He later recalled how he clandestinely slipped his contribution into the Era's mailbox without anyone knowing: "No member of my family suspected that I was so bold as to dream of entering the circle of the elect who wrote regularly every week for the chief literary organ west of the Rocky Mountains".

"They are," wrote William Dean Howells, "the lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things that were ever written about the life of that summer ocean,"[5] but are also exceedingly homoerotic.

In 1891, Stoddard spent the summer aboard the yacht "Ramona" owned by Bohemian Club darling Harry Gillig and his wife, heiress Aimee Crocker sailing the Atlantic Coast.

Other guests of the pleasure boat were painter Theodore Wores, playwrights Augustus Thomas and Clay Greene, editor Jerome Hart, and actor Henry Woodruff.

[11] The same reasons, whether they be limited to ill-health, or also dealt with behavioral matters, caused him to resign a corresponding position that he held at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. from 1889 to 1902.

[12] He published his Exits and Entrances, a book of essays and sketches which he called his favorite work, probably because it told of his friendship with Stevenson and of other literary acquaintances.

In April 1903, he returned to San Francisco and was the guest of honor at a welcome-home party at the Bohemian Club with Henry James and Enrico Caruso in attendance.

Having written even more fervently to Walt Whitman, Stoddard had been excited by Typee, finding the Kory-Kory character so stimulating that he wrote a story celebrating the sort of male friendships to which Melville had more than once alluded.

Francis Millet, a well-regarded American Academic Classicist artist, had a studio in Rome in the early 1870s and Venice in the mid-1870s, where he lived with Stoddard.

Author Jonathan Ned Katz presents letters from Millet to Stoddard that suggest they had a romantic and intimate affair while living a bohemian life together.

So strictly biographical are most of his writings that Stoddard hoped by supplying a few missing links to enable the reader to trace out the whole story of his life.