Just to get the quid rolling, I'll guess John Barth in the Sot Weed Factor. Though I doubt that I'm right.

I don't know if he wrote prose, but it sounds a bit like Wallace Stevens to me.

Not John Barth or Wallace Stevens. Our mystery author is not a novelist or a poet.

Continuing the quotation:

His palate has become narcotized by the noxious weed, and he has lost, in a great measure, the delicate and enviable taste for fruits. This shows what expensive, useless, and injurious habits men will get into. I speak from experience. I have smoked until I trembled like an aspen leaf, the blood rushed to my head, and I had a palpitation of the heart which I thought was heart disease, till I was almost killed with fright. When I consulted my physician, he said, "break off tobacco using." I was not only injuring my health and spending a great deal of money, but I was setting a bad example. I obeyed his counsel. No young man in the world ever looked so beautiful, as he thought he did, behind a fifteen cent cigar or a meerschaum!

It is either David Foster Wallace (no obvious relation to Stevens)speaking of Hal Incandenza in Infinite Jest, which i think is not likely but it's the only literary instance of chaw-obsessions that springs to mind, or it is E.L. Doctorow's detective-dude in The Waterworks, or maybe is it just plain old Waterworks?

Or perhaps it's a letter from Philip Morris to his mom.

I am afraid that it is not David Foster Wallace, E.L. Doctorow, or Philip Morris. Our mystery author is indeed male, however, and I would hazard that everyone reading this knows his name.

My money's on Ben Franklin. It's got that early-to-bed, early-to-rise, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps feel to it.

Benjamin Franklin is incorrect, but is our closest guess so far. Another quotation, from the same book as the tobacco passages:

In the United States, where we have more land than people, it is not at all difficult for persons in good health to make money. In this comparatively new field there are so many avenues of success open, so many vocations which are not crowded, that any person of either sex who is willing, at least for the time being, to engage in any respectable occupation that offers, may find lucrative employment.
Those who really desire to attain an independence, have only to set their minds upon it, and adopt the proper means, as they do in regard to any other object which they wish to accomplish, and the thing is easily done. But however easy it may be found to make money, I have no doubt many of my hearers will agree it is the most difficult thing in the world to keep it.

That should fix it.

Hey, what's that rule on time elapsed between guesses? The new chick (ahem) can't find it anywhere.

Theodore Roosevelt?

robert benchley

side note: bt: i'm sending you an email with my digits. i'm stuck in the city for the weekend and would love to do something with you and the wife if avail. do call.

No rule this time around (other than not using search engines). If you've got a good guess, go ahead and make it. (One person making more than three guesses between my updates might be considered a little excessive, however.)

Also: not Theodore Roosevelt. Our author was never President of the United States.

Not Robert Benchley, either.

No rules on time elapsed on this quiz -- it's an anarchic free-for-all reflective of the ribald, sometimes destructively chaotic energy of the 19th C. American sociopolitical context in which we'll doubtless find the answer to Gavin's puzzler.

Or; go ahead and guess.

Also, is that Kathleen-in-Pomona?

Busted. Though this year it's Kathleen-in-New Orleans. About which more via other channels.

Next guess was going to have been Thomas Jefferson (the irony of the anti-tobacco screed was too fun to pass up, despite its unlikeliness), but the no-prez hint rid me of that one.

Next on the list would have been Mark Twain, but the no-novelist one got me there.

So I'll keep pondering.

Neither Mark Twain nor Thomas Jefferson. Bill correctly surmises nineteenth-century America.

Our mystery writer was a bestselling author.

I'll post another passage later on if nobody's guessed our man.

***crickets***

***silent puzzlement***

***crickets***

A quick recap of what we've learned today:
Our mystery author is a name known to everyone reading this. He was a nineteenth century American, and hence is now dead. He was not a novelist, a poet, or a president of the United States. He was a bestselling author.

He is not John Barth, Wallace Stevens, David Foster Wallace, E.L. Doctorow, Philip Morris, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Benchley, or Benjamin Franklin.

There is something to be learned even in a country store. We are apt to believe that sharp trades, especially dishonest tricks and unprincipled deceptions, are confined entirely to the city, and that the unsophisticated men and women of the country do every thing "on the square." I believe this to be measurably true, but know that there are many exceptions to this rule. Many is the time I cut open bundles of rags, brought to the store by country women in exchange for goods, and declared to be all linen and cotton, that contained quantities fo worthless woollen trash in the interior, and sometimes stones, gravel, ashes, etc.

thomas paine.

neither a novelist nor a poet be, my son, the real money is in pamphleteering!

Not Thomas Paine. Our mystery author lived for most of his life in Connecticut and New York.

I am confident that the reporters and editors who examined this animal were honestly persuaded that it was what it purported to be--a veritable mermaid. Nor is this to be wondered at, since, if it was a work of art, the monkey and fish were so nicely conjoined that no human eye could detect the point where the junction was formed. The spine of the fish proceeded in a straight and apparently unbroken line to the base of the skull--the hair of the animal was found growing several inches down on the shoulders of the fish, and the application of a microscope absolutely revealed what seemed to be minute fish scales lying in myriads among the hair. The teeth and formation of the fingers and hands differed materially from those of any monkey or orang-out-ang ever discovered, while the location of the fins was different from those of any species of the fish tribe known to naturalists. The animal was an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen, about three feet long. Its mouth was open, its tail turned over, and its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony.

Henry Thoreau?

Can anyone answer?

Not Henry Thoreau, and not, as our host Bill suggested over dinner, T. Herman Zweibel.
Our mystery author is not best remembered as a writer (although he wrote a book that sold over a million copies, no small beer in the nineteenth century). From the preface to his autobiography:

Those who peruse this volume will see that my career has been truly a checkered one. I have been a farmer's boy and a merchant, a clerk and a manager, a showman and a bank-president. I have been in jails and in palaces; have known poverty and abundance; have travelled over a large portion of two Continents; have encountered all varieties of men, have seen every phase of human character; and I have on several occasions been in imminent personal peril.

P. T. Barnum!

Rory has it: Phineas Taylor Barnum, proprietor of the American Museum, exhibitor of Tom Thumb, later circus impresario--and temperance man. The first three quotations were from his Art of Money Getting, while the following three were from his extremely entertaining autobiography The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself. The autobiography was lambasted at the time of its publication (1855) for showing insufficient remorse for Barnum's various humbugs (such as the Feejee Mermaid described above), but went on to sell over a million copies; Barnum tinkered with it for decades. (If this has whetted your appetite for Barnum's prose, the autobiography is extremely entertaining and has recently been reprinted in this edition.

Thanks for playing, everybody!

Woohoo! Yeah! Wa-hey! Yeeee-haaa!

Phew, almost let someone else get in first with that Thoreau guess. The mermaid should have given it to me right away.

Well played, everyone. Thanks, Gavin, for a memorable excursion.

Next week, I return to helming the Quiz, but we'll have more guest hosts in the near future.