Other Literary Forms
While Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s current reputation rests almost exclusively on her numerous collections of short stories for adults, her thirty-nine published works also include poems and stories for children, novels, and a play, Giles Corey, Yeoman (1893), a historical tragedy which, in part, dramatizes her ancestors’ involvement in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Some forty stories, together with a handful of articles, magazine verse, and other fugitive pieces, remain uncollected.
Achievements
In August, 1890, Critic magazine conducted a public opinion poll to establish “Twenty writers whom our readers deem truest representative of what is best in cultivated American womanhood.” Mary E. Freeman was included among the twenty, along with Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Rose Terry Cooke. Seven years later the same periodical conducted another poll to determine the twelve best American short stories. The winning list included Freeman’s “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” and the second best list included “A Humble Romance.” In still another display of public favor, the New York Herald‘s 1908 “Anglo-American Competition” awarded Freeman five thousand dollars for The Shoulders of Atlas (1908). Perhaps the two most significant recognitions of her literary accomplishments were awarded in 1926: Freeman became one of the first four women to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and she won the William Dean Howells Gold Medal for Fiction awarded by the American Academy of Letters.
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