The Mentor: Makers of American Fiction 5

The Mentor: Makers of American Fiction 5

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.”

 

[Illustration: BRAND WHITLOCK]

 

[Illustration: THOMAS DIXON]

 

 

_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.”

 

[Illustration: THEODORE DREISER]

 

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.”

 

[Illustration: From photograph, copyright by Paul Thompson, N. Y.

 

JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS]

 

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.

 

[Illustration: Campbell studios, N. Y.

 

LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE]

 

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.

 

[Illustration: From photograph, copyright by Pach Brothers, N. Y.

 

IRVING BACHELLER]

 

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 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.”

 

[Illustration:

 

Courtesy Charles Scribner’s Sons

 

GOUVERNEUR MORRIS]

 

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_

 

[Illustration:

 

From photograph by Florence M. Hendershot, Chicago

 

HAMLIN GARLAND]

 

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. “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.

 

[Illustration: Press Illustrating Service

 

RUPERT HUGHES AND MRS. HUGHES IN THEIR LONG ISLAND HOME]

 

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.”

 

[Illustration: CAPT. RUPERT HUGHES]

 

 

_Harrison and Bacheller_

 

Henry Sydnor Harrison’s first novel, “Captivating Mary Carstairs,” was

published anonymously, but in 1911 “Queed” appeared under the author’s

own name, and at once took a place in the front rank of the year’s

successful novels. There was a reminiscence of Dickens in the tale.

Queed, “the little doctor,” as he is known to his associates in the

story, is redeemed from over-acute egotism through the agency of two

young women. At two years’ intervals following “Queed,” came “V. V.’s

Eyes” and “Angela’s Business.”

 

[Illustration: ERNEST POOLE]

 

Back in the nineties of the last century there was a corner of New

York City known as Monkey Hill. It was in the shadow of the Brooklyn

Bridge, and crowning it, standing far back from the street, was a kind

of chalet that served as a club for certain writing men. Among these

men was Irving Bacheller, and to pleasant evenings in the club may

be traced “Eben Holden” (1900), the most popular of Mr. Bacheller’s

many popular books. As early as 1893, he had written “The Master of

Silence;” “The Still House of Darrow” appeared in 1894. But it was

“Eben Holden” that made the author’s name for a time a household

word. That book was followed by “D’ri and I,” “Darrel of the Blessed

Isles,” and “Vergilius,” a tale of ancient Rome. In his later books,

such as “Keeping Up With Lizzie” and “Charge It,” Mr. Bacheller plays

whimsically with the problems of modern extravagance. His latest nove is “The Light in the Clearing.”