RICHARD HARDING DAVIS · BOOTH TARKINGTON · STEWART EDWARD WHITE
JACK LONDON · ROBERT W. CHAMBERS · REX BEACH
EDITORIAL NOTE.--In this number of The Mentor the men that are
making modern American fiction are considered. The women fiction
writers will be considered in a later number.
Now and again we are privileged to touch hands with some literary
figure of the older generation, who was of the earth when Poe and his
Virginia lived in the Fordham cottage; when Fenimore Cooper, returned
from his long stay in Europe, was disputing with his neighbors on
the shores of Lake Oneida, when Irving was looking down upon the
noble Hudson from the slopes of his Sunnyside estate; and Holmes was
babbling wise philosophy over his coffee cup at the Boston breakfast
table. But there are not many of these links with the past left, and
the number is diminishing rapidly. Far beyond the Biblical three-score
and ten, Mr. William Dean Howells, as the dean of our literature, is
a figure upholding its richest traditions; turning three-score and
ten is Mr. James Lane Allen, whose name recalls the rare style and
the throbbing life of the books dealing with the Blue Grass region of
Kentucky. They are almost the last of the surviving great literary
figures of yesterday. These men and their work have been covered in
Mentor Number 25, “American Novelists.” The writing men of today, the
men with whom this article has to do, are for the most part those that
have not traveled beyond late youth or early middle age. Their hats
were flung into the ring in the present century; or, at the earliest,
in the nineties of the last century. Finding the field of the novelist
a broader one than it was in their fathers’ time, they have blithely
ventured, in their search for themes and material, to the four corners
of the real or the imaginary earth. The following pages present a
general review of the work of our well known fiction writers of the
day. The works of Owen Wister, Winston Churchill, Thomas Nelson Page
and George W. Cable are also considered fully in Mentor Number 25, so
we lead off this article with a simple mention of these distinguished
story-writers. In Wister’s work there is a primal bigness and strength
and, in certain passages, great tenderness and romantic charm. Two of
his best known books, “The Virginian” and “Lady Baltimore,” reveal
these qualities.
[Illustration: JAMES LANE ALLEN]
[Illustration: From photograph, copyright by Paul Thompson, N. Y.