the way was prepared by Eugene Field, "Mr. Dooley," B. L. Taylor, Don Marquis and the blandly omniscient Simeon Strunsky. They are, in short, for the most part busy newspaper men, secretly with child of Heaven knows what grand poems and plays and novels, yet producing their serio-comic column with daily or weekly regularity, the office boy at their elbows and the presses roaring for copy. "Literature," you say in your haste, "produced by men who are too busy to write, for men who are too busy to read?" No, not that; literature, rather, by men capable of taking joy in writing, like a sporting robin which built its nest and laid its bright blue eggs just above the coupling-pin between the engine and tender of a jolting little train that, twice a week, links a series of villages among the Green Mountains.
These young men, with obvious community of feeling, are striving to create a new literary public and to provide for that public a new literary fare, relatively free from political intoxicants. Journalists or near-journalists by training or temper or "environmental" necessity, they contemplate no longer the narrow circle reached by the old-fashioned review, but the wide circle composed of every man and woman who reads a newspaper. This is the true democratic reading public. Like the periodical essayists of Queen Anne's time, with their Scandal Clubs and Tatlers and Spectator Clubs, they undertake to meet their readers where they are, and they know that to do so their writing must sound like an
