Hot Corn
Book cover of first edition
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| Author | Solon Robinson |
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| Illustrator | John McLenan, (engraver Nathaniel Orr) |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | DeWitt and Davenport (New York) |
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Publication date
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1854 |
| Pages | 408 |
Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated is a collection of short stories by Solon Robinson about the life of the poor in New York City, and was a "runaway bestseller" when first published in the United States in early 1854. Along with songs and plays based on the book's stories, which were first published in the New York Tribune, Hot Corn enjoyed a brief frenzy of popularity.
The book is a collection of stories set in New York City's impoverished Five Points neighborhood, and first appeared in the New York Tribune in 1853.
One of stories was that of Little Katy, a hot corn seller on the street, who is beaten to death by her alcoholic mother who needs Katy's income to support her drinking, after Katy's corn supply is stolen.
Though it garnered some positive press for promoting morality, especially in religious newspapers (for example, the Christian Secretary of Hartford, Connecticut said "The Hot Corn stories are eloquent appeals in favor of temperance and virtue"), the book (and stage adaptations) were also the subject of much scorn by critics. The New York Herald faulted the book for "giving minute descriptions of life in fashionable houses of ill-fame, and entering into the details of seduction, licentiousness and debauchery, with a gusto, ill concealed by the pretence of morality." The Southern Literary Messenger excoriated the book, proclaiming that "to say that the man who deliberately writes and prints such perilous and damnable stuff deserves a place in the penitentiary, is feebly to express our notion of the enormity of his offence."
Author Henry James wrote in his autobiography he was prevented from reading Hot Corn as a child; a copy was given to his father with the admonishment that it wasn't proper for children to read. James wrote that "so great became from that moment the mystery of the tabooed book, of whatever identity; the question, in my breast, of why, if it was to be so right for others, it was only to be wrong for me..... Neither then nor afterwards was the secret of "Hot Corn" revealed to me ..."Henry Wadsworth Longfellow took his sons to see one of the plays in April 1854 and called it "wretched stuff."
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Wikipedia