therefore had to wait a little on exposition. Finally, novelists still living appear in this record only to the extent needful for an indication of the general tendencies of recent fiction. To write about contemporaries calls for a scale and method of treatment essentially different from that employed with writers whose work is done. Discussion of the American novel of the twentieth century is reserved for a further volume, already planned and in part executed.
In its general outlines the present study follows the chapters on fiction which the same author contributed to The Cambridge History of American Literature published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, with whose courteous permission this much larger version is considerably indebted to those chapters. Acknowledgments are due as well to The Nation for the use of materials which have appeared in its pages.
February, 1921.
