Studies in American Fiction

In 1797, a recent Harvard graduate named Charles Prentiss published what might be the first collection of American short stories: The American Bee: A Collection of Entertaining Histories, Selected from Different Authors and Calculated for Amusement and Instruction. Taken together, the stories in The American Bee endorse an antiauthoritarian outlook promoting women’s self-determination, sexual and otherwise, and encouraging men to resist the tyranny that underlies patriarchal ideals. Two texts in this already radical collection, one with American authorship, celebrate decidedly queer bonds for both men and women. While a modern reader might expect that such a collection would not have had a mainstream literary readership, Prentiss specifically marketed the works he published to the friends he had made during his time at Harvard. He must have believed that the antiauthoritarian message of The American Bee would appeal to this network of educated, like-minded, elite young men scattered across New England and the mid-Atlantic. Surprisingly, The American Bee’s queer stories seem to have occupied the center, not the neglected margins, of New England literary culture as Prentiss imagined it.

Prentiss’s privileged family history is another reason a reader might be surprised to see antipatriarchal and queer themes featured in his work. He grew up in a New England family that had gained enough prominence for C. J. F Binney to write its biography in 1852.¹ His father was a minister, and his brother-in-law was a New Hampshire congressman. Charles graduated from Harvard in 1795 and that same year married Sophia Gardner of Leominster, herself a minister’s daughter from a well-connected family, and they settled there. Prentis turned down a career in law to pursue life as an author, editor, [End Page 1] and publisher of both literary and political works. He published The American Bee early in his career, in 1797, right after he and his brother stopped printing the Rural Repositor, of which, according to Binney, “about one hundred of his old college friends were subscribers, as he was a favorite with them.’”² Prentiss only remained in New England for a short time; in 1799, he moved to Georgetown, after which he worked in Baltimore until he left to tour Europe in 1804. After his return, he worked as a printer and author in Virginia, Maryland, DC, and Massachusetts. He died in 1820 at age forty-six.³

Turning down a legal career to become an itinerant printer was a risky choice that meant Prentiss traded stability and prestige for financial risk and social obscurity. Many printers faced bankruptcy after the Revolutionary War, and most magazines lasted for just a few years. Consequently, Prentiss must have had an excellent reason to take this chance; his decision testifies to his personal investment in literature, as he consciously worked to ensure that US belles lettres made space for women’s sexual self-determination and same-sex relationships as alternatives to heterosexual marriage.

While Prentiss’s family history has attracted scholarly attention, his literary productions have not. The American Bee is rarely read; it is never mentioned in histories of US fiction; and it is the subject of only one scholarly article.⁴ It is a surprisingly accessible text, since a transcription is available for free through the Evans Early American Imprints Text Creation Partnership, and the Evans Digital Edition and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online houses facsimile pages. Nonetheless, The American Bee has suffered the same neglect as nearly all of the short fiction published before 1820 and of the many compilations of stories published after that, even though “between 1820 and 1845, compilations containing huge amounts of short fiction formed twenty-nine percent of the literary market.”⁵ As Jared Gardner demonstrates, the emphasis on a unique American vernacular style has privileged individual genius and exceptional Americanness in a way that systematically detracts from the transatlantic tradition of the periodical and has led to the critical neglect of magazines and the short fiction that populates their pages.⁶ The American Bee certainly participates in this transatlantic exchange in a way that troubles a simple...