The Mentor: Makers of American Fiction 6

The Mentor: Makers of American Fiction 6

Fiction Notes in Varied Keys_

 

If one novel can make a novelist, Ernest Poole earned the right to be

considered one of the makers of modern American fiction when he wrote

“The Harbor” (1915). Although the end of the story was somewhat marred

by over-insistence on sociological problems, in the first part of the

book the author struck a reminiscent note as charming as that struck

by Du Maurier in “Peter Ibbetson.” No one had paid much attention

to Mr. Poole’s earlier novel, “A Man’s Friends,” but in the general

recognition of “The Harbor,” as a work of far more than ephemeral

significance, there was hardly a dissenting voice. Not so widely

popular, but marked by the same high quality of workmanship, is Mr.

Poole’s later book, “His Family.”

 

Of the same generation at Princeton as Ernest Poole was Stephen French

Whitman, and as mention of Mr. Poole’s name inevitably suggests “The

Harbor,” so the name of Mr. Whitman calls up at once memories of

“Predestined.” Unlike “The Harbor,” “Predestined” was not, speaking

materially, a success. It was too grim, its ending was too pitiless.

But very few who read the story of the degeneration of Felix Piers were

able soon to forget it. In such later stories as “The Isle of Life” and

“Children of Hope,” Mr. Whitman has forsaken New York for Italy and

Sicily.

 

[Illustration: JOSEPH C. LINCOLN]

 

It is now almost twenty years since Henry Kitchell Webster and Samuel

Merwin began their writing careers in collaboration. Together they

wrote “The Short Line War” (1899), “Calumet K” and “Comrade John.” All

these were well-told tales, and the later years, when each man has been

working alone, have shown that neither one carried an undue share of

the burden. Mr. Webster’s books include “The Whispering Man,” “A King

in Khaki,” “The Ghost Girl,” “The Butterfly” and “The Real Adventure.”

Mr. Merwin’s work has been unusual in the variety of its themes.

Washington and the Constitution of the United States were ingredients

of “The Citadel.” The adventures of an American girl in China were

narrated in “The Charmed Life of Miss Austen.” Musical theories, the

segregated district of Yokohama, and incidents in Chinese hotels went

to the making of “Anthony the Absolute.” “The Honey Bee” is the story

of a woman whose life has been in an American department store, who

makes a trip to Paris, and there falls in love with one Blink Moran, of

the prize-ring.

 

[Illustration: JOSEPH LINCOLN’S HOME

 

Summit Avenue, Hackensack, N. J.]

 

 

_Fiction of Adventure_

 

There is no questioning the force that Hamlin Garland has been in the

literature of our time. He has told his story of his own life and

literary activities in “A Son of the Middle Border” (1917), a volume

that was at once accepted as one of the foremost of American literary

autobiographies. In no way detracting from the quality of Mr. Garland’s

later work is the ventured opinion that he has never surpassed some

of his earlier stories. His writing career began about 1890, when the

first of the tales of “Main-Traveled Roads” struck a fresh note in

fiction. Between 1895 and 1898 he wrote “Rose of Dutcher’s Cooley,”

and, in 1902, “The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop.” These, with

“Main-Traveled Roads” are still probably his most popular books. In

1900 “The Eagle’s Heart” appeared, and later “Hesper,” “The Tyranny of

the Dark,” “The Long Trail,” “The Shadow World” and “Cavanagh, Forest

Ranger.”

 

[Illustration: HARRY LEON WILSON’S BUNGALOW IN THE OZARK MOUNTAINS, MO.]

 

[Illustration: HARRY LEON WILSON]

 

Writing men of our generation have begun under the magic spell of

Stevenson. To Lloyd Osbourne it was given to serve his apprenticeship

to R. L. S., as Maupassant served his apprenticeship to Flaubert, and,

while yet an apprentice, to be accepted as a collaborator. Together

the stepfather and the stepson worked out “The Wrong Box” (1889), “The

Wrecker” (1892), and “The Ebb Tide” (1894). Then Stevenson passed on

into Shadow Land, and some years later Osbourne began alone with “The

Queen Versus Billy” and “Love the Fiddler.” In the first decade of the

present century the motor-car was still something of a novelty, and as

such almost a virgin field for fiction. It was of its then baffling

problems and incomprehensible moods that Lloyd Osbourne told in “The

Motor-maniacs,” “Three Speeds Forward,” and “Baby Bullet.” Later books

are “Wild Justice,” “The Adventurer,” and “A Person of Some Importance.”

 

[Illustration: WILL PAYNE]

 

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

 

SAMUEL MERWIN]

 

A certain letter of the alphabet for a time seemed to exert a

cabalistic influence on Louis Joseph Vance. “The Brass Bowl” appeared

in 1907. The book of the next year was “The Black Bag.” In 1909 it

was “The Bronze Bell.” There ended the use of the double B, but in

1912, Mr. Vance wrote “The Bandbox.” In the meantime had appeared

“The Pool of Flame,” “The Fortune Hunter,” “No Man’s Land,” and

“Cynthia-of-the-Minute.” Among the books that have followed “The

Bandbox” are “The Day of Days,” “Joan Thursday,” showing Mr. Vance at

his best, “The Lone Wolf,” and very recently, “The False Faces,” in

which the Lone Wolf returns to play a great part in the World War.

 

[Illustration: EDWIN LEFEVRE]

 

 

_Each Holds a Place of His Own_

 

The Law has ever had countless stories to tell. There is hardly a tale

by Arthur Train that does not, in some way, lead back to one of the

offices that cluster about the Criminal Courts Building facing Centre

Street, on the lower end of Manhattan Island. In that neighborhood

swung the shingle of the law firm of Gottlieb & Quibble, as related

in “The Confessions of Artemas Quibble.” Mr. Train’s first book,

“McAllister and His Double” (1905), began in a Fifth Avenue club, but

before a dozen pages had been finished, fate had carried McAllister

to the Tombs Prison. The thrice-told tales of Pontin’s Restaurant in

Franklin Street, where the lawyers gather at the noon hour, went to

make “The Prisoner at the Bar,” “True Stories of Crime” and “Courts,

Criminals and the Camorra.” Like Mr. Train, William Hamilton Osborne

has also achieved a place in Literature as well as Law.

 

[Illustration: ARTHUR TRAIN]

 

There are readers who regard the very facility of Gouverneur Morris as

a curse, believing that if writing to him had been harder work, his

present achievement would be considerably greater. His first book, “A

Bunch of Grapes,” dates back to his undergraduate days at Yale. Four

years later, in 1901, “Tom Beauling” appeared, to be followed the next

year by “Aladdin O’Brien.” “Yellow Men and White” showed what he could

do in the vein of “Treasure Island.” Of more enduring quality was “The

Voice in the Rice.” It is not surprising that many of our novelists

have begun with tales of undergraduate life. “Princeton Stories” was

the first book of Jesse Lynch Williams. “Harvard Episodes” of Charles

M. Flandrau. Will Irwin’s first fling at the game of writing was

“Stanford Stories” (1910). That book was done in collaboration. Also

in collaboration, this time with Gelett Burgess, the creator of “The

Purple Cow,” the editor of _The Lark_, and a humorist of rare whim,

were written Mr. Irwin’s next two books. It was a short sketch of the

old San Francisco before the earthquake, called “The City That Was,”

that first made Will Irwin’s name widely known. Of more substantial

proportions were “The House of Mystery,” “The Readjustment” and

“Beating Back.”

 

[Illustration: ROBERT HERRICK]

 

Of a certain genuine importance has been the work of Robert Herrick.

The author, like his heroes, has been finding the threads of life’s

web in a rather sorry tangle, and groping for a solution of the

world’s real meaning. It was of problems big and vital in our American

civilization that Mr. Herrick wrote in “The Memoirs of an American

Citizen,” “The Common Lot,” “The Web of Life,” “The Real World,”

“The Gospel of Freedom,” and “Together.” In “The Master of the Inn”

he has achieved an exceptional short story. Also deserving of high

attention is Meredith Nicholson, who began in 1903 with “The Main

Chance,” and achieved unusual popular success somewhat later with “The

House of a Thousand Candles” and “The Port of Missing Men.” Among

Mr. Nicholson’s more recent books are “The Lords of High Decision,”

“Hoosier Chronicle,” “Otherwise Phyllis” and “The Siege of the Seven

Suitors.” For tales breathing the spirit of the West and intricate

mystery stories, Zane Grey and Burton Egbert Stevenson are known

respectively. Mr. Grey’s best known books are “The Heritage of the

Desert,” “The Light of Western Stars,” “The Lone Star Ranger,” “The

Heart of the Desert” and “The U. P. Trail.” Wherever a well-told yarn

of intricate mystery is appreciated, such books as Mr. Stevenson’s “The

Marathon Mystery,” “The Destroyer” and “The Boule Cabinet” have found

generous welcome. Will Payne is the author of “Jerry the Dreamer,” the

striking “Story of Eva,” “Mr. Salt” and “The Losing Game”; Edward W.

Townsend in writing of Chimmie Fadden did not forfeit the place as a

novelist to which he is entitled by reason of such books as “A Daughter

of the Tenements,” “Days Like These” and “Lees and Leaven”; and Harry

Leon Wilson, who years ago made a definite impression with “The Seeker”

and “The Spenders,” and who of late has been moving a continent to

laughter by the dexterity with which he confronted the very British

Ruggles with the complicated problems of social life in the town of Red

Gap--somewhere in America.

 

[Illustration: CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY]

 

[Illustration: Moffett studios, Chicago

 

EMERSON HOUGH]

 

[Illustration: MAXIMILLIAN FOSTER]

 

Besides all these there are Joseph C. Lincoln and Cyrus Townsend Brady,

the first one in high favor for his breezy stories of Cape Cod life

and character, redolent of the salt sea air, the latter for his many

entertaining tales of plain and desert; and Sewell Ford, who created

the slangy but very human “Shorty McCabe” and “Torchy”; and those two

pungent writers of Western episodes, Peter Kyne and Charles E. Van

Loan. Emerson Hough has given us rousing tales of the Middle and Far

West, of the Kentucky mountains and Alaska. Holman Day’s excellent

stories breathe of the Maine woods, and Roy Norton has rendered tribute

to the sea. Harris Dickson, a son of Mississippi, has woven into story

form some throbbing incidents of Southern history, and has depicted

numerous sunny corners of every-day existence below the Mason and Dixon

line. James Branch Cabell is a spinner of charming romances; some of

the best have a medieval French flavor. Harold Bell Wright is well

known as the author of “Barbara Worth” and several other books whose

sales have climbed into the hundreds of thousands. Richard Washburn

Child is a young American who wields a vigorous pen in the portrayal

of national character, and James Oppenheim, not to be confused with

the Englishman, E. Phillips Oppenheim, represents vital phases of

present-day city life. Joseph Hergesheimer has won a place among

writers by reason of his picturesque style and original invention. A

comprehensive list of American-born novelists must also include the

names of Leroy Scott, Henry B. Fuller, Frank H. Spearman, Earl Derr

Biggers and Arthur Reeve, all of whom have within late years produced

popular successes. The roll of the makers of modern American fiction is a long one, yetnone can gainsay that the average of achievement is high.