the charmingly original Story of an Untold Love. James Lane Allen remains true to his first love, his former Kentucky home and environment, where he won abiding fame by A Kentucky Cardinal and his inimitable sketches, as The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, Aftermath, Summer in Arcady and his thoughtful, poetic The Choir Invisible. Marion Crawford is a cosmopolitan, and only through his mother and by virtue of his early childhood, spent in New York, can we claim him as an American. We owe much, nevertheless, to his cultured and tireless pen for many novels about Italy. Saracinesca, Sant’ Ilario, Don Orsino and A Roman Singer are the chief, and among his best. In Katharine Lauderdale and its sequel The Ralstons, with Marion Darche and The Three Fates, we have stories of American life, and in these there is much of merit and entertainment, though he is more at home in describing European, especially Italian, life.
Among American writers who are winning lasting names are Henry James, William Dean Howells and George W. Cable. Mr. James, the subtlest and most realistic of American novelists, has much of achievement, though he is lacking in the elements of popularity. He has, however, done much clever work in fiction, and manifested a high degree of art. His more notable stories are Roderick Hudson, Daisy Miller, The American, The Europeans, What Maisie Knew, The Princess Casamassima, The Portrait of a Lady and The Awkward Age. Mr. Howells has done much good and varied work, and the American world of letters owes him a heavy debt. He is essentially American in his ideals and tastes, and is always the artist. His most representative novel is The Rise of Silas Lapham, though we prefer his earlier and less realistic stories, as A Foregone Conclusion and A Chance Acquaintance. Mr. Cable is best known for his delightful pictures of Creole days, drawn with a pen skillful in catching the finest, most delicate traits of Creole character and preserved in such stories as Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes and Madame Delphine. In The Cavalier he has left his chosen field, but not added to his fame. As a writer of the short story, Mary E. Wilkins holds high place. Her art is always delicate and her workmanship at times exquisite. Her more notable books are A New England Nun, A Humble Romance, Pembroke and Giles Corey, Yeoman. Sarah Orne Jewett has an industrious and clever pen, and has done much excellent work from Deephaven to The Tory Lover. Mrs. Burton Harrison is a successful writer of society novels. She has culture, and has seen the world and its many and varied types. Her most interesting stories are The Anglomaniacs, Good Americans, A Son of the Old Dominion, A Triple Entanglement and A Princess of the Hills. The author of That Lass o’ Lowrie's and Little Lord Fauntleroy (Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett) continues to add to her fame and to address cosmopolitan tastes. A Lady of Quality, His Grace of Ormonde and The Making of a Marchioness are, with her plays, examples of her work. Gertrude Atherton did promising work in The Doomswoman and The Californians, and evinced skill in portraiture in The Aristocrats. Kate Douglas Wiggin (Mrs. Riggs) is at her best in such tales as Marm Lisa, Penelope's Progress and A Cathedral Courtship. Adeline D. T. Whitney was always sure of readers, especially young girls, in her delightful stories of the type of Faith Gartney's Girlhood, We Girls and Real Folks. The work of Miss Murfree (“Charles Egbert Craddock”) is strong, vigorous and dramatic. The mountain country of Tennessee she has made highly interesting by her pictorial descriptions and studies of character. Her best-known stories are In the Tennessee Mountains, In the Clouds and The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains. To these writers have to be added the names of others who have done good, often notable, work as novelists and writers of short stories, many of them also being known as poets and essayists of repute. These include Julian Hawthorne, T. B. Aldrich, A. S. Hardy, Susan Warner, Edgar Fawcett, “Octave Thanet” (Alice French), J. G. Holland, Harriet P. Spofford, E. Stuart Phelps Ward, J. T. Trowbridge, Helen Hunt Jackson and Hamlin Garland. Of poets and litterateurs the modern period enrolls the names, high in their art, of such writers as Geo. W. Curtis, E. C. Stedman, R. W. Gilder, R. H. Stoddard, Alice and Phœbe Cary, Lucy Larcom and P. H. Hayne.
Among other successes in American fiction must be noted such writers as Irving Bacheller, Judge Robert Grant, C. F. Goss and Edward Noyes Westcott. Mr. Bacheller's success is recent, but it is gratifying as well as emphatic, as is witnessed by Eben Holden and D'ri and I. The stories are new creations in fiction, and have a freshness that must be enjoyed by jaded novel readers. They are admirable in character-drawing, and bracing and wholesome fiction. Judge Grant has done much clever work, especially in his skillful picture of contemporary American life, entitled Unleavened Bread. The Redemption of David Corson by C. F. Goss and David Harum by the late E. N. Westcott have been read by multitudes, and in many respects have earned success, as has the late Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage and Wounds in the Rain. A new writer, Dr. J. B. Naylor, has in Ralph Marlowe interestingly described village life in southeastern Ohio, and amusingly sketched, and to the life, one of its garrulous rustic characters. From the same pen we have The Sign of the Prophet, a bright romance of the War of 1812, the heroine of which is a ward of Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet and brother of Tecumseh.
