Holiday

Holiday (1928), a play by Philip Barry. [ Plymouth Theatre, 230 perf.] Having made a small fortune while still a young man, Johnny Case (Ben Smith) decides to use his wealth to live a carefree, easy life. As he tells his prospective sister‐in‐law, Linda Seton (Hope Williams), “I just want to save part of my life for myself. There's a catch, though. It's got to be part of the young part.” He can work again later, if need be. This philosophy sits well with Linda, but not with Johnny's fiancée, Julia Seton (Dorothy Tree), nor with her father. So when Johnny goes off to put his ideas into action, it is Linda, not Julia, who follows him. While critics saw this play as everything from an intellectual defense of the hedonism of the 1920s to an Edith Whartonish satire on society, Barry's modern editor, Brendan Gill, viewed it as “an embodiment of Barry's continued preoccupation with the relations between outsiders and insiders,” noting that at the time of this Arthur Hopkins production, Barry was a newly rich young man, watching with fascination from outside the curious games of society insiders. The comedy was turned into the short‐lived Broadway musical Happy New Year (1980) using Cole Porter songs.

Katherine Anne Porter
1960

"Holiday" by Katherine Anne Porter originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in December 1960 but received more attention when it was included in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter in 1965. The story, however, had much earlier origins; Porter first wrote "Holiday" in the early 1920s, based on a personal experience she had had several years earlier. Unsatisfied with the story, she set it aside and did not rediscover it until 1960, when she enlisted a friend to help her organize her personal papers. As she wrote in her introduction to The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, "the story haunted me for years and I made three separate versions, with a certain spot in all three where the thing went off track. So I put it away and I forgot it. It rose from one of my boxes of papers, after a quarter of a century, and I saw at once that the first [version] was the right one." After a few minor changes, she sent it to the Atlantic Monthly. She won an O. Henry prize for the story in 1962.

"Holiday" tells the tale of a young woman who, seeking to escape her troubles, takes a holiday to a rural Texas farm owned by a very traditional German family. The story centers on her relationship with the family's deformed and crippled servant girl. Later she discovers the girl is actually the eldest daughter of the family, though she is virtually a slave in the household. The main character's fascination and identification with this girl allows Porter to explore themes of alienation, isolation, and the complete sacrifice of an individual for the good of the greater community (in this case, the family). Like much of Porter's work, the story is drawn from her own experiences, and many critics believe that the main character (whose name the reader never learns) is Porter herself, describing her own alienation as a woman artist in a patriarchal society.