The Man Without a Country

"The Man Without a Country" is a short story by American writer Edward Everett Hale, first published in The Atlantic in December 1863.

Nolan is to spend the rest of his life aboard US Navy warships in exile, with no right ever to set foot on US soil again and with explicit orders that no one shall ever again mention his country to him or bring him news about her.

The dying man asks to be told the news of American history since 1807, and Danforth finally relates to him almost every major event that has happened to the US since his sentence was imposed; the narrator confesses, however, "I could not make up my mouth to tell him a word about this infernal rebellion.

When he dies later that day, he is found to have drafted the epitaph for himself: "In memory of PHILIP NOLAN, Lieutenant in the Army of the United States.

Clifton Fadiman wrote in his 1949 introduction to the book Masterpieces of World Literature, that no story better than The Man Without a Country expresses the spirit of American nationalism.

Hale convinced many readers that Nolan was an actual figure, thus increasing the story's effectiveness as a piece of patriotic literature.

The spy's bookkeeper Nolan was killed by the Spanish Army while he was stealing Texas mustangs in 1801,[8] years before Burr's trial.

[9] Elizabeth McFadden and Agnes Louise Crimmins wrote the "historical drama" theatrical play "The Man Without a Country" in 1918, published by Samuel French in New York City.

Bill Johnstone, best known as Orson Welles' replacement as the title character in The Shadow radio drama, narrated and took part in the story as Hale.

[12] Later that same year on November 26, a dramatization was performed on Philco Radio Time, with Crosby (the program's star and host) again providing narration.

[15] In Sam Fuller's film Run of the Arrow (1957), Captain Clark (Brian Keith), a U.S. Army engineer commissioned to build a fort on Sioux territory, relates the Nolan story to O'Meara (Rod Steiger), a Southerner who, refusing to accept the defeat of the Confederacy, has married among the Sioux and been appointed by them to see the fort is built where agreed.

In the context of pressing O'Meara to decide whether his loyalties lie ultimately with the Sioux or with the Americans, Clark narrates the Nolan story as historical fact.

It featured Cliff Robertson as Philip Nolan, Beau Bridges as Frederick Ingham, Peter Strauss as Arthur Danforth, Robert Ryan as Lt. Cmdr.