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About the archive

Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954), writing under the pseudonym of Onoto Watanna, was the first person of Asian descent to publish a novel in the U.S. (Miss Numè of Japan, 1898; available in a reprint edition edited by Eve Oishi [Johns Hopkins UP, 1999]). Perhaps more significantly, she was the first Asian American to reach a national mainstream reading audience: between 1898 and 1925, she published over a dozen novels, most of them with Harper and Brothers, and dozens of short stories and non-fiction pieces, which appeared in mass-market periodicals such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, Century Magazine, and Harper’s Monthly. Her second novel, A Japanese Nightingale (1901; available in a reprint edition edited by Jean Lee Cole and Maureen Honey [Rutgers UP, 2002]), sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was adapted for both Broadway and film. According to the testimony of surviving family members and Winnifred Eaton herself, the number of her periodical publications may have neared or surpassed a hundred works. However, scholars until now have only located twenty short stories and about a dozen non-fiction pieces; a number of these have been recently anthologized in The Half-Caste and Other Writings (2003), edited by Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney.

None of the texts collected here appear in The Half-Caste and Other Writings or in any other anthology that includes Eaton's works. They thus greatly expand the known output of this important early figure in Asian American literature. The archive includes short stories, short fiction pieces, and complete novels, all of which appear in popular magazines of the period including American Home Journal (later renamed Conkey's Home Journal), The Smart Set, Metropolitan Magazine, Red Book Magazine, and Blue Book.

Online publication was chosen for these texts in large part because their sheer volume made print publication impractical. Also, it is anticipated that new works by Eaton will continue to surface, and an online archive can easily accommodate additional texts. (Please contact the editor, Jean Lee Cole, if you have any information about other Eaton texts!) With the assistance of Alex Montali and Gen Rafferty, xeroxes of the original texts were scanned, digitized, and edited; the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia provided XML coding and site services. The texts are also available through the ETC's online English-language collections, at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/.

Texts have been edited to modernize spelling and to standardize punctuation. Grammatical and typographical errors have been silently corrected; other editorial changes have been noted in the text. See the bibliographical headers for each story for additional information.

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