Bedouins: Mary Garden, Debussy, Chopin and More

James Gibbons Huneker was born in 1857 in Philadelphia. He began his life with a career in law, in order to please his parents. At 21, he abandoned the path, and fled to Paris to learn piano, with his pregnant girlfriend. He only spent a year there, and unhappily returned to Philadelphia with wife and child in tow. He continued to try and learn music, but he gave up his dreams of playing, and instead focused on writing about music and the arts. He ended up moving to New York, without his family, and immersing himself fully in the arts scene. He wrote primary for the New York Sun as an arts critic, but he also penned pieces for Harper’s, Theatre, and Scribner’s. Huneker’s tastes ranged greatly, and he was well-known for supporting new artists well before they became part of the canon, including Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Hardy, Anton Chekhov, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, George Bernard Shaw, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh, among numerous others. Huneker was well traveled in social circles, and his writings appreciated, but they did not pay a great deal. He died in 1921, of pneumonia.