The Mentor: Makers of American Fiction, Vol. 6, Num. 14, Serial No. 162, September 1, 1918

THE MENTOR · DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE

Entered as second-class matter March 10, 1913, at the postoffice at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1918, by The Mentor Association, Inc.

MAKERS OF MODERN AMERICAN FICTION
(MEN)

By ARTHUR B. MAURICE

Former Editor of The Bookman, author of “New York of the Novelists”

MENTOR GRAVURES

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[Pg 16] 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.

Mr. Winston Churchill began with the somewhat trivial “The Celebrity” (1898), regarded when it appeared as a satirical hit at the personality of Richard Harding Davis. Books that followed were, “Richard Carvel,” “The Crisis,” “The Crossing,” “A Far Country,” “Coniston,” “Mr. Crewe’s Career,” “The Inside of the Cup,” “The Dwelling-Place of Light.” It is to a splendid persistence, an inexhaustible patience, a rigid adherence to his own ideals both in style and substance, that Winston Churchill owes the high position among American contemporary writers of fiction that he holds and has held for nearly two decades. Thomas Nelson Page and George W. Cable attained fame long ago as interpreters, in fiction, of Southern life, Mr. Page by his tender and beautiful “Marse Chan,” “Meh Lady” and other stories, Mr.[Pg 17] Cable by his romances of “Old Creole Days” and “John March, Southerner.”

Norris’ Realism and McCutcheon’s Romanticism

More than fifteen years have passed since Frank Norris died, yet no one has yet come to take quite his place as an apostle of American realism. Before he fell under the spell of Émile Zola, with “McTeague,” and began his Trilogy of the Wheat, he had been the most ardent of romanticists. His earliest ventures in literature were tales of love and chivalry, written when he was a boy in his teens in Paris. “McTeague” was begun in the undergraduate days at the University of California. It began to assume shape in his year of student work at Harvard; but was elaborated and polished for four years before the public was allowed to see it. In the meantime “Moran of the Lady Letty” had been dashed off in an interval of relaxation, and became Norris’ first published book. Then came to Norris what he considered “the big idea,” that summed up at once American life and American prosperity. He would write the Trilogy of the Wheat. In the first book, “The Octopus,” he told of the fields and elevators of the Far West. “The Pit” showed the wheat as the symbol of mad speculation. With “The Wolf,” to picture the lives of the consumers in the Eastern States and in Europe, the Trilogy was to end. But before the tale was written Frank Norris died, at thirty-two years of age.

A few years ago, Mr. George Barr McCutcheon was asked the question, “Where is Graustark?” Whimsically he attempted to jot down on paper directions for journeying to the imaginary mountain kingdom, starting from a railway station in Indiana. Someone rather ill-naturedly suggested that Mr. McCutcheon had originally discovered this country in Anthony Hope’s “The Prisoner of Zenda.” But then someone else pointed out that Anthony Hope in turn had found his inspiration in Stevenson’s “Prince Otto,” and that R. L. S. himself had certainly owed something to the Gerolstein of M. Eugène Sue’s “The Mysteries of Paris.” So neither the exact whereabouts of Graustark nor its ultimate source is of great importance. What really counts is that hundreds of thousands of readers have found delight in following the adventures of Mr. McCutcheon’s stately heroines and somewhat irreverent heroes.

Every one of his romantic tales has met with generous welcome—“Graustark,” “Beverly of Graustark,” “Truxton King” and “The Prince of Graustark.”

But Graustark, if the first string to Mr. McCutcheon’s bow, is far from being the only one. Quite as wide in its popular appeal as any of the Graustark tales was “Brewster’s Millions,” with its curious starting problem. “Nedra” dealt with[Pg 18] a desert island. “The Rose in the Ring” was the story of a circus. Other books not to be overlooked are “Jane Cable,” “The Daughter of Anderson Crow,” “The Man from Brodney’s,” and in shorter form, “The Day of the Dog,” “The Purple Parasol,” “Cowardice Court” and “The Alternative.”

John Fox and Harold McGrath

Someone recently spoke of John Fox, Jr., as a writer who never misses fire. Certainly he has staked a definite claim to the Cumberland Range and the primitive people who dwell in its valleys and along its mountainsides. As early as 1894, “A Mountain Europa” appeared. It was followed by “A Cumberland Vendetta,” “Hell-for-Sartain,” “The Kentuckians,” “Crittendon,” and “Blue Grass and Rhododendrons.” But it was not until 1903, with “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come,” that Mr. Fox came fully into his own. Incidentally, his fellow-craftsman, Mr. George Barr McCutcheon, considers the title the best title in all American fiction. The high standard established in “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come” has been maintained in “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” and “The Heart of the Hills.” Into that imaginary Central Europe which lies somewhere east of Dresden, west of Warsaw, and north of the Balkans, Harold McGrath went for such early books as “Arms and the Woman” and “The Puppet Crown.” Those tales were in the first rank among the thousands of stories that about that time were being written about the fanciful kingdoms and principalities, and the natural gift for story spinning that the author showed then has been in evidence in his subsequent tales in other fields. From among the twenty odd books that now bear his name, it is not easy to make a selection. Perhaps those most conspicuous on the score of popularity have been “The Man on the Box,” “Half a Rogue,” “The Goose Girl,” “The Carpet of Bagdad,” and “The Voice in the Fog.”

A Group of Popular Story-Tellers

While still an undergraduate, Mr. Jesse Lynch Williams wrote several of the tales that went to make up his first published volume, “Princeton Stories.” In his second volume, “The Stolen Story and Other Stories,” Mr. Williams struck an entirely new note. Of the tale from which the book drew its title, Richard Harding Davis, himself the author of “Gallegher,” once said that it was “the very best of American yarns of newspaper life.” Two others of the collection of striking ingenuity were “The Great Secretary of State Interview” and “The Cub Reporter and the King of Spain.” Among Jesse Lynch Williams’ later books are “The Day-Dreamer,” “My Lost Duchess,” and “The Married Life of the Frederick Carrolls.”

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It was along the road of anonymity that Basil King finally found the way to pronounced success. In “Griselda,” “Let Not Man Put Asunder,” “In the Garden of Charity,” “The Steps of Honor,” and “The Giant’s Strength” he had won recognition as an accomplished story-teller. But still his audience was a comparatively limited one. Then, in 1910, appeared “The Inner Shrine,” a story of Franco-American life. It was read from one end of the land to the other, and greatly piqued curiosity as to the authorship, which, for many months, was carefully concealed. A dozen different names were suggested and accepted before it became an open secret that the story was the work of Basil King. The success of “The Inner Shrine” was perhaps largely responsible for the success of the subsequent “The Wild Olive” and “The Street Called Straight.”

In by-gone years it was Brand Whitlock, the Mayor of Toledo; in recent times it has been Brand Whitlock, the American Minister to Belgium, that has obscured Brand Whitlock, novelist. Yet despite the height he has attained in the fields of politics and of diplomacy, he is, and is likely always to remain, at heart a man of letters. Some day it may be given to him to “write the book as he sees it, for the God of things as they are.” Meanwhile he claims recognition here on the basis of such works of fiction as “The Thirteenth District,” “The Happy Average,” “The Turn of the Balance,” and “The Gold Brick,” a collection of short stories that appeared in 1910.

Samuel Hopkins Adams’ first essay in the field of sustained fiction was “The Mystery,” written in 1905, in collaboration with Stewart Edward White. The following year appeared “The Flying Death,” a tale of Montauk Point. Subsequent novels by Mr. Adams have been “Average Jones,” “The Secret of Lonesome Cave,” “Little Miss Grouch,” and “The Clarion,” the last named being a story involving newspaper life and the sinister influence of the tainted money of patent medicine advertisers on the liberty of the press.

Despite a career of literary activity that goes back twenty years, it is almost entirely to the books of the past four or five years that Rupert Hughes owes his present position as a popular novelist. In this later work, in such books as “What Will People Say?” “Empty Pockets” and “We Can’t Have Everything,” he has found his theme in modern Gotham: New York in the grip of the latest follies, the insensate, all-day and all-night pursuit of pleasure, the dance, the eating and drinking, and the squandering. Mr. Hughes’ novels reveal a range of knowledge of even the remote corners of the great city that has been painstakingly[Pg 20] acquired, and that is used with the sense of selection of the accomplished story-teller. Only a few months beyond undergraduate life Owen Johnson published “Arrows of the Almighty” and “In the Name of Liberty.” They were read by a limited audience, mildly applauded, and then forgotten. Later, showing the Balzacian influence, came “Max Fargus,” dealing with the seamy side of New York law offices. In the point of material success, it could hardly be considered an improvement on the earlier books. Then, one day, in a whimsical mood, the author turned back to memories of his schoolboy years in Lawrenceville. The road that led to success and recognition had been found. From one end of the land to the other, growing boys, and boys that had grown up, and boys with gray beards laughed over every fresh exploit of “The Prodigious Hickey,” and “Dink Stover,” and “Doc McNooder,” and “The Tennessee Shad,” and “The Triumphant Egghead,” and “Brian de Boru Finnegan.” Motor parties traveling between New York and Philadelphia acquired the habit of breaking the journey at Lawrenceville for the purpose of visiting “The Jigger Shop,” where Hungry Smeed established the Great Pancake record. Then Mr. Johnson took one of his heroes from the school to the university, and “Stover of Yale” was the most talked-of book of a month. Turning to a broader field, the author found, in the turbulent life of twentieth-century New York, the background for “The Sixty-first Second,” “The Salamander,” “Making Money,” “The Woman Gives,” and “Virtuous Wives.”

It is no disparagement of Edwin Lefevre as a workman to say that one short story, written at a single sitting before breakfast, is of more permanent importance than all the rest of his production combined. For that story is “The Woman and Her Bonds,” which, without any hesitation, is to be ranked among the really big short tales of American fiction. It is the first of the collection known as “Wall Street Stories,” a book which brought to Mr. Lefevre quick recognition. Wall Street is the author’s particular field, and many of his characters are easily recognized by those in intimate touch with the money mart of the Western world. Besides “Wall Street Stories,” Mr. Lefevre has written “Samson Rock of Wall Street,” “The Golden Flood,” and “To the Last Penny.”

Dreiser and Dixon

A vigorous, if undeniably crude, figure in contemporary American fiction, is Theodore Dreiser. Lacking style and literary distinction, frequently bordering on the ridiculous, he nevertheless, by a rigid devotion to a certain kind of realism that omits no details, has built up a following that chooses to regard him as something of a great man. His first book, written a dozen years or more ago, was “Sister Carrie.” It introduced a soiled, unsentimental, rather sordid, but pathetic and very human heroine. After a career in Chicago, Sister Carrie made her way to New York, and eventually climbed to comfortable heights of worldly success.[Pg 21] “Jennie Gerhardt” (1911) was in much the same vein and manner. “The Financier” (1912) gave a picture of American business life as it was or as Mr. Dreiser conceived it to be during the Civil War and the Reconstruction Period. Whatever its merits or demerits may be, “The Genius,” his latest novel, owes its chief prominence to its much debated morality.

After a life of activity in many fields, Thomas Dixon entered the writing lists with “The Leopard’s Spots” (1902), in which, powerfully if somewhat unevenly, he depicted conditions in certain states of the South under the carpet-bag and negro domination of the late sixties. Following up the same phase of history, he introduced, in “The Clansman,” the Kluklux Klan, and showed the work accomplished by that mysterious organization in bringing about the redemption of the afflicted district. Among Mr. Dixon’s later books are “The Traitor,” “The One Woman,” and “The Sins of the Father.”