The Mentor: Makers of American Fiction 4

The Mentor: Makers of American Fiction 4

With private tutors, and then amidst the best university surroundings,

Stewart Edward White’s education was obtained under advantageous

auspices. He read and traveled a great deal, and had time to indulge

his love of outdoor life. His first production was a story entitled “A

Man and His Dog,” and under the advice of Professor Brander Matthews,

of Columbia, he offered it for publication. It was bought by _Short

Stories_ for $15. This was Mr. White’s first income from literary

work. Then, after a trip to the Hudson Bay country, he wrote a story

entitled “The Claim Jumpers,” which was published in 1901 and met

with an encouraging reception. “The Westerners,” which was finished

later, was bought for serial publication for about $500. This was a

distinct advance in his literary affairs, and when “The Blazed Trail”

was published in 1902, Mr. White came truly into his own. “The Blazed

Trail” was written in a lumber camp in the depth of a western winter,

and it was composed during the early hours from four A. M. till eight,

before he put on his snow-shoes for a day’s lumbering. “The Conjurer’s

House” came out in 1903, and in that same year “The Forest,” which Mr.

White regards as one of the most instructive books he has written. It

is the story of a canoe trip. The immediate success of “The Forest”

led to the writing of “The Mountains,” which told the adventures of

a camping trip in the Sierras. Then “The Mystery,” “Camp and Trail,”

“The River Man,” “The Rules of the Game,” “The Call of the North,”

“The Rediscovered Country,” “The Adventures of Bobby Orde,” “The Gray

Dawn,” “The Leopard Woman,” and other books followed. In all his books

he told the vigorous story of life in its primitive forms. “Gold” is

a picture of the madness of ’49. “The Dawn” is a story of California,

“The Leopard Woman” a romance of the African wilds. In his later books,

Africa became to Mr. White a very real and commanding subject--and one

that still holds him in its lure.

 

Mr. White produces his books fast and in highly finished form. He is

essentially a realist. Human achievement, with all its vital interest

and meaning, laid hold early on his imagination and gave to his stories

their all-pervading sense of truth to life. As a critic has said,

“One puts down a book by him with a feeling of having read through

experiences, dramatic and full of romance, yet never breaking the

bounds of probability--and that is fine art.” Mr. White’s home is in

Santa Barbara, California, and his field of active experience includes

a substantial part of the whole surface of the earth.

 

Mr. White entered the U. S. Service shortly after war was declared.

The picture on the opposite side of this sheet shows him in uniform as

Major of U. S. Field Artillery.

 

PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION

ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 6, No. 14, SERIAL No. 162

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

[Illustration: HARLEKENDEN HOUSE, THE HOME OF WINSTON CHURCHILL,

CORNISH, N. H.]

 

 

 

 

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 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.

 

WINSTON CHURCHILL]

 

[Illustration: Press Illustrating Service

 

JACK LONDON

 

Bust, by Finn Haakon Frolich, unveiled in Honolulu, after London had

made his cruise in the _Snark_]

 

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. Cable by his romances of “Old Creole

Days” and “John March, Southerner.”

 

[Illustration: Bradley studios, N. Y.

 

JOHN FOX, JR.]

 

 

_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.

 

[Illustration: GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON]

 

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.

 

[Illustration: BOOTH TARKINGTON

 

From a late picture taken at his summer home in Maine]

 

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 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.”