Charles Finger

Charles Joseph Finger (December 25, 1869 – January 7, 1941) was a British born American writer. He also directed an orchestra and taught piano.

Biography

Finger was born in Willesden, England, and educated at King's College London. He had a strong literary and musical formation, and was quite active in the Fabian movement. Finger was a keen disciple of Walt Whitman. As a youth and young man he reveled in the homosociality of the Regent Street Polytechnic created by Quintin Hogg, and as a bisexual, throughout his life he sought to create communities of like-minded readers. Intrinsic to his literary accomplishments were his future life in South America and Texas, and his love of men.^[1] At age 20 he began to travel extensively, visiting first Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, where he worked as gold seeker, guide, and cook for the first sheep farming stations, in the period of Selknam genocide. He moved to New York and London, thereafter, and to a number of cities in Texas. He worked as an accountant and musician, eventually settling in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he began to concentrate on writing.^[2][3]

In 1902, Finger married Eleanor (Nellie) Ferguson, daughter of a sheep rancher, with whom he would have five children.

He became the acting editor of the Reedy's Mirror after William Marion Reedy's death in 1920.^[4]

Finger won the 1925 Newbery Medal for the book Tales from Silver Lands (1924), a collection of stories from Central and South America. Some of his other works are Bushrangers (1924), Tales Worth Telling (1927), Courageous Companions (1929), and A Dog at His Heel (1936). His autobiography is Seven Horizons (1930).

Finger was an accomplished musician. He directed the San Angelo Conservatory of Music in Texas, from 1898 to 1904.^[5] One of his piano students in San Angelo was David Wendel Guion, who achieved notability for arranging and popularizing the ballad "Home on the Range".

Finger, whose daughter Helen Finger was a lithographer, took special pains to promote the work of Arkansas painter and lithographer James Duard Marshall.^[6] Helen Finger and James Duard Marshall had worked together teaching adult art classes in Fayetteville, Arkansas, under the Federal Emergency Relief Act.^[7]

The epitaph on Finger's gravestone is "This voyage done, set sail and steer once more To further landfall on some nobler shore." He is buried in the Farmington, Arkansas cemetery.

Literary works

Source:^[8]

References

Bibliography

• Finger, C. J. (Ed.). (1923). Sailor Chanties and Cowboy Songs. Girard: E. Haldeman-Julius.
• Finger, C. J. (1927). Frontier ballads. Songs from lawless lands. Heard and gathered by Charles J. Finger. Woodcuts by Paul Honore. London: William Heinemann.
• Finger, C. J. (1936, Aug. 1). Forty Years in Patagonia. The Saturday Review, 7.
• Harambour, A. (2017). “Ficción, verdad, mentira. Breve historia de una canción de Navidad y boxeo en Tierra del Fuego y el fin del mundo (fines del siglo XIX)”, Magallania 45: 2, pp. 55–66. https://goo.gl/uPRmuJ

External links

• Works by Charles Finger at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Charles Finger at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by Charles Finger at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by or about Charles Finger at Internet Archive
• Charles Finger at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Charles Joseph Finger at Library of Congress, with 75 library catalog records
• Helen Finger (daughter) at LC Authorities, with 4 records, and at WorldCat
• Charles Finger Typescript and Letters at Dartmouth College Library