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mods: For the pleasure of his company an affair of the misty city, thrice told Stoddard, Charles Warren 1843-1909 creator author. Looby, Christopher editor, writer of introduction. text bibliography Fictional autobiographies. Gay fiction. Romance fiction. Fiction. Autobiographical fiction. Gay fiction. Romance fiction. pau 2023 monographic eng print 254 pages ; 23 cm. "Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909) was, during his life, very well known as a prolific writer in multiple genres: poetry, travel sketches, personal memoir, and conversion narrative. His most popular works were dispatches primarily from the South Sea Islands but also extending into Palestine, Egypt, and what would become known as Hawai'i, most of which were published in the San Francisco Chronicle and then collected into books. For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City, Thrice Told (1903) is Stoddard's only novel. This new edition, as with other works in Penn Press's series Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century, returns and reframes an important queer literary text to print. Set mostly in and around San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, the novel features a protagonist, Paul Clitheroe, who is an aspiring writer living among the Bohemian artistic circles of that place and time-the same circles Stoddard himself inhabited. The novel is both formally experimental and largely autobiographical. Thus Paul comes into contact, as Stoddard did, with other writers, artists, actors, directors, priests, adventurers, and many others as he attempts to begin his career. Bohemian artistic life and erotic experimentation go hand in hand here: Paul has multiple relationships with other men even as he writes a novel that features similar liaisons. At the very end of the story, while on a cruise in the Pacific, Paul impulsively leaves his ship and disappears in a canoe with some young Hawai'ian men. This parallels Stoddard's life too: he spent many long periods of his life in Hawai'i, where he fo…