Biltmore Oswald

Description

Subtitled the Diary of a Hapless Recruit, Biltmore Oswald by J. Thorne Smith Jr. is about a young man and his life as a navy recruit as he himself sees his career and his adventures.

The diary is funny from beginning to end. It comprises several different stories, all of them featuring Oswald as he gets into trouble and then gets out of it in a way that is sometimes mysterious even for himself. The stories are written in the funny style that made Smith so popular and it includes lots of supernatural elements as well, such as the story featuring a mermaid and completely out of place in a diary, already foreshadowing the author’s interest in the genre that brought him real fame: comic fantasy.

The period when the recruit’s adventures take place is World War I, but the ongoing war does not seem to make the stories gloomier, it serves only as a background. The character of Oswald is irresistibly charming, sometimes naïve, most of the time hapless indeed, but resourceful and somehow saving himself from even the most embarrassing, compromising or dangerous situation.

The stories in Biltmore Oswald were initially written and published in series in The Broadside, a journal for Naval Reservists while the author himself was in the Navy as well. The diary entries were assembled into book form in 1918, being actually the first book in the line of many hilarious, entertaining and very exciting books published by Smith. The diary enjoyed tremendous success as a series as well as in book form, prompting the author to use the character in his following book entitled Out O’ Luck: Biltmore Oswald Very Much at Sea, a sequel that features Oswald and his adventures on a ship out at sea, trying to survive hardships and faced with all sorts of funny situations.
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