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“One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.”
This poem by Omar Khayyam appears on the title page of the novel One Thing is Certain by Sophie Kerr. Though she is more renowned for her magazine articles and both long and short works of fiction, Kerr dabbled in poetry herself. This April seemed to be a perfect time to pull her story from the masses as not only is it National Poetry Month, but her life story is also intertwined with the feelings that early Spring invokes, having grown up on a large plant nursery in Denton. Kerr’s prose would eventually make her one of the most famous fruits of Caroline County.
Sophie Kerr was born to Amanda Sisk Kerr and Jonathan Kerr on August 23rd, 1880. Her father was a transplant from Pennsylvania who moved to Denton in 1867 after his service to the Union during the Civil War. An avid horticulturist, reader, and writer, Jonathan Kerr was known for conducting research at his nursery that attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He wrote about his experiments in various publications (some horticulture-related, some not). One of the more interesting examples of this was a piece he submitted to the Baltimore Sun describing how he forced bees to sting him on certain areas of his body, claiming the stings alleviated the effects of rheumatism. Despite his slight unusualness, he was known as an expert in his field, and Kerr adored her father. She once said he wrote poetry when he was a young man as well!
The aforementioned nursery, which at one time hosted over 200 species of plum trees, was located on the corner of 5th Avenue and Kerr. A sign marks the current-day structure, though the land at the time of Kerr’s life expanded through most of that section of town through to Second Street. So next time you’re eating a hotdog at the Denton Lions Club little league fields, just know you could be in the very spot where Sophie and her older sister picked those thousands of plums, played, held picnics, or read books underneath the shade.
Kerr graduated from Denton High School in 1895. From there she went to Hood College in Frederick for her Bachelor’s degree, then the University of Vermont for her Master’s. In between, she began submitting samples of her writing to the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, who hired her to write music criticism, book reviews, and “all sorts of odds and ends”, as she once put it.
In 1904, Kerr married a Pittsburgh businessman, John DeLoss Underwood, under the trees at her childhood home surrounded only by close family and friends. The marriage only lasted 4 years before the couple separated in 1908. Interestingly, Kerr continued to go by “Mrs. Underwood” socially, while publishing under her maiden name, Sophie Kerr. I’m sure as the rest of this story unfolds, her complicated relationship with relationships will become even more apparent.
Kerr continued to work her way up in the writing and publishing world, eventually moving to New York City in 1920, where she would reside for the rest of her life. There she eventually became the managing editor of The Woman's Home Companion, an extremely successful women’s magazine. She continued to write her own novels and short stories, as well as writing for other publications like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Saturday Review of Literature. By the end of her life, Kerr had produced over 500 short stories, 23 novels, a Broadway play, various poems, and an insurmountable number of magazine and newspaper articles. Not to mention her letters, which are just as well-written as any of her other works of art.
Women are at the heart of Kerr’s works. She spent her life wrestling with the complexities of women’s personalities and the limitations placed upon them by society – and men. She was famous for her intolerance of men’s critiques of women, and for her healthy amount of candor on the subject. In a piece in the Sunday American Times titled “Women Hate to be Told”, Kerr is quoted as saying “The male sex’s advisory behavior towards all females riles my soul.” In another 1932 newspaper article, reporter Lillian Glenn wrote of Kerr’s response to the proposition that American wives are ‘extravagant’: “Today’s Easter Parade of Feminine Finery Directly Traceable to the Men, says American Novelist, for in Most Cases the Lovely Lady is Catering to the High Standards and Tastes of American Husbands.”
The Baltimore City Newspaper describes Kerr’s work like this, “Kerr wrote stories about plucky heroines, young women who rose to the challenge and went for the gusto. They had big dreams and lots of charm and tons of blond curls. For the most part, they were smart and unassuming and hopelessly, wonderfully, kind, but they had ambition. Even her seemingly vapid heroines had hearts of gold and wills of iron hidden under all their finery.”
One Thing is Certain, which she published in 1922, perfectly encapsulates both Kerr’s examination of the impossible positions women were placed in, and the lifelong love-hate relationship she seemed to have with the Eastern Shore. In this particular novel, a Denton girl is forced to marry an old deacon, but she soon takes a lover and is branded an adultress. Kerr once again explored the unforgiving religious sentiments of her hometown in her 1929 novel Mareea-Maria. Alternatively, stories like “The Bees” paint a positive picture of country folk weaving through farms and gardens, and she fondly mentioned the food of her youth in both recipes for women’s magazines and within her stories, delicacies like sweet corn soup, spiced cantaloupe, hot potato biscuit, and oyster salad. This excerpt from a letter to a biographer in 1918 might do her thoughts on the Shore more justice than assuming her feelings from her books, “I was born near Denton, Maryland…It is a narrow-minded, kind-hearted, conventional, self-respecting community.”
Kerr would visit on occasion to see her childhood home and friends. Sometimes she spoke to groups like the Rotary Club. In 1934 she received an honorary doctorate degree in literature from Vermont University, and in 1942 she received another honorary PhD, this time along with Eleanor Roosevelt at Washington College in Chestertown. After a heart attack took her life in February of 1965, she left her fortune of over $500,000 to Washington College to further literary studies and provide a cash prize for promising writers or poets. That gift has now grown into the country’s largest undergraduate literary prize, bigger than the Pulitzer or National Book Award.
One of my favorite quotes of Kerr’s does not come from a poem or short story, though. In 1946 she gave an interview in which she was asked how she does it all, between being a writer, editor, member of the Writer’s Board, the Council of Food and Wine Society, and the Board of Governors of the Women’s National Republican Club, as well as finding time for her hobbies like reading, attending plays or concerts, volunteering, and writing letters. “Whatever I’ve done has been helped by the fact that I never look back or bemoan a mistake,” she said, “People don’t notice your mistakes anyway. They’re interested in themselves and don’t care what you do as long as you don’t interfere with them. When a thing is done, let it go, get the lesson out of it, and go on to something else…I also save myself a lot of wear and tear by not arguing. Arguing seems to me a kind of expansion of egotism, so when people begin to argue, I just think about something else.” Despite saying elsewhere in that interview that she doesn’t give advice, I’m choosing to take this as such, one Denton-raised writer to another.
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Her black cat’s name was Thomas Hardy – because he is a tom cat and she got him from a hardware store.
Sophie Kerr was born in Denton in 1880. She received national recognition for her 23 novels, over 500 short stories, and many other writings.
The Sophie Kerr home, built in 1860, still stands on 5th Avenue.
This painting of Kerr hangs in the Sophie Kerr room at Washington College’s Miller Library. The literary prize given to a Washington College student each year in her honor now totals around $70,000.
