George Hamlin Fitch (1852-1925) was the San Francisco Chronicle’s literary critic and book reviewer from 1880 until his retirement in 1915. On 9 October 1910, his weekly Sunday column took on a far more serious subject than usual:
For the thirty years that I have spoken weekly to many hundreds of readers of The San Francisco Chronicle through its book review columns, it has been my constant aim to preach the doctrine of the importance of cultivating the habit of reading good books, as the chief resource in time of trouble or sickness … But it never occurred to me that this habit would finally come to mean the only thing that makes life worth living.
Fitch goes on to describe the death of his only son, Harold:
Cut off as I have been from domestic life, without a home for over fifteen years, my relations with my son Harold were not those of the stern parent and the timid son. Rather it was the relation of elder brother and younger brother.
Hence, when only ten days ago this close and tender association of many years was broken by death—swift and wholly unexpected, as a bolt from cloudless skies—it seemed to me for a few hours as if the keystone of the arch of my life had fallen and everything lay heaped in ugly ruin. I had waited for him on that Friday afternoon [30 September 1910] until six o’clock. Friday is my day off, my one holiday in a week of hard work, when my son always dined with me and then accompanied me to the theater or other entertainment. When he did not appear at six I left a note saying I had gone to our usual restaurant. That dinner I ate alone. When I returned in an hour it was to be met with the news that Harold lay cold in death at the very time I wrote the note that his eyes would never see.
You know not how much time you have, says Fitch. Use it well! Read the best books history has to offer.
And so, in this roundabout way, I come back to my library shelves, to urge upon you who now are wrapped warm in domestic life and love to provide against the time when you may be cut off in a day from the companionship that makes life precious. Take heed and guard against the hour that may find you forlorn and unprotected against death’s malignant hand. Cultivate the great worthies of literature, even if this means neglect of the latest magazine or of the newest sensational romance. Be content to confess ignorance of the ephemeral books that will be forgotten in a single half year, so that you may spend your leisure hours in genial converse with the great writers of all time.
In his article, Fitch does not mention how Harold died, but death and burial records make it clear that Harold Fitch died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The shock of his son’s death was bad enough, but having also to process his suicide, presumably without being willing to confide in anyone about it, must have been a struggle for the rest of George Fitch’s life.
In the weeks following Fitch’s article in the Chronicle, many readers asked him to list the great books that had proved so comforting to him in his sorrow. Fitch did so in his Sunday columns over the following weeks. In 1911, he gathered them together and published them under the headline of his original article, Comfort Found in Good Old Books. It proved a good seller for Paul Elder and was reprinted several times.
There is another aspect of the book worth highlighting. The New York Times reviewer, while noting that Fitch “is the best known and most highly esteemed [western] critic of current literature” and that the book would also serve “as a signpost out of the surging mass of current ephemeral literature,” also pointed out that Westerners feel compelled to talk about personal emotions. Here in the East, he is saying, we don’t display such delicate emotions, we suck it up:
The detachment of the Pacific Coast from the rest of the country, and the way in which, to a rather marked degree, it is still thrown upon itself, strengthen very much this tendency toward a more intimate expression of thought and emotion. The Eastern reader of Mr. Fitch’s book needs to understand these peculiar conditions and influences under which it had its inspiration. Otherwise he may be surprised and perhaps repelled a little by the peculiar frankness and intimacy of the opening chapter, a tribute to the author’s only son, written a few days after the young man’s sudden death.1“A Book from a Man’s Heart,” New York Times, 3 September 1911, p532
Fitch wrote several other books for Elder, including The Critic in the Orient, The Critic in the Occident, Great Spiritual Writers of America, and Modern English Books of Power. Like Comfort Found, each of these books were compiled from Fitch’s newspaper columns in the Chronicle.
George Hamlin Fitch was born in Lancaster, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, on 25 November 1852. His family moved to San Francisco when he was a young boy, but the family returned to New York in 1865, where he was educated at preparatory schools and Cornell University. His first newspaper job was at the New York Tribune, where he worked for three years. He returned to San Francisco in 1879 to work for the Chronicle, and quickly rose to become its literary critic.2San Francisco Chronicle, 25 February 1925, p3 In June 1881, he married Theodosia Hudson, also a native New Yorker. Their daughter Mary was born in 1882, and son Harold in 1885. George and Theodosia divorced about 1895, and Fitch lived on his own for most of the rest of his life. In 1910, he married Amerique B. Deussing, but this union appears to have been very short. After his retirement in 1915, he lived for a while in England and New York before settling in Arcadia, in Southern California, in 1920. At the time of his sudden death in 1925, he was living with a Mrs. Amelia White, but it’s not clear whether they were married. It was originally thought that he would be buried in the Fitch family plot at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, but perhaps due to Mrs. White’s desires, he was laid to rest at Live Oak Memorial Park in Monrovia.
Updated 2026-01-27
- 1“A Book from a Man’s Heart,” New York Times, 3 September 1911, p532
- 2San Francisco Chronicle, 25 February 1925, p3
