A War Experience and Other Stories by F.A. Becher.

An urecorded mysery…

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Apparently the first and only edition, A War Experience and Other Stories was published in Boston in 1898 by the Writer Publishing Company, the firm behind The Writer, a monthly magazine founded in 1887 by William Henry Hills “to interest and help all literary workers.” (See also Hills’s similar magazine, The Author).

Issued in 1898, this slim volume includes four stories: A War Experience, Love vs. Pride, The Telltale Letter (set in Boston), and A Coquette’s Punishment. The identity of F. A. Becher, whether man or woman and perhaps a pseudonym, remains unknown, and the literary merit of the stories remains an open question.

The title story follows Oberst von N— during the Franco-Prussian War, as he protects a Frenchwoman during a siege, later learning she is the wife of a French officer he had fought. Years later, her son, Armand de B—, sends a letter of gratitude, completing a tale of wartime mercy. In A Coquette’s Punishment, a young woman spurns a Yale graduate at a summer resort identified as “O_______” (likely Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard); he commits suicide, and, thereafter, the remorseful coquette forever mourns.

The work is unrecorded in OCLC and the Library of Congress, and no contemporary commentary or documentation has surfaced to shed further light on its origins or reception.

Price: $125.00