Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/533

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515


my New York stories to Main Street, rub out the Flatiron Building, and insert Town Hall, and the story will fit any up-State town just as well. So long as a story is true to human nature all you need to do to fit any town is to change the local color. You can make all the char acters of the Arabian Nights parade up and down Broadway." The result is that Porter has exhibited in mass a great range of human nature, and if he has not created characters distinctive because of passions which raise them above the crowd, he has depicted wide areas and aspects of society hitherto untouched by the short story. It is this aspect of his work that justifies Professor C. Alphonso Smith s statement, "O. Henry has socialized the short story." Two RENEGADES (PAGE 363) This story is typical of a number of Porter s stories in having its scene laid in South America. It is also characteristic in its portrayal of the picaresque type of character and in its original diction. It has not been deemed necessary by the present editor to explain its slang and its allusions to matters contemporary at the time when Porter wrote the story.

QUESTIONS, i. What were the characteristics of Doc Millikin?

2. In what way does the story show the obliterating of sectional ani mosities? 3. Point out characteristic features of the writer s style. Other Novelists and Story-Writers. Some of the more important writers of fiction in the South since the Civil War are named in the list that follows. Maryland: Francis Hopkinson Smith (1838-1915), Lucy Meacham Thruston (1862- ); Virginia: Mary Virginia Terhune (" Marion Harland") (1831- ), Mrs. Burton Harrison (1846- ), Molly Elliot Seawell (1860- ), Amelie Rives (1863- ), Mary Johnston (1870- ), Ellen Glasgow (1874- ), James Branch Cabell (1879 ), Henry Sydnor Harrison (1880- ); North Carolina: Frances Christian Tiernan ("Christian Reid") (1846- ), Thomas Dixon (1864- ); Georgia: Harry Stillwell Edwards (1854- ), Will X. Harben (1858- ); Kentucky: John Fox, Jr. (1863- ), Alice Hegan Rice (1870- ); Tennessee: Sarah Barnwell Elliott (18 - ), Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849- ), Will Allen Dromgoole (18 - ), John Trotwood Moore (1858- ), Virginia Frazer Boyle (1863- ); Mississippi: Katherine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (" Sherwood Bonner ") (1849-1883), Harris Dickson (1868- ); Alabama: Augusta Evans Wilson (1835-1909); Louisi ana: Albion Tourgee (1838-1905), Grace King (1852- ), Kate Chopin (1851-1904), Ruth McEnery Stuart (1856- ), Mary Evelyn Moore Davis (1852-1909).