Fiction · 1858
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
At a Boston boardinghouse breakfast table, an unnamed talker — the self-styled Autocrat — holds forth each morning on whatever occurs to him: aging, poetry, science, vanity, the boardinghouse's own cast of characters, including a shy schoolmistress he is plainly courting across the table by the book's end. The other boarders interrupt, argue, and occasionally get the better of him, but the floor is always his to reclaim.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote the Autocrat monologues for the first issues of the Atlantic Monthly, which he helped name, in 1857 and 1858, then collected them as a book the same year. Their success led him to write two further volumes in the same form, The Professor at the Breakfast Table and The Poet at the Breakfast Table.
Bibliomancer restores the 1858 text exactly as Holmes wrote it.
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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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