A handkerchief narrates its own life — from the flax field in Picardy, through a Paris workroom where a girl embroiders it into a fortune, to New York, where it is bought by people who need to be seen with it. Cooper was thrown out of Yale for a prank with gunpowder and wrote his first novel on a bet with his wife; this 1843 satire on American snobbery is the strangest thing in his shelf, and it is very sharp about money. Sixty plates by painters including Daumier and Caillebotte follow the same passage from field to parlor, from harvest and meadow to theater and carriage, the rural labor and city leisure that turn a scrap of linen into a social weapon.
Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief : A Satire of New York Fashion
Écrit par James Fenimore Cooper
