of a vast fictional architecture that satirizes heroism while preserving the pleasures of romance. His work anticipated the sophisticated, adult-oriented fantasy that would later flourish, yet it is equally an artifact of the 1920s, with their blend of skepticism and style. The Jurgen case made him a symbol in the fight against censorship; the Storisende Edition made him a strategist of his own canon. In Richmond, his name endures most visibly at Virginia Commonwealth University, whose main library honors him and houses materials related to his career. Scholars continue to trace the intricate pathways of the Biography of the Life of Manuel, while readers discover in Cabell an author who laughed at illusion even as he conjured it, and who turned a local allegiance into a universal art.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by James, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Poetry - Legacy & Remembrance - Optimism.

Other people realated to James: George Jean Nathan (Editor)