The Cambridge History of American Literature/Book III/Chapter XI

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The Cambridge History of American Literature
by Carl Van Doren
Book III, Chapter XI: The Later Novel: Howells
499The Cambridge History of American Literature — Book III, Chapter XI: The Later Novel: HowellsCarl Van Doren

CHAPTER XI

The Later Novel: Howells


THE romance of the school of Cooper was not only falling into disuse among most writers of capacity at the time of his death but was rapidly descending into the hands of fertile hacks who for fifty years were to hold an immense audience without more than barely deserving a history. It was in that very year (1851) that Robert Bonner bought the New York Ledger and began to make it the congenial home of a sensationalism which, hitherto most nearly anticipated by such a romancer as Joseph Holt Ingraham, reached unsurpassable dimensions with the prolific Sylvanus Cobb, Jr. From the Ledger no step in advance had to be taken by the inventors of the “dime novel,” which was started upon its long career by the publishing firm of Beadle and Adams of New York in 1860.[1] Edward S. Ellis’s Seth Jones or The Captive of the Frontier (1860), one of the earliest of the sort, its hero formerly a scout under Ethan Allen but now adventuring in Western New York, sold over 600,000 copies in half a dozen languages. Though no other single dime novel was perhaps ever so popular, the type prospered, depending almost exclusively upon native authors and native material: first the old frontier of Cooper and then the trans-Mississippi region, with its Indians, its Mexicans, its bandits, its troopers, and above all, its cowboys, among whom “Buffalo Bill” (Col. William F. Cody) achieved a primacy much like that of Daniel Boone among the older order of scouts. Cheap, conventional, hasty,—Albert W. Aiken long averaged one such novel a week, and Col. Ingram Prentiss produced in all over six hundred,—they were exciting, innocent enough, and scrupulously devoted to the doctrines of poetic justice, but they lacked all distinction, and Frank Norris could justly grieve that the epic days of Western settlement found only such tawdry Homers. In the fourth quarter of the century the detective story rivalled the frontier tale; after 1900, both, though reduced to the price of five cents apiece, gave way before the still more exciting and easily comprehended moving picture.

One successor of Cooper, however, upheld for a time the dignity of old-fashioned romance. John Esten Cooke (1830–86), born in the Valley of Virginia and brought up in Richmond, cherished a passion as intense as Simms’s for his native state and deliberately set out to celebrate its past and its beauty. Leather Stocking and Silk (1854) and The Last of the Foresters (1856), both narratives of life in the Valley, recall Cooper by more than their titles; but in The Youth of Jefferson (1854), still more in The Virginia Comedians (1854) and its sequel Henry St. John, Gentleman (1859), Cooke seems as completely Virginian as Beverley Tucker[2] before him, though less stately in his tread. All three of these novels have their scenes laid in Williamsburg, the old capital of the Dominion; they reproduce a society strangely made up of luxury, daintiness, elegance, penury, ugliness, brutality. At times the dialogue of Cooke’s impetuous cavaliers and merry girls nearly catches the flavour of the Forest of Arden, but there is generally something stilted in their speech or behaviour that spoils the gay illusion. Nevertheless, The Virginia Comedians may justly be called the best Virginia novel of the old régime, unless possibly Swallow Barn[3] should be excepted, for reality as well as for colour and spirit. During the Civil War Cooke fought, as captain of cavalry, under Stuart, and had experiences which he afterwards turned to use in a series of Confederate romances, most notable of which is Surry of Eagle’s Nest (1866). But in this and in the related tales Hilt to Hilt (1869) and Mohun (1869), as well as in numerous later novels, he continued to practice an old manner which grew steadily more archaic as the realists gained ground. Towards the end of his life he participated, without changing his habits, in the revival of the historical romance which began in the eighties; but his pleasant, plaintive My Lady Pokahontas (1885) cannot really compare for charm with his Virginia A History of the People (1883), a high-minded and fascinating work. Cooke was the last of Cooper’s school; but he was also the first of those who contributed to the poetic idealization of the antebellum South which has been one of the most prominent aspects of American fiction since 1865.

Less close to Cooper was another novelist who fought in the Civil War, and gave his life in one of the earliest battles, Theodore Winthrop (1828–61). Of a stock as eminent in New England and New York as Cooke’s in Virginia, Winthrop had a more cosmopolitan upbringing than Cooke: after Yale he travelled in Europe, in the American tropics, in California while the gold fever was still new, and in the North-west. His work at first found so delayed a favour with publishers that his books were all posthumous—Cecil Dreeme (1861), John Brent (1862), Edwin Brothertoft (1862), The Canoe and the Saddle (1863), and Life in the Open Air and Other Papers (1863).[4] Time might, it is urged, have made Winthrop the legitimate successor of Hawthorne, but in fact he progressed little beyond the qualities of Brockden Brown, whom he considerably resembles in his strenuous nativism, his melodramatic plots, his abnormal characters, his command over the mysterious, and his breathless style. Of the three novels John Brent is easily the most interesting by reason of its vigorous narrative of adventures in the Far West, at that time a region still barely touched by fiction, and its magnificent hero, the black horse Don Fulano. That Winthrop’s real talent looked forward in this direction rather than backward to Hawthorne appears still more clearly from The Canoe and the Saddle, a fresh, vivid, amusing, and truthful record of his own journey across the Cascade Mountains, and an established classic of the North-west. His death, however, prevented further achievement, and the Pacific Coast had to wait for Mark Twain[5] and Bret Harte.[6]

What chiefly characterized American fiction of the decade 1850–60, leaving out of account romancers like Hawthorne, Cooke, and Winthrop, was domestic sentimentalism, which for a time attained a hearing rare in literary history, and produced one novel of enormous influence and reputation. In that decade flowered Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mary Jane Holmes, and Augusta Jane Evans (Wilson), all more or less in the Charlotte Temple tradition; Anne and Susan Warner[7] and Maria S. Cummins, pious historians of precocious young girls; and—not so far above them—the almost equally tender and tearful Donald Grant Mitchell (“Ik Marvel”)[8] and George William Curtis,[9] young men who, however, afterwards took themselves to sterner tasks. Professor Ingraham gave up his blood-and-thunder, became a clergyman, and wrote the long-popular biblical romance The Prince of the House of David (1855). Indeed, the decade was eminently clerical, and though Mitchell and Curtis might recall Irving and Thackeray respectively, they were less representative than the most effective writer of the whole movement, who was daughter, sister, wife, and mother of clergymen.

Harriet Beecher, born in Litchfield, Connecticut, 14 June, 1811, passed her childhood and girlhood, indeed practically her entire life, in an atmosphere of piety which, much as she eventually lost of its original Calvinistic rigour, not only indoctrinated her with orthodox opinions but furnished her with an intensely evangelical point of view and a sort of Scriptural eloquence. Her youth was spent in a more diversified world than might be thought: from her mother’s people, who were emphatically High Church and, in spite of the Revolution, some of them still Tory at heart, she learned a faith and ritual less austere than that of her father, Lyman Beecher[10]; she had good teaching at the Litchfield Academy, especially in composition; like all her family, she was highly susceptible to external nature and passionately acquainted with the lovely Litchfield hills; she read very widely, and not only theology, of which she read too much for her happiness, but the accepted secular authors of the eighteenth century, as well as Burns and Byron and Scott. At the same time, she justified her Beecher lineage by her ready adaptation to the actual conditions under which she lived during Lyman Beecher’s pastorates in Litchfield and Boston, and during her own career as pupil and then teacher in the school conducted at Hartford by her strong but morbid sister Catherine. Although Harriet Beecher was still a thorough child of New England when she went, in 1832, to live in Cincinnati, to which her father had been called as president of the Lane Theological Seminary, and although her earliest sketches and tales, collected in a volume called The Mayflower (1843), deal largely with memories of her old home set down with an exile’s affection, she grew rapidly in knowledge and experience. Married in 1836 to Professor Calvin E. Stowe of the Seminary, mother by 1850 of seven children, she returned in that year to Brunswick, Maine, where Professor Stowe had accepted a position in Bowdoin College. There, deeply stirred by the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law, she began Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, which ran as a serial in The National Era of Washington from June, 1851, to April, 1852, and then, on its appearance in two volumes in March, 1852, met with a popular reception never before or since accorded to a novel. Its sales went to the millions. Over five hundred thousand Englishwomen signed an address of thanks to the author; Scotland raised a thousand pounds by a penny offering among its poorest people to help free the slaves; in France and Germany the book was everywhere read and discussed; while there were Russians who emancipated their serfs out of the pity which the tale aroused. In the United States, thanks in part to the stage,[11] which produced a version as early as September, 1852, the piece belongs not only to literature but to folklore.

That Uncle Tom’s Cabin stands higher in the history of reform than in the history of the art of fiction no one needs to say again. Dickens, Kingsley, and Mrs. Gaskell had already set the novel to humanitarian tunes, and Mrs. Stowe did not have to invent a type. She had, however, no particular foreign master, not even Scott, all of whose historical romances she had been reading just before she began Uncle Tom. Instead she adhered to the native tradition, which went back to the eighteenth century, of sentimental, pious, instructive narratives written by women chiefly for women. Leave out the merely domestic elements of the book—slave families broken up by sale, ailing and dying children, negro women at the mercy of their masters, white households which at the best are slovenly and extravagant by reason of irresponsible servants—and little remains. To understand why the story touched the world so deeply it is necessary to understand how tense the struggle over slavery had grown, how thickly charged was the moral atmosphere awaiting a fatal spark. But the mere fact of an audience already prepared will not explain the mystery of a work which shook a powerful institution and which, for all its defects of taste and style and construction, still has amazing power. Richard Hildreth’s[12] The Slave; or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) and Mrs. M. V. Victor’s once popular “dime novel” Maum Guinea; or, Christmas among the Slaves (1861) no longer move. They both lack the ringing voice, the swiftness, the fullness, the humour, the authentic passion of the greater book.

It has often been pointed out that Mrs. Stowe did not mean to be sectional, that she deliberately made her chief villain a New Englander, and that she expected to be blamed less by the South than by the North, which she thought peculiarly guilty because it tolerated slavery without the excuse either of habit or of interest. Bitterly attacked by Southerners of all sorts, however, she defended herself with A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded (1853), and then, after a triumphant visit to Europe and a removal to Andover, essayed another novel to illustrate the evil effects of slavery especially upon the whites. Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856)[13] has had its critical partisans, but posterity has not sustained them. Grave faults of construction, slight knowledge of the scene (North Carolina), a less simple and compact story than in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and a larger share of disquisition,—these weigh the book down, and most readers carry away only fragmentary memories, of Dred’s thunderous eloquence, of Tom Gordon’s shameless abuse of his power as master, and of Old Tiff’s grotesque and beautiful fidelity.

After Dred Mrs. Stowe wrote no more anti-slavery novels, although during the Civil War she sent to the women of land an open letter reminding them that they, so many of whom now sympathized with the defenders of slavery, had less than ten years ago hailed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a mighty stroke for justice and freedom. A considerable part of her later life (she died 1 July, 1896) was spent in Florida, where she had taken a plantation on the St. John’s River for the double purpose of establishing there as a planter one of her sons who had been wounded at Gettysburg and of assisting the freedmen, about whom and their relation to the former masters she had more enlightened views than were then generally current in the North. Now an international figure, she let her pen respond too facilely to the many demands made upon it: she wrote numerous didactic and religious essays and tales, particularly attentive to the follies of fashionable New York society, in which she had had little experience; she was chosen by Lady Byron to publish the most serious charges ever brought against the poet. In another department of her work, however, Mrs. Stowe stood on surer ground, and her novels of New England life—particularly The Minister’s Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869), Poganuc People (1878)—cannot go unmentioned.

Weak in structure and sentimental she remained. Her heroines wrestle with problems of conscience happily alien to all but a few New England and Noncomformist British bosoms; her bold seducers, like Ellery Davenport in Oldtown Folks and Aaron Burr in The Minister’s Wooing, are villains to frighten schoolgirls; she writes always as from the pulpit, or at least the parsonage. But where no abstract idea governs her she can be direct, accurate, and convincing. The earlier chapters of The Pearl of Orr’s Island must be counted, as Whittier thought, among the purest, truest idyls of New England. It is harder now to agree with Lowell in placing The Minister’s Wooing first among her novels, and yet no other imaginative treatment so well sets forth the strange, dusky old Puritan world of the later eighteenth century, when Newport was the centre at once of Hopkinsian divinity[14] and the African slave trade. Mrs. Stowe wisely did not put on the airs of an historical romancer but wrote like a contemporary of the earlier Newport with an added flavour from her own youthful recollections. This flavour was indispensable to her. When her memory of the New England she had known in her girlhood and had loved so truly that Cotton Mather’s Magnolia had seemed “wonderful stories … that made me feel the very ground I trod on to be consecrated by some special dealing of God’s providence,”—when this memory worked freely and humorously upon materials which it was enough merely to remember and set down, she was at her later best. These conditions she most fully realized in Poganuc People, crisp, sweet, spare (for her), never quite sufficiently praised, and in Oldtown Folks, like the other a series of sketches rather than a novel, but—perhaps all the more because of that—still outstanding, for fidelity and point, among the innumerable stories dealing with New England.

Adaptable to literary as to other circumstances, Mrs. Stowe had actually in Oldtown Folks fallen in with the imperious current proceeding from the example of Bret Harte, whose Luck of Roaring Camp stands at the very headwaters of American “local colour” fiction and largely gave it its direction. Elsewhere in this history that movement, so far as it concerns the short story, its chief form, has been traced;[15] in the novel a similar fondness for local manners and types appeared, but not so prompt a revolution in method, for the good reason that most writers who followed Bret Harte followed him in the dimensions of their work as well as in its subjects, and left the novel standing for a few years a little out of the central channel of imaginative production. Domestic sentimentalism, of course, did not noticeably abate, carried on with large popular success by Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–81) of Massachusetts and Edward Payson Roe (1838–88) of New York until nearly the end of the century, when others took up the useful burden. Both Holland and Roe were clergymen, a sign that the old suspicion of the novel was nearly dead, even among those petty sects and sectarians that so long feared the effects of it. Holland, whose first novel had appeared in 1857, was popular moralist and poet[16] as well as novelist and first editor of Scribner’s Magazine (founded 1870); but Roe contented himself with fiction. Chaplain of cavalry and of one of the Federal hospitals during the Civil War, he later gave up the ministry in the firm conviction that he could reach thousands with novels and only hundreds with his voice. His simple formula included: first, some topical material, historical event, or current issue; second, characters and incidents selected directly from his personal observation or from newspapers; third, an abundance of “nature” descriptions with much praise of the rural virtues; and fourth, plots concerned almost invariably, and not very deviously, with the simultaneous pursuit of wives, fortunes, and salvation. Barriers Burned Away (1872), The Opening of a Chestnut Burr (1874), and Without a Home (1881) are said to have been his most widely read books.

The greatest, however, and practically the ultimate victory over village opposition to the novel was won by Ben-Hur A Tale of the Christ (1880), a book of larger pretension and broader scope than any of Roe’s or Holland’s modest narratives, the only American novel, indeed, which can be compared with Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a true folk possession.[17] Its author, Gen. Lew Wallace (1827–1905), an Indiana lawyer, a soldier in both the Mexican and the Civil War, had already published The Fair God (1873), an elaborate romance of the conquest of Mexico. A chance conversation with the notorious popular skeptic Col. Robert G. Ingersoll led Wallace to researches into the character and doctrines of Jesus which not only convinced him but bore further fruit in a tale which thousands have read who have read no other novel except perhaps Uncle Tom’s Cabin and have hardly thought of either as a novel at all, and through which still more thousands know the geography, ethnology, and customs of first-century Judaea and Antioch as through no other source. Without doubt the outstanding element in the story is the revenge of Ben-Hur upon his false friend Messala, a revenge which takes the Prince of Jerusalem through the galleys and the palaestra and which leaves Messala, after the thrilling episode of the chariot race, crippled and stripped of his fortune. And yet, following even such pagan deeds, Ben-Hur’s discovery that he cannot serve the Messiah with the sword does not quite seem an anticlimax, though the conclusion, dealing with the Passion, like the introductory chapters on the meeting of the Magi, falls somewhat below the level of the revenge them in energy and simplicity. Compared with other romances of this sort, however, with William Ware’s[18] or Ingraham’s, for instance, Ben-Hur easily passes them all, by a vitality which has a touch of genius. It passes, too, Wallace’s third romance, written while he was ambassador to Turkey, The Prince of India or Why Constantinople Fell (1893), a long, dull romance with the Wandering Jew as principal figure.

Edward Eggleston (1837–1902), a clergyman like Holland and Roe, and like General Wallace a native of Indiana, though nourished in the school which made the domestic-sentimentalpious romance the dominant type of fiction between 1850 and 1870, must yet be considered the pioneer figure in the new realism which succeeded it in the eighties. As a Methodist on the frontier he had been brought up, though of cultivated Virginia stock, to think novels and all such works of the imagination evil things, but his diversified experience as an itinerant preacher, or “circuit rider,” and as editor and journalist, his wholesome religion, and the studious habit which eventually made him a sound historical scholar, took him out of these narrow channels of opinion. It is highly significant that whereas Mrs. Stowe or her followers would have thought of themselves as writing fiction considerably for the sake of its moral consequences, Eggleston, having read Taine’s Art in the Netherlands,[19] undertook to portray the life of southern Indiana in the faithful, undoctrinaire spirit of a Dutch painter. His first novel, The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), remains his most famous. Indiana’s singularities had already been exposed by Bayard Rush Hall (“Robert Carlton”) in The New Purchase (1855), and there was growing up a considerable literature[20] reporting

that curious poor-whitey race which is called “tar-heel” in the northern Carolina, “sand-hiller” in the southern, “corn-cracker” in Kentucky, “yahoo” in Mississippi, and in California “Pike” … the Hoosiers of the dark regions of Indiana and the Egyptians of southern Illinois.[21] All Eggleston’s essential novels are concerned with this phase of American life, whatever the scene: Indiana in The Hoosier Schoolmaster, The End of the World (1872), and Roxy (1878); Ohio in The Circuit Rider (1874); Illinois in The Graysons (1887); Minnesota in The Mystery of Metropolisville (1873). Light is thrown upon his aims in fiction by the fact that he subsequently aspired to write “A History of Life in the United States,” which he carried through two erudite, humane, and graceful volumes.[22] His Hoosier novels, simple in plot, clear-cut in characterization, concise and lucid in language, unwaveringly accurate in their setting, manners, and dialect, are indispensable documents, even finished chapters, for his uncompleted masterpiece. The Schoolmaster, as first in the field and fresh and pointed, still remains most famous; but Roxy is perhaps most interesting of them all, and The Circuit Rider the most informing. The Graysons deserves credit for the reserve with which it admits the youthful Lincoln into its narrative, uses him at a crucial moment, and then lets him withdraw without one hint of his future greatness. If the morals of these tales seem a little easy to read, they nevertheless lack all that is sentimental, strained, or perfervid. Without Mrs. Stowe’s rush of narrative, neither has Eggleston her verbosity. Even where, in his fidelity to violent frontier conditions, his incidents seem melodramatic, the handling is sure and direct, for the reason, as he says of The Circuit Rider, that whatever is incredible in the story is true. No novelist is more candid, few more convincing. With greater range and fire he might have been an international figure as well as the earliest American realist whose work is still remembered.[23]

It was perhaps a certain bareness in Middle Western life, lacking both the longer memories of the Atlantic States and the splendid golden expectations of California, that thus early established in the upper Mississippi valley the realistic tradition which descends unbroken through the work of Eggleston, E. W. Howe, Hamlin Garland, and Edgar Lee Masters. From the Middle West, too, came the principal exponent of native realism, in himself almost an entire literary movement, almost an academy. William Dean Howells was born at Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, 1 March, 1837, the grandson of a Welsh Quaker and the son of a country printer and editor. Like his friend Mark Twain he saw little of schools and nothing of colleges, and like him he got his systematic literary training from enforced duties as a printer and journalist. But, unlike Mark Twain, he fell as naturally into the best classical traditions as Goldsmith or Irving, who, with Cervantes, earliest delighted him. In My Literary Passions Howells has delicately recorded the development of his taste. At first he desired to write verse, and devoted months to imitating Pope in a youthful fanaticism for regularity and exactness. From this worship he turned, at about sixteen, to Shakespeare. particularly to the histories; then to Chaucer, admired for his sense of earth in human life; and to Dickens, whose magic, Howells saw, was rough. Macaulay taught him to like criticism and furnished him an early model of prose style. Thackeray, Longfellow, Tennyson followed in due course. Having taught himself some Latin and Greek and more French and Spanish, Howells took up German and came under the spell of Heine, who dominated him longer than any other author and who showed him once for all that the dialect and subjects of literature should be the dialect and facts of life.

Poems in the manner of Heine won Howells a place in the Atlantic, then the very zenith of his aspiration, and in 1860 he undertook the reverent pilgrimage to New England which he recounts with such winning grace in Literary Friends and Acquaintance. Already a journalist of promise, and something of a poet, he made friends wherever he went and was reconfirmed in his literary ambitions. At the outbreak of the Civil War appointed United States consult at Venice, married at Paris in 1862 to Miss Elinor G. Mead of Vermont, he spent four years of almost undisturbed leisure in studying Italian literature, notably Dante, as the great authoritative voice of an age, and Goldoni, whom Howells called “the first of the realists.” In Italy, though he wrote poetry for the most part, he formed the habit of close, sympathetic, humorous observation and discovered the ripe, easy style which made him, beginning with Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867), one of the happiest of our literary travellers. From such work he moved, by the avenue of journalism, only gradually to fiction. On his return to the United States in 1865 he became, first, editorial contributor to The Nation for a few months, and then assistant editor of the Atlantic until 1881.

The literary notices which he wrote for the Atlantic during these years of preparation would show, had he written nothing else, how strong and steady was his drift toward his mature creed. Not alone by deliberate thought nor even by the stimulus of polemic was he carried forward, but rather by a natural process of growth which, more than an artistic matter, included his entire philosophy. From his childhood he had been intensely humane—sensitive and charitable. This humaneness now revealed itself as a passionate love for the truth of human life and a suspicion, a quiet scorn, of those romantic dreams and superstitious exaggerations by which less contented lovers of life try to enrich it or to escape it. “Ah! poor Real Life,” he wrote in his first novel, “can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face?” Perhaps Their Wedding Journey (1871) ought hardly to be called a novel, but it is a valuable Howells document in its zeal for common actuality and in its method, so nearly that of his travel books. A Chance Acquaintance (1873), more strictly a novel, for the first time showed that Howells could not only report customs and sketch characters felicitously but could also organize a plot with delicate skill. A young Bostonian, passionately in love with an intelligent but unsophisticated inland girl, who returns his love, is so little able to overcome his ingrained provincial snobbishness that he steadily condescends to her until in the end he suddenly sees, as she sees, that he has played an ignoble and vulgar part which convincingly separates them. Nothing could be more subtle than the turn by which their relative positions are reversed. The style of A Chance Acquaintance, while not more graceful than that of Howells’s earlier books, is more assured and crisp. The central idea is clearly conceived and the outlines sharp without being in any way cruel or cynical. The descriptions are exquisite, the dialogue both natural and revealing, and over and through all is a lambent mirth, an undeceived kindliness of wisdom, which was to remain his essential quality.

In 1869 he had published a metrical novel, No Love Lost, and in 1871 a volume of Suburban Sketches; he continued to write criticism and later began to write farces; but an increasing share of his energy now went to novels. The study of the conflict between different manners or grades of sophistication, taken up at about the same time by Henry James,[24] concerned Howells largely, and appears in A Foregone Conclusion (1875), The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), and A Fearful Responsibility (1881). Writing of spiritualism and Shakerism in An Undiscovered Country (1880), he made clear his suspicion of those types of otherworldliness. And in 1882, with the publication of A Modern Instance, Howells assumed his proper rank as the chief native American realist.

The superiority of this book to all that had gone before can less justly be said to lie in its firmer grasp of its materials, for Howells from the first was extraordinarily sure of grasp, than in its larger control of larger materials. It has a richer timbre, a graver, deeper tone. Marcia Gaylord, the most passionate of all his heroines, is of all of them the most clearly yet lovingly conceived and elaborated. In the career of her husband, Bartley J. Hubbard, Howells accomplishes the difficult feat of tracing a metamorphosis, the increase of selfishness and vanity, fed in this case by Marcia’s very devotion, into monstrous growths of evil without a redeeming tincture even of boldness—mere contemptibility. The process seems as simple as arithmetic, but, like all genuine growth, it actually resists analysis. The winter scenes of the earlier chapters, faithful and vivid beyond any prose which had yet been written about New England, drawn with an eye intensely on the fact, have still the larger bearings of a criticism of American village life in general. The subsequent adventures of the Hubbards in Boston, though so intensely local in setting and incident, are applicable everywhere. Squire Gaylord’s arraignment of his son-in-law in the Indiana courtroom vibrates with a passion seldom met in Howells; and Bartley’s virtual offer of his former wife to his former friend belongs with the unforgettable, unforgivable basenesses in fiction. After these episodes, however, it must be owned that an anticlimax follows in Halleck’s discovery that his New England conscience will now forever hold him from Marcia because he had loved her before she was free.

Between 1881, when Howells resigned from the Atlantic, and 1886, when he began to write for Harper’s, he had some years of leisure, particularly signalized by the publication in 1884 of the novel which brought him to the height of his reputation as well as of his art. The theme of The Rise of Silas Lapham is the universal one, very dear in a republic, of the rising fortunes of a man who has no aid but virtue and capacity. Lapham, a country-bred, “self-made” Vermonter, appears when he has already achieved wealth, and finds himself drawn, involuntarily enough, into the more difficult task of adjusting himself and his family to the manners of fastidious Boston. A writer primarily satirical might have been contented to make game of the situation. Howells, keenly as he sets forth the conflict of standards, goes beyond satire to a depth of meaning which comes only from a profound understanding of the part which artificial distinctions play in human life and a mellow pity that such little things can have such large consequences of pain and error. The conflict, however, while constantly pervasive in the book, does not usurp the action; the Lapham family has serious concerns that might arise in any social stratum. Most intense and dramatic of these is the fact that the suitor of one daughter is believed by the whole family to be in love with the other until the very moment of his declaration. The distress into which they are thrown is presented with a degree of comprehension rare in any novel, and here matched with a common sense which rises to something half-inspired in Lapham’s perception—reduced to words, however, by a friendly clergyman—that in such a case superfluous self-sacrifice would be morbid and that, since none is guilty, one had better suffer than three. A certain rightness and soundness of feeling, indeed, govern the entire narrative. As it proceeds, as Lapham falls into heavy business vicissitudes and finally to comparative poverty again, and yet all the time rises in spiritual worth, the record steadily grows in that dignity and significance which, according to Howells’s creed, is founded only on absolute truth.

Silas Lapham marked the culmination of Howells’s art, approached the next year in the exquisite interlude Indian Summer, gayly, lightly, sweetly, pungently narrating the loves of a man of forty, and not quite approached in The Minister’s Charge (1887), which shows a homespun poet moving in the direction of comfortable prose. But Howells had not yet shaped his final philosophy, which grew up within him after he had left Boston for New York in 1886 and had established his connection with Harper’s Magazine. Again, as from the Atlantic literary notices, light falls upon his growth from the monthly articles which he wrote for “The Editor’s Study” between 1886 and 1891. Chiefly discussions of current books, concerned with poetry, history, biography nearly as much as with fiction, these essays remarkably encouraged the growth of realism in America, and most eloquently commended to native readers such Latin realists as Valera, Valdés, Galdós, and Verga, and the great Russians Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. It will not do to say that these foreign realists moulded Howells, for his development, whatever his readiness to assimilate, was always from within outward, but it helps to distinguish between the Howells who lived before 1886 and the one who lived after that date, to say that the earlier man had one of his supreme literary passions for the art of Turgenev, and that the later Howells, knowing Tolstoy, had become impatient of even the most secret artifice. For Tolstoy was Howells’s great passion. “As much as one merely human being can help another I believe,” said Howells, “that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in æsthetics only, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way I saw it before I knew him.” Tolstoy’s novels seemed to Howells as perfect as his doctrine. “To my thinking they transcend in truth, which is the highest beauty, all other works of fiction that have been written … [He] has a method which not only seems without artifice, but is so.”

This was some ten years after Howells had first read Tolstoy, ten years during which, in spite of Tolstoy’s example, he had not at all reverted to the preacher but had published many merry farces and had begun to be sunnily reminiscent in A Boy’s Town (1890). But though too much himself to be converted from his artistic practice, Howells had broadened his field and deepened his inquiries. A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), in which Basil and Isabel March, the bridal couple of Their Wedding Journey, now grown middle aged, give up Boston, as Howells had himself recently done, for a future in New York, is not content to point out merely the unfamiliar fashions of life which they meet but is full of conscience regarding certain evils of the modern social order. Or rather, Howells had turned from the clash of those lighter manners which belong to Comedy and had set himself to discuss the deeper manners of the race which belong to morals and religion. He wrote at a moment of hope:

We had passed through a period of strong emotioning in the direction of the humaner economics, if I may phrase it so; the rich seemed not so much to despise the poor, the poor did not so hopelessly repine. The solution of the riddle of the painful earth through the dreams of Henry George, through the dreams of Edward Bellamy, through the dreams of all the generous visionaries of the past, seemed not impossibly far off.[25]

In this mood Howells’s theme compelled him so much that the story moved forward almost without his conscious agency, “though,” he carefully insists, “I should not like to intimate anything mystical in the fact.” A Hazard of New Fortunes outdoes all Howells’s novels in the conduct of different groups of characters, in the superb naturalness with which now one and now another rises to the surface of the narrative and then retreats without a trace of management. New Englanders, New Yorkers, Southerners, Westerners, all appear in their true native colours, as do the most diverse ranks of society, and many professions, in their proper dress and gesture. The episode of the street-car strike, brought in near the end, dramatizes the struggle which has been heretofore in the novel rather a shadow than a fact, but Howells, artist first then partisan, employs it almost wholly as a sort of focal point to which the attention of all his characters is drawn, with the result that, having already revealed themselves generally, they are more particularly revealed in their varying degrees of sympathy for the great injustice out of which class war arises. In this manner, without extravagant emphasis, Howells judges a generation at the same time that he portrays it in the best of all novels of New York.

Howells’s Tolstoyanism appears still more frankly in his two Utopian tales, A Traveller from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), in which he compares America with the lovely land of Altruria, where all work is honourable and servants are unknown, where capital and interest are only memories, where equality is complete, and men and women, in the midst of beauty, lead lives that are just, temperate, and kind. The stern tones of Tolstoy Howells never learned, or at least never used, for he could not lose his habitual kindness, even when he spoke most firmly. It was kindness, not timidity, however, for though he held steadily to his art he did not keep silence before even the most popular injustices. He plead for the Chicago “anarchists” and he condemned the annexation of the Philippines in clear, strong tones; no good cause lacked the support of his voice. He was extraordinarily fecund. After 1892 he succeeded George William Curtis in “The Easy Chair” of Harper’s and wrote monthly articles which, less exclusively literary than the “Editor’s Study” pieces, carried on the same tradition. His most significant critical writings, chiefly concerned with the art he himself practiced, are found in Criticism and Fiction (1891), Heroines of Fiction (1901), and Literature and Life (1902). Reminiscences and travels assume a still larger place in his later work. After A Boy’s Town came My Literary Passions (1895), and then Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900), of accounts of the classic age of Boston and Cambridge easily the best. He revisited Europe and left records in London Films (1905), Certain Delightful English Towns (1906), Roman Holidays (1908), Seven English Cities (1909), Familiar Spanish Travels (1908), in which he occasionally drew his matter out thin but in which he was never for a page dull, or untruthful, or sour, after the ancient habit of travellers. My Mark Twain (1910) is incomparably the finest of all the interpretations of Howells’s great friend, while Years of My Youth (1916), written when the author was nearly eighty, is the work of a master whom age had made wise and left strong. In 1909 he was chosen president of the American Academy, and six years later he received the National Institute’s gold medal “for distinguished work in fiction.”

The Institute rightly judged that, important as Howells is as critic and memoir-writer, he must be considered first of all a novelist. His later books of fiction make up a long list. That he could produce such an array of fiction is sign enough that he had not been overpowered by humanitarianism; a better sign is the fact that these later novels are even kinder, gayer, mellower than the early ones. In them his investigation moves over a wide area, which includes the solid realism of The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897) and The Kentons (1902); the sombre study of a crime in The Quality of Mercy (1892); the keen statement of problems in An Imperative Duty (1892) and The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904); happier topics as in Miss Bellard’s Inspiration (1905); and, very notably, subtle explorations of what is or what seems to be the supersensual world in The Shadow of a Dream (1890), Questionable Shapes (1903)—short stories, Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907)—short stories, and The Leatherwood God (1916), which last, the study of a frontier impostor who proclaims himself a god, best hints at Howells’s views of the relation between the real world which he had so long explored and so lovingly portrayed and those vast spaces which appear to be beyond it for the futile tempting of religionists and romanticists.

Holding so firmly to his religion of reality, and with his varied powers, it is not perhaps to be wondered at that Howells produced in his fourscore books the most considerable transcript of American life yet made by one man. Nor, of course, should it be wondered at, that in spite of his doctrine of impersonality the world of America as he has set it down is full of his benignance and noble health, never illicit or savage and but rarely sordid. His natural gentleness and reserve, even more than the decorous traditions of the seventies and eighties, kept him from the violent frankness of, say, Zola, whose books Howells thought “indecent through the facts that they nakedly represent.” What Howells invariably practiced was a kind of selective realism, choosing his material as a sage chooses his words, decently. Most of his stories end “happily,” that is, in congenial marriages with good expectations. He did not mind employing one favoured situation—in which a humorous husband and a serious wife find themselves responsible for a young girl during her courtship—so often as to suggest a personal experience. Not without some complaint, he nevertheless not too rebelliously accepted the modern novelist’s fate of writing largely for women, a sex which in Howells’s world appears as often shallow and changeful and almost always quite unreasonable. Thus limited as to subjects by his temper and his times, he was likewise limited as to treatment. On every ground he preferred to make relatively little of impassioned or tragic moments, believing that the true bulk of life is to be represented by its common-places. “It will not do,” he wrote, speaking of the ducal palace at Weimar, “to lift either houses or men far out of the average; they become spectacles, ceremonies; they cease to have charm, to have character, which belong to the levels of life, where alone there are ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself, with all the little delightful differences repressed in those who represent and typify.”[26] (The pendulum had swung far since the days when Cooper and Hawthorne repined over the democratic barrenness of American manners!) No one has written more engaging commonplaces than Howells, though perhaps something like the century which has elapsed since the death of Jane Austen—Howells’s ideal among English novelists—will have to pass before the historian can be sure that work artistically flawless may be kept alive, lacking malice or intensity, by ease and grace and charm, by kind wisdom and thoughtful mirth.

Hawthorne and Mrs. Stowe, romance and sentiment, had divided first honours in American fiction during the twenty years 1850–1870; the seventies belonged primarily to the short story of the school of Bret Harte. The novel of that decade, thus a little neglected, profited in at least one respect: it ceased to be the form of fiction on which all beginners tried their pens and passed rather into the hands of men whose eyes looked a little beyond easy conquests and an immediate market. This fact, with the rapid growth of the artistic conscience in the cosmopolitanizing years which followed the Civil War, serves to explain in part the remarkable florescence, the little renaissance of fiction in the eighties.[27] The short story may specially claim Bret Harte, Aldrich, Stockton, Bunner, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Cable, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Charles Egbert Craddock, Johnston, Page,[28] and Joel Chandler Harris,[29]—though they all wrote novels of merit,—because their talents were for pungency, fancy, brevity. But to the novel of the decade three of the five major American novelists, Mark Twain, Howells, Henry James, contributed their greatest triumphs; then appeared Ben-Hur, for a good while rivalled in popularity by Judge Albion Winegar Tourgee’s A Fool’s Errand (1879), a fiery document upon Reconstruction in the South; and there were such diverse pieces as Edward Bellamy’s much-read Utopian romance Looking Backward (1888), dainty exotics like Blanche Willis Howard’s Guenn A Wave on the Breton Coast (1884) and Arthur Sherburne Hardy’s Passe Rose (1889), E. W. Howe’s grim The Story of a Country Town (1883), Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), passionately pleading the cause of the Indians of California, Miss Woolson’s East Angels (1886), just less than a classic, Henry Adams’s[30] Democracy (1880) and John Hay’s[31] The Bread-Winners (1884), excursions into fiction of two men whose largest gifts lay elsewhere, the earlier army novels of General Charles King, and the earlier detective stories of Anna Katharine Green (Rohlfs). As a rule these novels seem more deftly built than the novels of the sixties or seventies, more sophisticated. People talked somewhat less than formerly about “The Great American Novel,” that strange eidolon so clearly descended from the large aspirations of men like Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow[32] but by 1850 thought of less as an epic which should enshrine the national past than as a great prose performance reflecting the national present.

In the eighties began the career of that later American writer who gave to the novel his most complete allegiance, undeterred by the vogue of briefer narratives or other forms of literature. Francis Marion Crawford, son of the sculptor Thomas Crawford and nephew of Julia Ward Howe, was born at Bagni di Lucca, Tuscany, in 1854. He prepared for college at St. Paul’s School, New Hampshire, and entered Harvard, but soon left it to study in Europe, successively at Cambridge, Heidelberg, and Rome. Having become interested in Sanscrit, and having lost his expectations of a fortune, he went to India and there edited The Indian Herald at Allahabad. In 1881 he returned to America, spent another year upon Sanscrit with Professor Lanman of Harvard, and wrote his first novel, Mr. Isaacs (1882), on the advice of an uncle who had been struck by Crawford’s oral account of the central personage. The success of the experiment was so prompt and complete that its author recognized his vocation once for all, much as does George Wood in The Three Fates (1892), a novel admitted to be partly autobiographical. Crawford went to Italy in 1883, and thereafter spent most of his life at Sorrento. He still travelled, grew wealthy from the sale of his novels, became a Roman Catholic, and died in 1909.

Except that toward the end of his life he partly turned from fiction to sober—and not remarkably spirited—history, Crawford can hardly be said to have changed his methods from his earliest novel to his latest. Improvisation was his knack and forte; he wrote much and speedily. His settings he took down, for the most part, from personal observation in the many localities he knew at first hand; his characters, too, are frequently studies from actual persons. In his plots, commonly held his peculiar merit, Crawford cannot be called distinctly original: he employs much of the paraphernalia of melodrama—lost or hidden wills, forgeries, great persons in disguise, sudden legacies, physical violence; moreover, it is almost a formula with him to carry a story by natural motives until about the last third, when melodrama enters to perplex the narrative and to arouse due suspense until the triumphant and satisfying dènouement. And yet so fresh, strong, and veracious is the movement that it nearly obscures these conventional elements. Movement, indeed, not plot in the stricter sense, is Crawford’s chief excellence. He could not tell a story badly, but flowed on without breaking or faltering, managing his material and disposing his characters and scenes without apparent effort, in a style always clear and bright. This lightness of movement is accompanied, perhaps accounted for, by an absence of profound ideas or of any of that rich colour of life which comes only—as in Scott, Balzac, Tolstoy—when fiction is deeply based in a native soil. As to his ideas, Crawford appears to have had few that were unusual, and at least he suspected such ideas as the substance of fiction, about the aims and uses of which he is very explicit in The Novel: What It Is (1893). Novelists he called “public amusers,” who must always write largely about love and in Anglo-Saxon countries must write under the eyes of the ubiquitous young girl. They might therefore as well be reconciled to the exigencies of their business. For his own part he thought problem novels odious, cared nothing for dialect or local colour, believed it a mistake to make a novel too minute a picture of one generation lest another should think it “old-fashioned,” and preferred to regard the novel as a sort of “pocket-theatre”—with ideals, it should be added, much like those of the British and American stage from 1870 to 1890.

Thus far Crawford was carried by his cosmopolitan training and ideals: he believed that human beings are much the same everywhere and can be made intelligible everywhere if reported lucidly and discreetly. Reading his books is like conversing with a remarkably humane, sharp-eyed traveller who appears —at least at first—to have seen every nook and corner of the world. Zoroaster (1885), Khaled (1891), and Via Crucis (1898) have their scenes laid in Asia; Paul Patoff (1887), in Constantinople; The Witch of Prague (1891), in Bohemia; Dr. Claudius (1883), Greifenstein (1889), and A Cigarette-Maker’s Romance (1890), in Germany; In the Palace of the King (1900), in Spain; A Tale of a Lonely Parish (1886) and Fair Margaret (1905), in England; An American Politician (1885), The Three Fates (1892), Marion Darche (1893), Katharine Lauderdale (1894), and The Ralstons (1895), in America; and, most important group of all, the Italian tales, of which A Roman Singer (1884), Marzio’s Crucifix (1887), The Children of the King (1892), and Pietro Ghisleri (1893) are but little less interesting than the famous Roman series,—Saracinesca (1887), Sant’Ilario (1889), Don Orsino (1892), and Corleone (1896). The Saracinesca cycle most of all promises to survive, partly because as a cycle it is imposing but even more particularly because here Crawford’s merits appear to best advantage. After all, though he considered himself an American, and though he knew many parts of the globe, he knew the inner circles of Rome better than any other section of society, and really minute knowledge came, as it did not always in his stories of America, for instance, and almost never did in his historical tales, to the aid of his invariable qualities of movement and lucidity and large general knowledge of life. If in this admirable cycle, which is to Crawford’s total work much what the Leather-Stocking cycle is to Cooper’s, Crawford actually achieved less than Cooper, it is to some extent for the reason that some cosmopolitanism finds it even harder than does some provincialism to impart to fiction true depth and body; that reality, like charity, often begins at home.

In the eighties realism was the dominant creed in fiction, which in practice followed its creed somewhat closely, with exceptions, of course, among the purely popular novelists like Roe and General Wallace. The same decade, however, saw the beginnings of two movements which became marked in the nineties, both of them natural outcomes of the official realism of Howells and James. One led, by reaction, to the rococo type of historical romance which flourished enormously at the end of the century; and the other to the harsher naturalism which shook off the decorums of the first realists, contended with the historical romancers, first succumbed to them, and then succeeded them in power and favour. The historical tendency, less than the naturalistic a matter of doctrine, came at first from the South and West: from writers who painted the amiable colours of antebellum plantation life—Cable, Page, Joel Chandler Harris; or from California, from writers who tried to catch the charm of old Spanish days—Bret Harte and Helen Hunt Jackson; or from the Mississippi Valley, from writers who, thanks to Parkman, had discovered the richness and variety of the French règime there—Constance Fenimore Woolson and Mary Hartwell Catherwood. Of all these Mrs. Jackson wrote perhaps the best single romance in Ramona (1884), a story aimed to carry forward an indictment, already begun in the same author’s A Century of Dishonor (1881), against the treatment of the Indians by their white conquerors. Ramona, however, and her Temecula husband Alessandro have so little Indian blood that their wrongs seem less those of Indians than the wrongs which all the older Californians, Indian or Spanish, suffered from the predacious vanguard of the Anglo-Saxon conquest. And the romance dominates the problem. For Mrs. Jackson, Spanish California had been a paradise of patriarchal estates set in fertile valleys, steeped in drowsy antiquity, and cherished by fine unworldly priests. Her tragic story derives much of its impressiveness from the pomp of its setting, the strength of its contrasts, its passionate colour and poetry. Mrs. Catherwood wrote graceful and engaging but not quite permanent tales, from The Romance of Dollard (1889) to Lazarre (1901), which added a definite little province to our historical fiction—the French in the interior of the continent.

But the later historical romance is best studied in the work of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1913) of Pennsylvania, who, on the advice of Oliver Wendell Holmes, early set aside his literary ambitions until he should have established himself in a profession, became one of the most eminent of medical specialists, particularly in nervous diseases, and only after he was fifty gave much time to verse or fiction, which, indeed, he continued to produce with no diminution of power until the very year of his death. His special knowledge enabled him to write authoritatively of difficult and wayward states of body and mind; as in The Case of George Dedlow (1880), so circumstantial in its impossibilities, Roland Blake (1886), which George Meredith greatly admired, The Autobiography of a Quack (1900), concerning the dishonourable fringes of the medical profession, and Constance Trescott (1905), considered by Dr. Mitchell his best-constructed novel and certainly his most thorough-going study of a pathological mood. His psychological stories, however, had on the whole neither the appeal nor the merit of his historical romances, which began with Hephzibah Guinness (1880) and extended to Westways (1913). Westways is a large and truthful chronicle of the effects of the Civil War in Pennsylvania, but Mitchell’s best work belongs to the Revolutionary and Washington cycle: Hugh Wynne Free Quaker Sometimes Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel on the Staff of his Excellency General Washington (1896), The Youth of Washington Told in the Form of an Autobiography (1904), and The Red City A Novel of the Second Administration of President Washington (1908). Dr. Mitchell’s own favourite among his books, The Adventures of François, Foundling, Thief, Juggler, and Fencing-Master during the French Revolution (1898), stands as close to the American stories as did Paris to the city of Franklin in the later eighteenth century. Revolutionary these narratives are only by virtue of the time in which they take place, for their sympathies are almost wholly with the aristocrats in France, with the respectable and Federalist classes in America. Philadelphia, generally the centre of the action, appears under a softer, mellower light than has been thrown by our romaneers upon any other Revolutionary city, and Washington, though drawn, like Philadelphia, as much to the life as Dr. Mitchell could draw him, is a demigod still.

By the time The Red City appeared its type was losing vogue, but Hugh Wynne and The Adventures of François came on the high tide of the remarkable outburst of historical romance just preceding the Spanish War. The best books of the sort need but to be named: Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), Frederic Jesup Stimson’s King Noanett (1896), James Lane Allen’s The Choir Invisible (1897), Charles Major’s When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898), Mary Johnston’s Prisoners of Hope (1898) and To Have and To Hold (1899), Paul Leicester Ford’s Janice Meredith (1899), Winston Churchill’s Richard Carvel (1899) and The Crisis (1901), Booth Tarkington’s Monsieur Beaucaire (1900), Maurice Thompson’s Alice of Old Vincennes (1900), Henry Harland’s The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box (1901). In part they were an American version of the movement led in England by Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, and Anthony Hope; the “Ruritanian” romance, for instance, of Anthony Hope was so popular as to be delightfully parodied in George Ade’s The Slim Princess (1907); all these tales were courtly, high-sounding, decorative, and poetical. But their enormous popularity—some of them sold half a million copies in the two or three years of their brief heyday—points to some native condition. In the history of the American imagination they must be thought of as marking that moment at which, in the excitement which accompanied the Spanish War, the nation suddenly rediscovered a longer and more picturesque past than it had been popularly aware of since the Civil War. The episode was brief, and most of the books now seem gilt where some of them once looked like gold, but it was a vivid moment in the national consciousness, and if it founded no new legends it deepened old ones.

Romance did not have the field entirely during these years, for there was also a strong naturalistic trend, which dated from the eighties, when Henry James had seemed too foreign and Howells too hopeful. In 1883 Edgar Watson Howe, of Kansas, had published The Story of a Country Town, a book almost painfully overlooked and yet worthy to be mentioned with Wuthering Heights or Moby Dick for power and terror. Unlike those two it lacks locality, as if the bare, sunburned Kansas plain had no real depth, no mystery in itself, and could find no native motif but the smoldering discontent of that inarticulate frontier. Sternest, grimmest of American novels, it moves with the cold tread and the hard diction of a saga. No shallow mind could have conceived the blind, black, impossible passion of Joe Erring or have conducted it to the purgation and tranquillity which succeeds the catastrophe. Plainly, the author had deliberately hardened his heart against the too facile views of contemporary novelists. It is this stiffening of the conscience which goes with all the later naturalistic writers in America; they are polemic haters of the national optimism. Howe’s early experiment was followed, not imitated, by a brilliant group of writers undoubtedly nearer to Zola than to Howells: Hamlin Garland,[33] best in short stories, who stressed the sordid facts of Middle Western farm life and who spoke for the group in his volume of essays Crumbling Idols (1894); Henry Blake Fuller, who wrote The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani (1890) under the ægis of Charles Eliot Norton and then the realistic novel of Chicago, The Cliff-Dwellers (1893); Harold Frederic, who after his lucid and accurate romance of the Mohawk, In the Valley (1890), followed Ambrose Bierce[34] with energetic Civil War stories and later made a sensation with The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) and The Market-Place (1899); and the notable pair who promised much but died young, Stephen Crane (1871–1900) and Frank Norris (1870–1902).

Crane was a genius who intensely admired Tolstoy and somewhat febrilely aimed at absolute truthfulness in his fiction. Maggie A Girl of the Streets (1896), written when he was but twenty-one, gave a horrible picture of a degenerate Irish family in New York and the tragedy of its eldest daughter; its violent plain speaking seemed very new when it appeared. Crane’s great success, however, attended The Red Badge of Courage An Episode of the American Civil War (1895), a reconstruction, by a man who at the time of writing knew war only from books, of the mental states of a recruit when first under fire. A greater war has made the theme widely familiar, but Crane’s performance still seems more than an amazingly clever tour de force; it is a real feat of the imagination. Norris had larger aims than Crane and on the whole achieved more, though no one of his books excels the Red Badge. He was one of the least sectional of American novelists, with a vision of his native land which attached him to the movement, then under discussion, to “continentalize” American literature by breaking up the parochial habits of the local colour school. He had a certain epic disposition, tended to vast plans, and conceived trilogies. His “Epic of the Wheat”—The Octopus (1901), The Pit (1903), and The Wolf (never written)—he thought of as the history of the cosmic spirit of wheat moving from the place of its production in California to the place of its consumption in Europe. Another trilogy to which he meant to give years of work would have centred about the battle of Gettysburg, one part for each day, and would have sought to present what Norris considered the American spirit as his Epic of the Wheat presented an impersonal force of nature. Such conceptions explain his grandiose manner and the passion of his naturalism, which he was even willing to call romanticism provided he could mean by it the search for truths deeper than the surface truths of orthodox realism. He had a strong vein of mysticism; he habitually occupied himself with “elemental” emotions. His heroes are nearly all violent men, wilful, passionate, combative; his heroines—thick-haired, large-armed women—are endowed with a rich and deep, if slow, vitality. Love, in Norris’s world is the mating of vikings and valkyries. Love, however, is not his sole concern. The Pacific and California novels, Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), Blix (1899), McTeague (1899), A Man’s Woman (1900), as well as The Octopus, are full of ardently detailed actualities; The Pit is a valuable representation of a "corner” on the Chicago Board of Trade. In all these his eagerness to be truthful gave Norris a large energy, particularly in scenes of action, but his speed and vividness are not matched by his body and meaning.

Much the same thing may be said of Jack London (1876–1916), one or two of whose novels will likely outlast his short stories,[35] important as they were in his best days, and close kin as his stories and novels are in subjects, style, and temper. Norris’s “elemental” in London became “abysmal” passions. He carried the cult of “red-blood” to its logical, if not ridiculous, extreme. And yet he has a sort of Wild-Irish power that will not go unnoted. John Barleycorn (1913) is an amazingly candid confession of London’s own struggles with alcohol. Martin Eden (1909), also autobiographical, though assumed names appear in it, recounts the terrific labours by which in three years London made himself from a common sailor into a popular author. The Sea-Wolf (1904) reveals at its fullest his appetite for cold ferocity in its record of the words and deeds of Wolf Larsen, a Nietzschean, Herculean, Satanic ship captain, whose incredible strength terminates credibly in sudden paralysis and impotence. Most popular of all, and best equipped for survival, is The Call of the Wild (1903), the story of a dog stolen from civilization to draw a sledge in Alaska, eventually to escape from human control and go back to the wild as leader of a pack of wolves. As in most animal tales, the narrative is sentimentalized, but there runs through it, along with its deadly perils and adventures, an effective sensitiveness to the Alaskan wastes, a robust, moving, genuine current of poetry.

A real, however narrow, gulf separates London from such colleagued naturalists as Richard Harding Davis, better in short stories[36] than in novels, and often romantic, or even from David Graham Phillips (1867–1911), whose bitter war upon society and “Society” culminated in the two volumes of Susan Lenox (1917), the only extended portrait of an American courtesan No one of them all had quite London’s boyish energy, quite his romantic audacity in naturalism. And the tendency of fiction is just at present away from the world of “elemental” excitement to more civil phases of life, a newer form of realism having succeeded alike the episode of naturalism and the antithetical episode of historical romance. At the same time there are still novels of many types: domestic and sentimental romances; tales of wild adventure; stories written to exploit a single character in the tradition of F. Hopkinson Smith’s[37] Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891), Edward Noyes Westcott’s David Harum (1898), and Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1905); a few records of exotic life at the ends of the earth; narratives, nicely skirting salaciousness, of “fast” New York; affectionate, idealized portrayals, as in the work of James Lane Allen for Kentucky, of particular states or neighbourhoods. But no tendency quite so clearly prevails as romance in the thirties, sentimentalism in the fifties, realism in the eighties, or naturalism at the turn of the century.

Bibliographical and Critical[edit]

  • American Backgrounds for Fiction [:] Georgia. Will N. Harben. Bookman, Oct., 1913; The Pennsylvania “Dutch.” Helen R. Martin. Nov., 1913; North Carolina. Thomas Dixon. Jan., 1914; The North Country of New York. Irving Bacheller. Feb., 1914; Arkansas, Louisiana, and the Gulf Country. Ruth McEnery Stuart. Aug., 1914.
  • Blanc, Marie Thérèse de Solms (“Th. Bentzon”). Les nouveaux romanciers américains. Paris, 1885. [Among others, Howells, Cable, Crawford.] Le roman historique aux Etats Unis. Deux Mondes, 1 Apr., 1906.
  • Bogart, E.L. Historical Novels in American History. History Teachers’ Magazine, Sept., 1917.
  • Carruth, F. W. Boston in Fiction. Bookman, Nov., 1901-Feb., 1912.
  • Cooper, F. T. Some American Story Tellers. 1911. [Among others, Crawford, Phillips, Wister, Norris.]
  • [De Forest, J. W.] The Great American Novel. Nation, 9 Jan., 1868.
  • Dell, F. Chicago in Fiction. Bookman, Nov.-Dec., 1913.
  • De Menil, A. N. The Literature of the Louisiana Territory, St. Louis, 1904. [Among others, Cable, Howe, Charles Egbert Craddock.]
  • Fiske, H.S. Provincial Types in American Fiction. Chautauqua, 1903.
  • Ford, P. L. The American Historical Novel. Atlantic, Dec., 1897.
  • Harvey, C.M. The Dime Novel in American Life. Atlantic, July, 1907.
  • Harwood, W.S. New Orleans in Fiction. Critic, Nov., 1905.
  • Herrick, R. The Background of the American Novel. Yale Review, Jan., 1914. The American Novel. Ibid. Apr., 1914.
  • Howells, W. D. Certain of the Chicago School of Fiction. North American, May, 1903.
  • Lathrop, G. P. The Novel and its Future. Atlantic, Sept., 1874.
  • Mabie, H. W. American Fiction Old and New. Outlook, 26 Oct., 1912.
  • Maurice, A. B. New York in Fiction. 1901. The New York of the Novelists. 1916.
  • Millard, Bailey. San Francisco in Fiction. Bookman, Aug., 1910.
  • Morse, J.H. Native Elements in Fiction. Century, June-July, 1883.
  • Nicholson, M. The Hoosiers. 1900. [Among others, Eggleston, Wallace.]
  • Pattee, F.L. A History of American Literature since 1870. 1915.
  • Perry, T. S. American Novels. North American, Oct., 1872. [Discusses the term “Great American Novel.”]
  • Quinn, A. H. The American Novel—Past and Present. University Lectures delivered by Members of the Faculty in the Free Public Lecture Course 1913–1914. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1915.
  • South in Fiction, The [:] Kentucky and Tennessee. Isaac F. Marcosson. Bookman, Dec., 1910; Virginia. Louise Collier Willcox. Mar., 1911; The Trail of the Lower South. Montrose J. Moses. Apr., 1911.
  • Northup, C. S. The Novelists. Stanton, T. [ed.]. A Manual of American Literature, 1909.
  • Swift, L. Boston as Portrayed in Fiction. Book Buyer, Oct., 1901.
  • Toulmin, H. A., Jr. Social Historians.

Boston, 1911. [Among others, Page, Cable, Charles Egbert Craddock, Allen.]

  • Trent, W. P. American Literature [1880–1900]. Dial, 1 May, 1900. Latter-Day Writers. A Brief History of American Literature. 1904.
  • Van Doren, Carl. The American Novel. 1921.
  • Vedder, H. C. American Writers of To-day. 1894. [Among others, Howells, Aldrich, Crawford, Charles Egbert Craddock, Harte, Hale, Eggleston, Cable, Stockton.]
  • Underwood, J. C. The Literature of Insurgency. 1914. [Among others, Howells, Norris, Phillips.]
  • William, C. Philadelphia in Fiction. Bookman, Dec., 1902.
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book II, Chaps. VI and VII.

Individual Authors[edit]

Author:Henry Adams[edit]

  • Democracy. An American Novel. 1880. Esther [under pseudonym, Frances Snow Compton.] 1884.
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book III, Chap. XV.

Author:Thomas Bailey Aldrich[edit]

  • Daisy’s Necklace: And What Came of It. (A Literary Episode.) 1857. Out of his Head. A Romance. 1862. The Story of a Bad Boy. Boston, 1870. Prudence Palfrey. A Novel. 1874. The Queen of Sheba. Boston, 1877. The Stillwater Tragedy. 1880. From Ponkapog to Pesth. Boston and New York, 1883. The Second Son. A Novel. Boston and New York, 1888. [With M. O. W. Oliphant.] An Old Town by the Sea. Boston and New York, 1893. Ponkapog Papers. Boston and New York, 1903.
  • See, also, Bibliographies to Book III, Chaps. VI and X.
  • Greenslet, Ferris. The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Boston and New York, 1908.
  • North, E. D. A Bibliography of the Original Editions of the Works of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Book Buyer, May, 1901.

Author:James Lane Allen[edit]

  • Flute and Violin and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances. 1891. The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky and Other Kentucky Articles. 1892. A Kentucky Cardinal. A Story. 1895. Aftermath. Part Second of A Kentucky Cardinal. 1896. Summer in Arcady. A Tale of Nature. 1896. The Choir Invisible. 1897. [Based on John Gray. A Kentucky Tale of the Olden Time. Originally published in 1893.] Two Gentlemen of Kentucky. 1899. The Reign of Law. A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields. 1900. The Mettle of the Pasture. 1903. The Bride of the Mistletoe. 1909. The Doctor’s Christmas Eve. 1910. The Heroine in Bronze or A Portrait of a Girl. A Pastoral of the City. 1912. The Last Christmas Tree. An Idyl of Immortality. Portland, Me., 1914. The Sword of Youth. 1915. A Cathedral Singer. 1916. The Kentucky Warbler. 1918. The Emblems of Fidelity. 1919.
  • Henneman, J. B. James Lane Allen. Shakespearean and Other Papers. Sewanee, Tenn., 1901.

Author:Edward Bellamy[edit]

  • Six to One. A Nantucket Idyl. 1878. Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process. 1880. Miss Ludington’s Sister. A Romance of Immortality. Boston, 1884. Looking Backward 2000–1887. Boston, 1888. [405th thousand, 1889.] Equality [sequel to Looking Backward]. Boston, 1897. The Blind Man’s World and Other Stories. Boston and New York, 1898. [Int. by Howells, W. D.] The Duke of Stockbridge. A Romance of Shays’ Rebellion. 1900.

Author:Henry Cuyler Bunner[edit]

  • A Woman of Honor. Boston, 1883. The Midge. 1886. Jersey Street and Jersey Lane. 1896.
  • See, also, Bibliographies to Book II, Chap. XXIII, and Book III, Chap. VI.
  • Paine, H. G. H. C. Bunner and his Circle. Bookman, June, 1912.

Author:George Washington Cable[edit]

  • The Grandissimes. A Story of Creole Life. 1880. The Creoles of Louisiana. 1884. The Silent South…. 1885. Dr. Sevier. Boston, 1885. Bonaventure. A Prose Pastoral of Louisiana. 1888. The Negro Question. 1890. John March, Southerner. 1894. The Cavalier. 1901. Bylow Hill. 1902. Kincaid’s Battery. 1908. The Amateur Garden. 1914. Gideon’s Band. A Tale of the Mississippi. 1914. The Flower of the Chapdelaines. 1918. Lovers of Louisiana (Today). 1918.
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book III, Chap. VI.

Author:Mary Hartwell Catherwood[edit]

  • The Romance of Dollard. [1889.] The Story of Tonty. Chicago, 1890. The Lady of Fort St. John. Boston and New York, 1891. Old Kaskaskia. Boston and New York, 1893. The White Islander. 1893. The Chase of Saint Castin and Other Stories of the French in the New World. Boston and New York, 1894. The Days of Jeanne D’Arc. 1897. The Spirit of an Illinois Town and The Little Renault. Two Stories of Illinois at Different Periods. Boston and New York, 1897. Heroes of the Middle West: The French. Boston, 1898. Spanish Peggy. A Story of Young Illinois. Chicago and New York, 1899. The Queen of the Swamp and Other Plain Americans. Boston and New York, 1899. Mackinac and Lake Stories. 1899. Lazarre. Indianapolis [1901].

Author:John Esten Cooke[edit]

  • Leather Stocking and Silk; or, Hunter John Myers and his Times. A Story of the Valley of Virginia. 1854. The Virginia Comedians, or, Old Days in the Old Dominion. Edited from the MSS. of C. Effingham, Esq. 1854. 2 vols. Also issued as two separate novels: Beatrice Hallam, Captain Ralph. New ed. with new preface, 1883. The Youth of Jefferson or A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764. 1854. Ellie; or, the Human Comedy. Richmond, 1855. The Last of the Foresters; or, Humors on the Border; a Story of the Old Virginia Frontier. New York and Cincinnati, 1856. Henry St. John, Gentleman, of “Flower of Hundreds,” in the County of Prince George, Virginia. A Tale of 1774–’75. 1859. As Bonnybel Vane. Embracing the History of Henry St. John, Gentleman. 1883. The Life of Stonewall Jackson. From Official Papers, Contemporary Narratives and Personal Acquaintance. By a Virginian. Richmond, 1863. Pirated ed. claiming to be “Reprinted from the advance sheets of the Richmond edition,” New York, 1863. As Stonewall Jackson: a Military Biography. New York, 1866. Surry of Eagle’s-Nest; or, the Memoirs of a Staff-Officer serving in Virginia. Edited from the MSS. of Colonel Surry. 1866. Wearing of the Gray; being Personal Portraits, Scenes and Adventures of the War. 1867. Fairfax: or, The Master of Greenway Court. A Chronicle of the Valley of the Shenandoah, New York and London, 1868. As Lord Fairfax; or, The Master of Greenway Court, 1892. Hilt to Hilt; or, Days and Nights on the Banks of the Shenandoah in the Autumn of 1864. 1869. Mohun; or, the Last Days of Lee and his Paladins. Final Memoirs of a Staff Officer serving in Virginia. From the MSS. of Colonel Surry, of Eagle’s Nest. 1869. The Heir of Gaymount: a Novel. 1870. A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee. 1871. As Robert E. Lee. 1893. Hammer and Rapier. 1871. Out of the Foam. A Novel. New York and London, 1871. Doctor Vandyke. A Novel. 1872. Her Majesty the Queen. A Novel. Philadelphia, 1873. Pretty Mrs. Gaston, and Other Stories. [1874.] Justin Harley: a Romance of Old Virginia. Philadelphia, 1875. Canolles: the Fortunes of a Partisan of ’81. Detroit, 1877. Professor Pressensee. Materialist and Inventor. A Story. 1878. Mr. Grantley’s Idea. 1879. Stories of the Old Dominion from the Settlement to the End of the Revolution. [1879.] The Virginia Bohemians. A Novel. 1880. Fanchette. By One of her Admirers. Boston, 1883. Virginia; a History of the People. Boston and New York, 1883. (American Commonwealths series.) New ed. with supplementary chapter by Brown, W. G., 1903. The Maurice Mystery. 1885. My Lady Pokahontas. A True Relation of Virginia. Writ by Anas Todkill, Puritan and Pilgrim. With Notes by John Esten Cooke. Boston and New York, 1885.
  • Armstrong, J. L. John Esten Cooke. Library of Southern Literature. 1909–13.
  • Davidson, J. W. The Living Writers of the South. 1869.
  • Preston, Margaret J. A Virginian of the Virginians. Critic, 16 Oct., 1886. A biography of Cooke by John Beaty is to appear shortly.

Author:Stephen Crane[edit]

  • The Black Riders and Other Lines [verse]. Boston, 1895. The Red Badge of Courage. An Episode of the American Civil War. 1895. Maggie. A Girl of the Streets. 1896 [privately printed, 1893]. The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War. 1896. As Pictures of War. London 1916]. George’s Mother. 1896. The Third Violet. 1897. The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure. 1898. The Monster and Other Stories. 1899. War is Kind. 1899. Active Service. A Novel. [1899.] Wounds in the Rain. War Stories. [1900.] Whilomville Stories. 1900. Great Battles of the World. Philadelphia, 1901. The O’Ruddy. A Romance. [1903.] [With Robert Barr.]
  • Garland, H. Stephen Crane as I Knew Him. Yale Review, Apr., 1914.
  • Hitchcock, R. Preface to 1900 ed. of The Red Badge of Courage.
  • Wells, H. G. Stephen Crane. From an English Standpoint. North American Review, Aug., 1900.

Author:Francis Marion Crawford[edit]

  • Mr. Isaacs. A Tale of Modern India. 1882. Doctor Claudius. A True Story. 1883. A Roman Singer. 1884. To Leeward. 1884. An American Politician. Boston, 1885. Zoroaster. 1885. Also written in French: Zoroastre. Paris, 1887. Preface by Chesneau, E. A Tale of a Lonely Parish. 1886. Marzio’s Crucifix. 1887. Also written in French: Le Crucifix de Marzio. Paris, 1888. Preface by Filon, A. Paul Patoff. 1887. Saracinesca. 1887. With the Immortals. 1888. Greifenstein. 1889. Sant’ Ilario. 1889. A Cigarette-Maker’s Romance. 1890. Khaled. A Tale of Arabia. 1891. The Witch of Prague. A Fantastic Tale. 1891. Don Orsino. 1892. The Three Fates. 1892. The Children of the King. A Tale of Southern Italy. 1892. Pietro Ghisleri. 1893. [Entered for copyright with the title Laura Arden, 1892.] Marion Darche. A Story without Comment. 1893. The Novel: What It is. 1893. Casa Braccio. 1894. 2 vols. Katherine Lauderdale. 1894. 2 vols. Love in Idleness. A Bar Harbour Tale. 1894. As Love in Idleness. A Tale of Bar Harbour. 1894. The Upper Berth. 1894. Adam Johnstone’s Son. 1895. Constantinople. 1895. The Ralstons. 1895. 2 vols. Taquisara. 1895. 2 vols. Bar Harbour. 1896. Corleone. A Tale of Sicily. 1896. 2 vols. A Rose of Yesterday. 1897. Ave Roma Immortalis. Studies from the Chronicles of Rome. 1898. 2 vols. Via Crucis. A Romance of the Second Crusade. 1898. In the Palace of the King. A Love Story of Old Madrid. 1900. The Rulers of the South. Sicily, Calabria, Malta. 1900. 2 vols. As Southern Italy and Sicily and The Rulers of the South. 1914. 2 vols. Marietta, a Maid of Venice. 1901. Cecilia. A Story of Modern Rome. 1902. Francesca da Rimini. A Play in Four Acts. 1902. The Heart of Rome. A Tale of the “Lost Water.” 1903. Man Overboard! 1903. Whosoever Shall Offend. 1904. Fair Margaret. A Portrait. 1905. Salve Venetia. Gleanings from Venetian History. 1905. 2 vols. As Venice the Place and the People…. 1909. 2 vols. A Lady of Rome. 1906. Arethusa. 1907. The Little City of Hope. A Christmas Story. 1907. The Primadonna. A Sequel to “Fair Margaret.” 1908. The Diva’s Ruby. A Sequel to “Primadonna” and “Fair Magaret.” 1908. Stradella. 1909. The Undesirable Governess. 1909. The White Sister. 1909. Wandering Ghosts. 1911. As Uncanny Tales. London, 1911.
  • Beerbohm, Max. Crawford versus Dante. Saturday Review, 21 June, 1902.
  • Bernardy, Amy A. Roma e l’Italia nell’Opera di F. M. Crawford. Nuova Antologia di Lettere, Scienze ed Arti, Sept., 1903.
  • Bridges, R. F. Marion Crawford: A Conversation. McClure’s Magazine, Mar., 1895.
  • Ramee, Louise de la (“Ouida”). The Italian Novels of Marion Crawford. Nineteenth Century, Nov., 1897.
  • Trent, W. P. Mr. Crawford’s Novels. Sewanee Review, Feb., 1894.

Author:Richard Harding Davis[edit]

  • Soldiers of Fortune. 1897. Her First Appearance. 1901. Captain Macklin. 1902. Farces…. 1906. The White Mice. 1909. The Deserter. 1917. The Boy Scout and Other Stories. 1917. Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis. 1917. Ed. Charles Belmont Davis.
  • See, also, Bibliographies to Book III, Chaps. VI and XIV.

Author:John William De Forest[edit]

  • History of the Indians of Connecticut from the Earliest Known Period to 1850. Hartford, 1851. Oriental Acquaintance; or, Letters from Syria. 1856. European Acquaintance: being Sketches of People in Europe. 1858. Seacliff; or, The Mystery of the Westervelts. Boston, 1859. Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. 1867. Kate Beaumont. Boston, 1872. Overland. A Novel. [1872.] The Wetherel Affair. 1873. Honest John Vane. A Story. New Haven, 1875. Playing the Mischief. A Novel. 1875. Irene the Missionary. Boston, 1879. The Bloody Chasm. A Novel. 1881. As The Oddest of Courtships. 1882. A Lover’s Revolt. 1898. The De Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherland) … New Haven, 1900. The Downing Legends; Stories in Rhyme. New Haven, 1901. Poems; Medley and Palestina. New Haven, 1902.
  • Howells, W. D. My Literary Passions. 1895. [The discussion of De Forest was omitted from later editions.]

Author:Edward Eggleston[edit]

  • The Hoosier Schoolmaster. A Novel. 1871. The End of the World. A Love Story. 1872. The Mystery of Metropolisville. 1873. The Circuit Rider: A Tale of the Heroic Age. 1874. Roxy. 1878. Queer Stories for Boys and Girls. 1884. [Made up of two books: The Book of True Stories and Stories told on a Cellar Door, 1871, and The Schoolmaster’s Stories for Boys and Girls. Boston, 1874.] The Graysons. A Story of Illinois. 1888. The Faith Doctor. A Story of New York. 1891. Duffels. 1893.
  • See, also, Bibliographies to Book III, Chaps. VII and XV.
  • Eggleston, George Cary. The First of the Hoosiers. Philadelphia, 1903.
  • Nicholson, M. The Hoosiers. 1900. Edward Eggleston. Atlantic, Dec., 1902.

Author:Edward S. Ellis[edit]

  • See Bibliography to Book III, Chap. VII.

Author:Paul Leicester Ford[edit]

  • The Best Laid Plans. 1889. The Honorable Peter Sterling and What People Thought of Him. 1894. The Great K. & A. Train Robbery. 1897. The Story of an Untold Love. Boston and New York, 1897. Tattle-Tales of Cupid. 1898. Janice Meredith. A Story of the American Revolution. 1899. Wanted—A Match Maker. 1900. A House Party. 1901. Wanted—A Chaperon. 1902. A Checked Love Affair and The Cortelyou Feud. 1903. Love Finds the Way. 1904. His Version of It. 1905. A Warning to Lovers & Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the Gander. 1906. [Ford was also important as bibliographer and editor of Americana.]

Author:Harold Frederic[edit]

  • Seth’s Brother’s Wife. A Study of Life in the Greater New York. 1887. The Lawton Girl. 1890. In the Valley. 1890. The Young Emperor, William II of Germany. 1891. The Return of the O’Mahony. A Novel. 1892. The New Exodus: A Study of Israel in Russia. 1892. The Copperhead. 1893. Marsena, and Other Stories of the Wartime. 1894. Mrs. Albert Grundy. Observations in Philistia. London and New York, 1896. March Hares. 1896. The Damnation of Theron Ware. Chicago, 1896. In the Sixties. 1897. Gloria Mundi. A Novel. Chicago, 1898. The Deserter and Other Stories. A Book of Two Wars. Boston, 1898. The Market-Place. 1899.

Author:Mary E. Wilkins Freeman[edit]

  • Giles Corey, Yeoman. A Play. 1893. Jane Field. A Novel. 1893. Pembroke. A Novel. [1894.] Biographical ed., 1899. Madelon. A Novel. 1896. Jerome, a Poor Man. A Novel. 1897. The Heart’s Highway. A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. 1900. The Portion of Labor. 1901. The Debtor. A Novel. 1905. Doc Gordon. 1906. By the Light of the Soul. A Novel. 1906. The Shoulders of Atlas. A Novel. 1908. The Butterfly House. 1912. An Alabaster Box. 1917 [with Florence Morse Kingsley].
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book III, Chap. VI.

Author:Henry Blake Fuller[edit]

  • The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani. Boston [1890]. The Chatelaine of La Trinité. 1892. The Cliff-Dwellers. 1893. With the Procession. A Novel. 1895. The Puppet Booth. Twelve Plays. 1896. From the Other Side. Stories of Transatlantic Travel. Boston and New York, 1898. The Last Refuge. A Sicilian Romance. Boston and New York, 1900. Under the Skylights. 1901. Waldo Trench and Others. Stories of Americans in Italy. 1908. Lines Long and Short. Biographical Sketches in Various Rhythms. Boston and New York, 1917. On the Stairs. Boston and New York, 1918.

Author:Hamlin Garland[edit]

  • Under the Wheel. A Modern Play in Six Scenes. Boston, 1890. A Spoil of Office. A Story of the Modern West. Boston, 1892. A Member of the Third House. A Dramatic Story. Chicago [1892]. Crumbling Idyls. 1894. Prairie Songs. 1894. Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly. Chicago, 1895. Jason Edwards. An Average Man. 1897. Ulysses S. Grant. His Life and Character. 1898. The Trail of the Goldseekers: A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse. 1899. The Eagle’s Heart. 1900. Her Mountain Lover. 1901. The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop. A Novel. 1902. Hesper. A Novel. 1903. The Light of the Star. A Novel. 1904. The Tyranny of the Dark. 1905. The Long Trail. A Story of the Northwest Wilderness. 1907. Money Magic. A Novel. 1907. Boy Life on the Prairie. 1907. The Shadow World. 1908. The Moccasin Ranch. A Story of Dakota. 1909. Cavanagh, Forest Ranger. A Romance of the Mountain West. 1910. Victor Ollnee’s Discipline. 1911. The Forester’s Daughter. A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range. 1914. They of the High Trails. 1916. A Son of the Middle Border. 1917.
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book III, Chap. VI.
  • Bentzon, Th. (Mme. Blanc). Un Radical de la prairie: Hamlin Garland. Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 Jan., 1900.

Author:John Hay[edit]

  • The Bread-Winners. A Social Study. 1884.
  • See, also, Bibliographies to Book III, Chaps. X and XV.
  • Howells, W. D. John Hay in Literature. North American Review, Sept., 1905.
  • Stanton, T. John Hay and “The Bread-Winners.” Nation, 10 Aug., 1916.

Author:Arthur Sherburne Hardy[edit]

  • Francesca of Rimini. A Poem. Philadelphia, 1878. But Yet a Woman. A Novel. Boston [1883]. The Wind of Destiny. Boston and New York, 1886. Passe Rose. 1889. Life and Letters of Joseph Hardy Neesima. Boston and New York, 1891. Songs of Two. 1900. His Daughter First. Boston and New York, 1903. Aurélie. Boston and New York, 1912. Diane and her Friends. Boston and New York, 1914. Helen. Boston and New York [1916]. No. 13, Rue du Bon Diable. Boston and New York, 1917.

Author:Josiah Gilbert Holland[edit]

  • The Bay-Path; A Tale of New England Colonial Life. 1857. Miss Gilbert’s Career: An American Story. 1860. Arthur Bonnicastle; An American Novel. 1873. Sevenoaks; A Story of Today. 1875. Nicholas Minturn. A Study in a Story. 1877. Complete Works. 1897–1911. 16 vols.
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book III, Chap. X.

Author:Blanche Willis Howard (Baroness von Teuffel)[edit]

  • One Summer. Boston, 1875. One Year Abroad. Boston, 1877. Aunt Serena. Boston, 1881. Guenn. A Wave on the Breton Coast. Boston, 1884. Aulnay Tower. Boston, 1885. Tony the Maid. A Novelette. 1887. The Open Door. Boston and New York, 1889. A Battle and a Boy; A Story for Young People. [1892.] A Fellowe and His Wife. Boston, 1892. No Heroes. Boston and New York, 1893. Seven in the Highway. Boston and New York, 1897. Dionysius the Weaver’s Heart’s Dearest. 1899. The Garden of Eden. 1900.

Author:Edgar Watson Howe[edit]

  • The Story of a Country Town. Atchison, Kansas, 1883. Boston, 1884. The Mystery of The Locks. Boston, 1885. A Moonlight Boy. Boston, 1886. A Man Story. Boston, 1889. An Ante-Mortem Statement. Atchison, 1891. Daily Notes of a Trip around the World. Topeka, 1907. 2 vols. Country Town Sayings: A Collection of Paragraphs from the Atchison Globe. Topeka, 1911. The Trip to the West Indies. Topeka, 1910. Travel Letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa. Topeka [1913]. Ventures in Common Sense. 1919. The Anthology of Another Town. 1920. Several vols. of essays.
  • Howells, W. D. Two Notable Novels. Century Magazine, Aug., 1884.

Author:William Dean Howells[edit]

  • Poems: Poems of Two Friends [Howells and J. J. Piatt]. Columbus [Ohio] 1860. No Love Lost: A Romance of Travel. 1869. Poems. Boston, 1873. Poems. Boston, MDCCCLXXXVI. Stops of Various Quills. MDCCCXCV. Poems. Boston and New York [1901].
  • Prose—Non-fiction: Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin [Life of Lincoln only by Howells]. Columbus, 1860. Venetian Life. 1866. Enlarged ed., Boston, 1872. Italian Journeys. 1867. Enlarged ed. Boston, 1872. Suburban Sketches. 1871. Enlarged ed., Boston, 1872. Sketch of the Life and Character of Rutherford B. Hayes…. Also a Biographical Sketch of William A. Wheeler. 1876. A Day’s Pleasure. Boston, 1876. A Day’s Pleasure and Other Sketches. Boston, 1881. A Little Girl among the Old Masters. With Introduction and Comment…. Boston, 1884 [Pictures by Mildred Howells, aged ten]. Three Villages. Boston, 1884. Tuscan Cities. Boston, 1886. Modern Italian Poets. Essays and Versions. 1887. A Boy’s Town Described for “Harper’s Young People.” [1890.] Criticism and Fiction. MDCCCXCI. A Little Swiss Sojourn. 1892. My Year in a Log Cabin. 1893. My Literary Passions. 1895. Rev. ed. with Criticism and Fiction, n. d. Impressions and Experiences. 1896. Stories of Ohio. [1897.] Literary Friends and Acquaintance. A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship. 1900. Doorstep Acquaintance and Other Sketches. Boston and New York [1900]. Heroines of Fiction. 1901. 2 vols. Literature and Life. Studies. 1902. London Films. 1905. Certain Delightful English Towns with Glimpses of the Pleasant Country Between. 1906. Mulberries in Pay’s Garden. Cincinnati, 1907. Roman Holidays and Others. 1908. Seven English Cities. 1909. Boy Life: Stories and Readings Selected from the Works of William Dean Howells … by Percival Chub. MCMIX. My Mark Twain. Reminiscences and Criticisms. [1910.] Imaginary Interviews. 1910. Familiar Spanish Travels. MCMXIII. The Seen and the Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon. A Fantasy. MCMXIV. In an Old-Time State Capitol. Harper’s, Sept.-Nov., 1914. Buying a Horse. Boston and New York, 1916. Years of My Youth. [1916.]
  • Fiction: Their Wedding Journey. Boston, 1871. A new chapter, Niagara Revisited, Twelve Years after Their Wedding Journey (separately, Chicago [1884]), added in 1888 ed. A Chance Acquaintance. Boston, 1873. A Foregone Conclusion. Boston, 1875. Private Theatricals. Atlantic, Nov., 1875-May, 1876. (Never issued in book form.) The Lady of the Aroostook. Boston, 1879. The Undiscovered Country. Boston, 1880. A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories. Boston, 1881. Doctor Breen’s Practice. A Novel. Boston, 1881. A Modern Instance. A Novel. Boston, 1882. A Woman’s Reason. A Novel. Boston, 1883. The Rise of Silas Lapham. Boston, 1884. Indian Summer. Boston, 1885. The Minister’s Charge. The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker. Boston, 1887. April Hopes. 1888. Annie Kilburn. A Novel. 1889. Character and Comment. Selected from the Novels of William Dean Howells by Minnie Macoun. Boston and New York, 1889. A Hazard of New Fortunes. A Novel. 1889. Eds. in 1 vol. and in 2 vols. Later ed., n. d., has important preface (“Bibliographical”) on the composition of the book, dated July, 1909. The Shadow of a Dream. A Story. 1890. The Quality of Mercy. A Novel. 1892. An Imperative Duty. A Novel. 1892. Christmas Every Day and Other Stories for Children. 1893. The Coast of Bohemia. A Novel. 1893. Biographical Ed. with Introductory Sketch, 1899. The World of Chance. A Novel. 1893. A Traveller from Altruria. Romance. 1894. The Day of Their Wedding. A Novel. 1896. A Parting and a Meeting. Story. 1896. Idyls in Drab. Edinburgh, 1896. The Landlord at Lion’s Head. A Novel. 1897. An Open-Eyed Conspiracy. An Idyl of Saratoga. 1897. The Story of a Play. A Novel. 1898. Their Silver Wedding Journey. A Novel. 1899. In 1 vol. and 2 vols. Ragged Lady. A Novel. 1899. The Howells Story Book. 1900. [Ed. Mary E. Burt and Mildred Howells.] A Pair of Patient Lovers. 1901. [5 stories.] The Flight of Pony Baker. A Boy’s Town Story. 1902. The Kentons. A Novel. 1902. Letters Home. 1903. Questionable Shapes. 1903. [3 stories.] The Son of Royal Langbrith. A Novel. 1904. Miss Bellard’s Inspiration. A Novel. 1905. Between the Dark and the Daylight. Romances. 1907. [7 stories.] Through the Eye of the Needle. A Romance with an Introduction…. 1907. Fennel and Rue. A Novel. 1908. Christmas Every Day. A Story Told a Child. 1908. New Leaf Mills. A Chronicle. MCMXIII. The Leatherwood God. 1916. The Daughter of the Storage and Other Things in Prose and Verse. [1916.] Hither and Thither in Germany. 1920. [Extracted from Their Silver Wedding Journey.] The Vacation of the Kelwyns. 1920.
  • Plays: The Parlor Car. Farce. Boston, 1876. A Counterfeit Presentment. Comedy. Boston, 1877. Out of the Question. A Comedy. Boston, 1877. The Sleeping-Car. A Farce. Boston, 1883. The Register. Farce. Boston, 1884. The Elevator. Farce. Boston, 1885. Five O’Clock Tea. Farce. 1885. The Garroters. Farce. 1886. A Sea-Change or Love’s Stowaway. A Lyricated Farce in Two Acts and an Epilogue. Boston, 1888. The Sleeping-Car and Other Farces. 1889. [4 farces.] The Mouse-Trap and Other Farces. 1889. [4 farces.] The Albany Depot. 1891. A Letter of Introduction. Farce. 1892. The Unexpected Guests. A Farce. 1893. Evening Dress. Farce. 1893. A Likely Story. Farce. [1894.] The Mouse-Trap. Farce. 1894. A Previous Engagement. Comedy. 1897. An Indian Giver. A Comedy. Boston and New York. MDCCCC. The Smoking Car. A Farce. Boston and New York, 1900. Bride Roses. A Scene. Boston and New York, MDCCCC. Room Forty-Five. A Farce. Boston and New York, MDCCCC. Minor Dramas. Edinburgh, 1902. 2 vols. [19 farces.] The Mother and the Father. Dramatic Passages. 1909. Parting Friends. A Farce. MCMXI.
  • Contributed to: George Fuller. His Life and Works. Boston and New York, MDCCCXXXVI. [Howells wrote Sketch of George Fuller’s Life.] The Niagara Book. A Complete Souvenir of Niagara Falls. Buffalo, 1893. [With Mark Twain, N. S. Shaler, and others.] The Magic Book. 1901. [With Mark Twain and others.] The Whole Family. A Novel by Twelve Authors. [1908.] [Howells wrote opening chapter.] In After Days. Thoughts on the Future Life. 1910. [With Henry James, Julia Ward Howe, and others.]
  • Wrote introductions for: Life of Vittorio Alfieri. Boston, 1877. Memoirs of Edward Gibbon, Esq. Boston, 1877. Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni. Boston, 1877. Lives of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Thomas Ellwood. Boston, 1877. Memoirs of Frederica Sophia Wilhelmina, Princess Royal of Prussia, Margravine of Baireuth, Sister of Frederich the Great. Boston, 1877. 2 vols. Memoirs of Jean François Marmontel. Boston, 1878. 2 vols. [Foregoing known as Choice Autobiographies.] Living Truths from the Writings of Charles Kingsley. [1882.] Sebastopol by Count Leo Tolstoi. Translated from the French by Frank D. Millet. 1887. Pastels in Prose. Translated [from the French] by Stuart Merrill. 1890. The House by the Medlar-Tree. By Giovanni Verga. [1890.] South-Sea Idyls by Charles Warren Stoddard. 1892. The Poems of George Pellew. Boston [1892]. Main-Travelled Roads. Being Six Stories of the Mississippi Valley by Hamlin Garland. Chicago, MDCCCXCIII. Master and Man by Count Leo Tolstoi. 1895. Recollections of Life in Ohio, from 1813 to 1840, by William Cooper Howells [W. D. Howells’s father]. Cincinnati, 1895. Doña Perfecta by Perez Galdós. 1896. Lyrics of Lowly Life by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. 1896. English Society Sketched by George Du Maurier. 1897. The Blindman’s World and Other Stories by Edward Bellamy. Boston and New York, 1898. Harper’s Novelettes. 8 vols. [Edited by Howells and H. M. Alden.] [1906–07.] [Titles as follows:] The Heart of Childhood, Quaint Courtships, Under the Sunset, Their Husbands’ Wives, Different Girls, Southern Lights and Shadows, Shapes that Haunt the Dusk, Life at High Tide. Mark Twain’s Speeches. 1910. Poems by Madison Cawein. 1911. Artemus Ward’s Best Stories. 1912. The Second Odd Number. Thirteen Tales by Guy de Maupassant. 1917. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. [1918.] Daisy Miller [and] An International Episode. [1918.] The Shadow of the Cathedral by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. 1919. The Actor-Manager by Leonard Merrick. 1919. The Great American Short Stories. 1920.
  • Compiled: [with Thomas Sargent Perry] Library of Universal Adventure by Sea and Land Including Original Narratives and Authentic Stories of Personal Prowess in all the Waters and Regions of the Globe from the Year 79 A.D. to the Year 1888 A.D. 1888.
  • Baxter, S. Howells’ Boston. New England Magazine. Oct., 1893.
  • Brooks, V. W. Mr. Howells at Work at Seventy-two. World’s Work, May, 1909.
  • [Brownell, W. C.] The Novels of Mr. Howells. Nation, 15 July, 1880.
  • Clemens, S. L. William Dean Howells. What is Man? and Other Essays. [1917.] Mark Twain’s Letters. Ed. Paine, A. B. 1917. 2 vols. [Passim.]
  • Follett, Helen Thomas and Wilson. William Dean Howells. Some Modern Novelists. 1918.
  • Garland, H. Meetings with Howells. Bookman, March, 1917.
  • Gosse, E. The Passing of William Dean Howells. Living Age, 10 July, 1920.
  • Howells, W. D. [Account of his own opinions of the novels]. Book Buyer, July, 1897. Recollections of an Atlantic Editorship. Atlantic, Nov., 1907. Part of Which I Was. North American Review, Jan., 1915 [Account of relations with North American].
  • See, also, autobiographical writings listed above under Prose—Non-fiction.
  • Howells, W. D. and others. Literary Recollections by William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Frank B. Sanborn. North American, Apr., 1912. [Howells’s 75th birthday dinner.]
  • Harvey, A. William Dean Howells. A Study of the Achievement of a Literary Artist. 1917.
  • [James, Henry.] [Review of] A Foregone Conclusion. North American, Jan., 1875. The Letters of Henry James. 1920. 2 vols. [Passim.]
  • Lee, A. A Bibliography of First Editions of the Writings of W. D. Howells. Book Buyer, March, Apr., 1897.
  • Lessing, O. E. William Dean Howells. Das literarische Echo, 1 Nov., 1912.
  • Macy, J. Howells. The Spirit of American Literature. 1913.
  • Matthews, B. Mr. Howells as a Critic. Forum, Jan., 1902.
  • Peck, H. T. William Dean Howells. The Personal Equation. 1898.
  • Phelps, W. L. William Dean Howells. Essays on Modern Novelists. 1910.
  • “Ricus.” A Suppressed Novel of Mr. Howells. [Private Theatricals.] Bookman, Oct., 1910.
  • Robertson, J. M. Mr. Howells’ Novels. Essays Towards a Critical Method. London, 1889.
  • Van Doren, C. William Dean Howells. Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature. Vol. 13. 1917.
  • Whitlock, B. Forty Years of It. 1914. [Passim, especially pp. 72, 85, 158–60.]

Author:Helen Hunt Jackson[edit]

  • Mercy Philbrick’s Choice. Boston, 1876. Hetty’s Strange History. Boston, 1877. Nelly’s Silver Mine. A Story of Colorado Life. 1878. A Century of Dishonor; A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. 1881. Glimpses of California and the Missions. 1883. Ramona. A Story. Boston, 1884. Zeph. A Posthumous Story. Boston, 1885.
  • See, also, Bibliographies to Book III, Chaps. VI and X.
  • Davis, C. C., and Alderson, W. A. The True Story of “Ramona.” [1914].
  • Hufford, D. A. The Real Ramona. Los Angeles [1900].
  • James, G. W. Through Ramona’s Country. Boston, 1909.

Author:Sarah Orne Jewett[edit]

  • A Country Doctor. Boston, 1884. A Marsh Island. Boston and New York, 1885. The Normans; Told Chiefly in Relation to their Conquest of England. 1898. The Tory Lover. Boston and New York, 1901. Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston and New York, 1911. Ed. Fields, Annie.
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book III, Chap. VI.

Author:Jack London[edit]

  • The Cruise of the Dazzler. 1902. A Daughter of the Snows. Philadelphia [1902]. The Call of the Wild. 1903. The Kempton-Wace Letters [with Anna Strunsky]. 1903. The People of the Abyss. 1903. The Sea-Wolf. 1904. The Game. 1905. War of the Classes. 1905. White Fang. 1905. The Apostate; A Parable of Child Labor. Girard, Kansas, 1906. Before Adam. 1906. Scorn of Women. In Three Acts. 1906. The Iron Heel. 1907. The Road. 1907. Martin Eden. 1909. Revolution. Chicago [1909]. Burning Daylight. 1910. Revolution and Other Essays. 1910. Theft. A Play in Four Acts. 1910. Adventure. 1911. The Cruise of the Snark. 1911. Smoke Bellew. 1912. The Abysmal Brute. 1913. John Barleycorn. 1913. The Valley of the Moon. 1913. The Mutiny of the Elsinore. 1914. The Scarlet Plague. 1915. The Star Rover. 1915. The Acorn-Planter. A California Forest Play … 1916. The Little Lady of the Big House. 1916. The Turtles of Tasman. 1916. The Human Drift. 1917. Jerry of the Islands. 1917. Michael, Brother of Jerry. 1917. On the Makaloa Mat. 1919. Hearts of Three. 1920. Works. 12 vols. 1917; 21 vols. 1919. Introduction to The Cry for Justice; An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest. Philadelphia [1915]. [Ed. Sinclair, Upton.]
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book III, Chap. VI.
  • Friedland, L. S. Jack London as Titan. Dial, 25 Jan., 1917. [London in Russia.]
  • James, George Wharton. A Study of Jack London in his Prime. Overland Monthly, Vol. LXIX, pp. 361–99. [1917.]
  • Johnson, Martin. Through the South Seas with Jack London. 1913.
  • Lane, Rose Wilder. Life and Jack London. Sunset (San Francisco), Oct., 1917-May, 1918.

Author:Silas Weir Mitchell[edit]

  • Hephzibah Guinness; Thee and You; and A Draft on the Bank of Spain. Philadelphia, 1880. In War Time. Boston, 1885. Roland Blake. Boston, 1886. Prince Little Boy and Other Tales out of Fairyland. Philadelphia, 1888. Far in the Forest. A Story. 1889. Characteristics. 1892. When All the Woods Are Green. A Novel. 1894. A Madeira Party. 1895. [Contains also A Little More Burgundy.] Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker. Sometime Brevent Lieutenant-Colonel on the Staff of his Excellency General Washington. 1896. 2 vols. The Adventures of François. Foundling, Thief, Juggler, and Fencing-Master during the French Revolution. 1898. Dr. North and His Friends. 1900. The Autobiography of a Quack and The Case of George Dedlow. 1900. The Autobiography of a Quack and Other Stories. 1901. Circumstance. 1901. A Comedy of Conscience. 1903. Little Stories. 1903. New Samaria and The Summer of St. Martin. Philadelphia, 1904. Mr. Kris Kringle. A Christmas Tale. Philadelphia [1904]. The Youth of Washington Told in Form of an Autobiography. 1904. Constance Trescott. A Novel. 1905. [See A Note concerning “Constance Trescott,” Century Magazine, Sept., 1906.] A Diplomatic Adventure. 1906. A Venture in 1777. Philadelphia [1908]. The Red City. A Novel of the Second Administration of President Washington. 1908. The Guillotine Club and Other Stories. 1910. John Sherwood, Ironmaster. 1911. Westways. A Village Chronicle. 1913.
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book III, Chap. X.
  • Churchill, W. “Hugh Wynne” in Court Dress. Book Buyer, Dec., 1899.
  • Farrand, Max. Hugh Wynne. A Historical Novel. Washington Historical Quarterly, Seattle, Vol. 1, pp. 101–8, 1906.
  • Fisher, S. G. Dr. Weir Mitchell and his Work. Book Buyer, Oct., 1897.
  • Oberholtzer, E. P. Personal Memories of Weir Mitchell. Bookman, Apr., 1914.
  • Tucker, B. R. S. Weir Mitchell. A Brief Sketch of his Life with Personal Recollections. Boston [1914].
  • Williams, T. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Physician, Scientist and Author. Century, Nov., 1898.

Author:Frank Norris[edit]

  • Complete Works. 7 vols. 1903. 4 vols. n. d. Moran of the Lady Letty. A Story of Adventure off the California Coast. 1898. Blix. 1899. McTeague. A Story of San Francisco. 1899. A Man’s Woman. 1900. The Octopus. A Story of California. 1901. The Pit. A Story of Chicago. 1903. A Deal in Wheat and Other Stories of the New and Old West. 1903. The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays. 1903. The Joyous Miracle. 1906. The Third Circle. 1909 [short stories]. Vandover and the Brute. 1914. [Ed. Norris, C. G.].
  • Garland, H. The Work of Frank Norris. Critic, March, 1903.
  • Millard, B. A Significant Literary Life. Out West, Jan., 1903.
  • Norris, C. G. Frank Norris. Garden City [1914]. [Pamphlet.]
  • Stephens, H. M. The Work of Frank Norris: An Appreciation. California University Chronicle, Jan., 1913.
  • Van Doren, C. Frank Norris. Warner’s Library of The World’s Best Literature, Vol. 18, 1917.

Author:Thomas Nelson Page[edit]

  • On Newfound River. 1891. The Old South. Essays Social and Political. 1892. Social Life in Old Virginia before the War. 1897. Red Rock. A Chronicle of Reconstruction. 1898. Gordon Keith. 1903. The Negro. The Southerner’s Problem. 1904. The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manner. 1908. Robert E. Lee the Southerner. 1908. John Marvel, Assistant. 1909. Robert E. Lee. Man and Soldier. 1911.
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book III, Chap. VI.

Author:David Graham Phillips[edit]

  • The Great God Success. A Novel. [1901]. Her Serene Highness. A Novel. 1902. A Woman Ventures. A Novel. [1902.] Golden Fleece. The American Adventures of a Fortune Hunting Earl. 1903. The Master-Rogue. The Confessions of a Crœsus. 1903. The Cost. Indianapolis [1904]. The Deluge. Indianapolis [1905]. The Plum Tree. Indianapolis [1905]. The Reign of Gilt. 1905. The Social Secretary. Indianapolis [1905]. The Fortune Hunter. Indianapolis [1906]. Light-fingered Gentry. 1907. The Second Generation. 1907. Old Wives for New. A Novel. 1908. The Worth of a Woman. A Play in Four Acts, followed by A Point of Law. A Dramatic Incident. 1908. The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig. A Novel. 1909. The Hungry Heart. A Novel. 1909. The Husband’s Story. A Novel. 1910. White Magic. A Novel. 1910. The Conflict. A Novel. 1911. The Grain of Dust. A Novel. 1911. George Helm. 1912. The Price She Paid. A Novel. 1912. Degarmo’s Wife and Other Stories. 1913. Susan Lenox. Her Fall and Rise. 1917. 2 vols.
  • Underwood, J. C. David Graham Phillips. Literature and Insurgency. 1914.

Author:Edward Payson Roe[edit]

  • Barriers Burned Away. 1872. Play and Profit in My Garden. [1873.] What Can She Do? 1873. Opening a Chestnut Burr. 1874. From Jest to Earnest. 1875. A Manual on the Culture of Small Fruits. Newburgh, N. Y., 1876. Near to Nature’s Heart. 1876. A Knight of the Nineteenth Century. 1877. A Face Illumined. 1878. Success with Small Fruits. 1880. A Day of Fate. 1880. Without a Home. 1881. His Sombre Rivals: A Story of the Civil War. 1883. A Young Girl’s Wooing. 1884. Nature’s Serial Story. 1885. An Original Belle. 1885. Driven Back to Eden. 1885 [St. Nicholas Magazine]. He Fell in Love with his Wife. 1886. The Earth Trembled. 1887. “Miss Lou.” 1888. Found Yet Lost. 1888. The Home Acre. 1889. The Hornet’s Nest. A Story of Love and War. 1892.
  • Roe, Mary A. E. P. Roe. Reminiscences of his Life. 1899.

Author:Francis Hopkinson Smith[edit]

  • Caleb West, Master Diver. 1898. Tom Grogan. 1900. The Fortunes of Oliver Horn. [1902.] The Tides of Barnegat. 1906. Peter. A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero. 1908. Kennedy Square. 1911. Felix O’Day. 1915. Enoch Crane. A Novel. 1916 [left unfinished but completed by F. Berkeley Smith].
  • See, also, Bibliographies to Book III, Chaps. VI and XIV.

Author:Harriet Beecher Stowe[edit]

  • The Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the Descendants of the Puritans. 1843. Enlarged ed. Boston, 1855. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Boston, 1852. 2 vols. A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded, together with Corroborative Statements verifying the Truths of the Work. Boston, 1853. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. Boston, 1854. 2 vols. Dred; a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Boston, 1856. 2 vols. As Nina Gordon: a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Boston, 1866. The Minister’s Wooing. Boston, 1859. Agnes of Sorrento. Boston, 1862. The Pearl of Orr’s Island. Boston, 1862. A Reply to: “The Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousand of Women of Great Britain and Ireland, to their Sisters, the Women of the United States of America.” London, 1863. House and Home Papers. By Christopher Crowfield. Boston, 1865. Religious Poems. Boston, 1867. Queer Little People. Boston, 1867. The Chimney Corner. By Christopher Crowfield. Boston, 1868. Little Foxes. By Christopher Crowfield. Boston, 1868. Men of Our Time; or, Leading Patriots of the Day…. Hartford, 1868. As The Lives and Deeds of Our Self-Made Men. Boston [1889]. Oldtown Folks. Boston, 1869. Lady Byron Vindicated. A History of The Byron Controversy, from its Beginning in 1816 to the Present Time. Boston, 1870. Pink and White Tyranny. A Society Novel. Boston, 1871. My Wife and I; or, Harry Henderson’s History. 1871. Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories. Boston, 1872. Palmetto Leaves. Boston, 1873. We and Our Neighbors; or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street. (Sequel to “My Wife and I.”) A Novel. [1875.] Betty’s Bright Idea. Also, Deacon Pitkin’s Farm, and The First Christmas of New England. 1876. Footsteps of the Master. 1876. Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives. [1878.] Our Famous Women. Comprising the Lives and Deeds of American Women who have distinguished themselves…. Hartford, 1884 [compiled with others]. Dialogues and Scenes from the Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston and New York, 1889. [Arranged by Weaver, Emily.] Mrs. Stowe also wrote other books for children, and tracts.
  • Ames, E. W. First Presentation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Americana, Nov., 1911.
  • Anderson, J. P. List of the Various Editions and Translations of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in The Library of the British Museum. In Knight, Mrs. K. B., History of the Work of Connecticut Women at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Chicago, 1893. 1898.
  • Dunbar, P. L. Harriet Beecher Stowe [Poem]. Century, Nov., 1898.
  • Crowe, Martha Foote. Harriet Beecher Stowe. A Biography for Girls. 1914.
  • Fields, Annie. Days with Mrs. Stowe. Authors and Friends. Boston, 1896. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston, 1897.
  • Maclean, Grace Edith. Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Germany. 1910. (Americana Germanica. New Series, Vol. X.)
  • McCray, F. T. Life-Work of the Author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1889.
  • Maurice, A. B. Famous Novels and their Contemporary Critics. I. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Bookman, Mar., 1913.
  • Putnam’s Magazine, Jan., 1853. Uncle Tomitudes. [Notes on the reception of the book.]
  • Sanborn, F. B. Mrs. Stowe and her Uncle Tom. Biblia Sacra, Oct., 1911.
  • The Stowe Byron Controversy: A Complete Resumé of all that has been written and said upon the subject … by the editor of “Once a Week.” London, 1869. Much controversial literature.
  • Stowe, C. E. Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe compiled from her Letters and Journals. Boston and New York, 1889.
  • Stowe, C. E. and L. B. Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Story of her Life. Boston and New York, 1911.
  • Weed, G. L. The True Story of Eliza. Independent, 17 Sept., 1903.

Author:Bayard Taylor[edit]

  • Hannah Thurston; a Story of American Life. 1863. John Godfrey’s Fortunes; Related by Himself. A Story of American Life. 1864. The Story of Kennett. 1866. Joseph and His Friends. A Story of Pennsylvania. 1870.
  • See, also, Bibliographies to Book III, Chaps. X and XIV.

Author:Albion Winegar Tougee[edit]

  • Toinette: A Tale of the South. [1874.] As A Royal Gentleman, 1884. A Fool’s Errand. By One of the Fools. [1879.] A second part, The Invisible Empire [1879–80]. Figs and Thistles: A Western Story. [1879.] Bricks without Straw. [1880.] John Eax and Mamelon, or, The South without the Shadow. [1882.] Hot Plowshares. [1882.]
  • Besides these six Reconstruction Novels Tourgee wrote many others, for which see Albion Winegar Tourgee, by Roy F. Dibble, 1920.

Author:Lew Wallace[edit]

  • The Fair God or The Last of the ’Tzins. A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston, 1873. Ben-Hur; a Tale of the Christ. [1880.] Many eds. [Dramatized by William Young, 1889.] The Boyhood of Christ. 1889. The Prince of India or Why Constantinople Fell. 1893. 2 vols. The Story of American Heroism: Thrilling Narratives of Personal Adventures during the Great Civil War as told by the Medal Winners and Honor Men. 1896. [By Wallace and others.] The Wooing of Malkatoon. Commodus. 1898. Lew Wallace. An Autobiography. 1906.

Author:Edgar Noyes Westcott[edit]

  • David Harum. A Story of American Life. 1898. The Teller. A Story. 1901. [Contains letters by Westcott and an account of his life by F. Heermans.]

Author:Theodore Winthrop[edit]

  • Cecil Dreeme. Boston, 1861. 19th ed., 1866. John Brent. Boston, 1862. 16th ed., 1866. Edwin Brothertoft. Boston, 1862. 9th ed., 1866. The Canoe and the Saddle. Boston, 1863. 8th ed., 1866. Ed. Williams, J. H., Tacoma, Washington, 1913. Life in the Open Air, and Other Papers. Boston, 1863. 3d ed., 1866. The Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop. Edited by his Sister, Laura Winthrop Johnson. 1884. [Largely made up of Winthrop’s own writings.] Mr. Waddy’s Return…. Edited by Burton E. Stevenson. 1904.
  • Curtis, G. W. Biographical Sketch of Theodore Winthrop. Cecil Dreeme. Boston, 1861.
  • Colby, Elbridge. George William Curtis and Theodore Winthrop. Nation, 29 June, 1916. Bibliographical Notes on Theodore Winthrop. Bulletin of the New York Public Library. Jan., 1917. [Carefully lists eds. and imprints, and includes contributions to periodicals.]

Author:Constance Fenimore Woolson[edit]

  • Two Women: 1862. A Poem. 1877. Anne. A Novel. 1882. For the Major. A Novelette. 1883. East Angels. A Novel. 1886. Jupiter Lights. A Novel. 1889. Horace Chase. A Novel. 1894.
  • See, also, Bibliography to Book III, Chap. VI.
  • James, Henry. Miss Woolson. Partial Portraits. 1888.
  1. Charles M. Harvey, The Dime Novel in American Life, Atlantic, July, 1907.
  2. See Book II, Chap. VII.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Mr. Waddy's Return, written earliest of all, was first published in 1904, edited and condensed by Burton Egbert Stevenson.
  5. See Book III, Chap. VIII.
  6. See Book III, chap.VI
  7. See Book III, Chap. VII
  8. See Book III, Chap. XIII
  9. Ibid.
  10. See Book II, Chap. XXII
  11. See above, Vol.I, p. 227
  12. See Book II, Chap. XVII.
  13. Also known as Nina Gordon from the English title.
  14. See Book II, Chap. XXII.
  15. See Book III, Chap. VI.
  16. See Book III, Chap. X.
  17. An edition numbering a million copies was ordered by a Chicago mail order house in 1913 and promptly distributed.
  18. See Book II, Chap. VII
  19. Published in English at New York in 1871.
  20. See The Discovery of Pike Country in F. L. Pattee's American Literature since 1870 (1915).
  21. Roxy, Chap. XXVI.
  22. See Book II, Chap. XV.
  23. Mention should be made here of Col John W. De Forest (1826-1906), Who has not deserved that his novels should be forgotten as they have been, even Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), which survives only in the thoroughly merited praise of W. D. Howells (My Literary Passions, 1895,p.233), but which still seems strong and natural.
  24. See Book III, Chap. XII
  25. Preface dated July, 1909.
  26. Their Silver Wedding Journey (1899), chap. IX.
  27. A Renaissance in the Eighties, Nation, 12 October, 1918.
  28. For these writers, see Book III, Chap. VI.
  29. See Book III, Chap. V.
  30. See Book III, Chap. XV.
  31. See Book III, Chap. X and XV.
  32. See Book I, Chap. IX.
  33. See Book III, Chap. VI.
  34. Ibid.
  35. See Book III, Chap. VI.
  36. Ibid.
  37. See Book III, Chap. VI