Showing results for "A-Rod" in Short Stories

"Aldrig hade någon sprungit så fort nerför trapporna i det höga huset, två steg i taget vinglar J.P. i en hastighet som med säkerhet kommer få katastrofala följder. Med ena handen på ledstången och den andra mot väggen springer han för livet, med koncentrerad blick och rusande puls. I alltför hög fart tar han trappa efter trappa. Men J.P. bryr sig inte om han står eller faller, varje sekund är dyrbar när det redan gått för lång tid. När det som väntar honom på gården är långt mycket värre än vad alltför dålig balans i ett trapphus kan orsaka.

A man sits at his hearth as thunder shakes the mountains. Then—a knock. A stranger steps in, soaked and shivering, armed not with warmth or need, but with polished copper and an urgent offer. He doesn't sell comfort. He sells protection—against the very sky. The Lightning-Rod Man is Herman Melville at his most compact and cunning. This sharply drawn tale uses one room, one storm, and two voices to stage a quiet war between reason and fear, independence and submission, belief and the glittering promise of safety. It's a sales pitch wrapped in a sermon, disguised as a fable.

Herman Melville's deliciously hilarious tale of the day a door-to-door lightning-rod salesman called upon him.

Chosen for inclusion in William Evans Burton's Cyclopediae of Wit and Humor of 1857, The Lightning-Rod Man was the one Melville tale to be available throughout his lifetime, thanks to reissues of this volume. More a parable than a character-driven story, the Lightning-Rod man is a charlatan who tries to profit by selling fearful people lightning-rods during thunderstorms. The narrator has a difficult encounter with the Lightning-Rod man in this story about overcoming fear and superstition.

After spending the summer of 1853 in the Berkshire Mountains, where he supposedly had a real life encounter with a lightning-rod salesman, Melville published "The Lightning-Rod Man". At the end of this short story, the lightning-rod salesman is exposed for the fraud that he is. However, that will not keep his successors from fanning out to the Middle West, where lightning storms abound and farmers are gullible.