The Autobiography of an Idea

The Autobiography of an Idea

By Louis H. Sullivan.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. I: The Child
   1. Folly Cove
4. II
5. III: And Then Came Spring!
6. IV: A Vacation
7. V: Newburyport
8. VI: Boston
9. VII: Boston
10. VIII: Louis Goeth on a Journey
11. IX: Boston—The English High School
12. X: Farewell to Boston
13. XI: Chicago
14. XII: Paris
15. XIII: The Garden City
16. XIV: Face to Face
17. XV: Retrospect
    1. Retrospect
18. Colophon
19. Uncopyright

Imprint

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I

The Child

Once upon a time there was a village in New England called South Reading. Here lived a little boy of five years. That is to say he nested with his grandparents on a miniature farm of twenty-four acres, a mile or so removed from the center of gravity and activity which was called Main Street. It was a main street of the day and generation, and so was the farm proper to its time and place.

Eagerly the grandparents had for some time urged that the child come to them for a while; and after a light shower of mother tears⁠—the father indifferent⁠—consent was given and the child was taken on his way into the wilderness lying ten miles north of the city of Boston. The farm had been but recently acquired, and the child appeared, shortly thereafter, as a greedy parasite, to absorb that affection, that abundant warmth of heart which only Grandma and Grandpa have the intuitive folly to bestow. In short they loved him, and kept him bodily clean.

To the neighbors, he was merely another brat-nuisance to run about and laugh and scream and fight and bawl with the others⁠—all bent on joy and destruction. The peculiar kink in this little man’s brain, however, was this: he had no desire to destroy⁠—except always his momentary mortal enemies. His bent was the other way.

Now lest it appear that this child had come suddenly out of nothing into being at the age of five, we must needs authenticate him by sketching his prior tumultuous life. He was born of woman in the usual way at 22 South Bennett Street, Boston, Mass., U.S.A., on the third day of September, 1856. And, for the benefit of the exigent and meticulous, it may be added, on the authority of the young mother, that the event occurred on the second floor: day Tuesday, hour 10 p.m., weight ten pounds. The mother, at that date, had arrived at the age of twenty-one years, while the father would be thirty-eight come Christmas.

The long interval of passing years has made it clear that this pink monstrosity came into the world possessed of a picture-memory. He remembers, even now, certain cradle indiscretions; and from that same cradle he recalls a dim vision of a ghostly lady in somber black, and veiled, entering through the open door and speaking in a voice strangely unlike the mellow tones of his nearby mother. He remembers that one night in midwinter, he was lifted from his warm cozy refuge, bundled up and taken to the third floor. Grandpa was already there, scraping the heavy frost from one of the small square window panes; finally, after the ecstasies of Mama and the awed tones of Grandpa, the child was lifted up and held close to the pane to see what?⁠—a long brilliant, cloud-like streak, which, he dimly fancied, must be unusual; but as it seemed to have no connection with the important concerns of his existence, he was glad to leave it to itself, whatever it was, and return to the warm spot from which he had been taken. This streak in the sky was Donati’s comet of 1858.

Before going further into the doings of this two-year-old, it may be well to give an outline of his mongrel origin.

As to his father, Patrick Sullivan, no need for discussion⁠—he was Irish. As to the mother, Andrienne List Sullivan, she seemed French, but was not wholly so. She had the typical eyelids, expressive hazel eyes, an oval face, features mobile. She was a medium stature, trimly built, highly emotional, and given to ecstasies of speech. But she also had parents: her father, Henri List, was straight German of the Hanoverian type⁠—six feet tall, well proportioned, erect carriage, and topped by a domical head, full, clean-shaven face, thick lips, small gray eyes, beetling brows and bottle-nose. He was of intellectual mold, and cynically amused at men, women, children and all else. Her mother, a miniature woman of great sweetness and gentle poise, was Swiss-French, born in Geneva⁠—where also her three children were born. But her long Florentine nose suggested, unmistakably, an Italian strain. Her maiden name was Anna Mattheus. Like a true mère de famille, she ruled the roost,