ABSTRACT
Clarence Day was born in 1874, Day grew up the eldest of his siblings in a New York City household dominated by his assertive father, Clarence Day, Sr., and by his mother, the former Lavinia Stockwell. Day married Katherine Briggs Dodge in 1928, and they resided in New York for the duration of his life, first in an elaborate Riverside Drive apartment and, after the Wall Street crash of 1929, in less distinguished quarters. Day's writing career spanned from 1920 until his death in 1935. Responding to the same influences affecting the young T. S. Eliot and Sherwood Anderson, among others, Day wrote in his 1917 introduction to W. S. Gilbert's Mikado that keeping up the human spirit is "the problem of the age". Day admired Gilbert's characters for accepting their disastrous fates with "aplomb and a wise savoir vivre". In his own writings these traits are ultimately the most outstanding.
