eiser, Robert Herrick, Upton Sinclair, happily
still alive; given a fresh impulse during the shaken years of the war
and of the recovery from war by such satirists as Edgar Lee Masters and
Sinclair Lewis and their companions in the new revolt. The intelligent
American fiction of the century has to be studied--so far as the novel
is concerned--largely in terms of its agreement or its disagreement with
this naturalistic tendency, which has been powerful enough to draw
Winston Churchill and Booth Tarkington into an approach to its
practices, to drive James Branch Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer into
explicit dissent, and to throw into strong relief the balanced
independence of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. The year 1920, marking a
peak in the triumph of one or two species of naturalism and in some ways
closing a chapter, affords an admirable occasion to take stock. This
book, indeed, was planned and begun at the close of that year and has
firmly resisted the temptation to do more than glance at most of the
work produced since then--even at the price of giving what must seem
insufficient notice to _The Triumph of the Egg_ and _Three Soldiers_
and of giving none at all to that still more recent masterpiece
_Cytherea_. While criticism pauses to take stock, creation steadily goes
on.

Acknowledgments are due _The Nation_ for permission to reprint from its
pages those portions of the volume which have already been published
there.

CARL VAN DOREN.

March, 1922.

CONTENTS

I OLD STYLE

1. Local Color
2. Romance

II ARGUMENT

1. Hamlin Garland
2. Winston Churchill
3. Robert Herrick
4. Upton Sinclair
5. Theodore Dreiser

III ART

1. Booth Tarkington
2. Edith Wharton
3. James Branch Cabell
4. Willa Cather
5. Joseph Hergesheimer

IV NEW STYLE

1. Emergent Types

_Ellen Glasgow, William Allen White, Ernest Poole, Henry B. Fuller, Mary
Austin, Immigrants._

2. The Revolt from the Village

_Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, E.W. Howe, Sinclair Lewis, Zona
Gale, Floyd Dell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Canfield, 1921._

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS

CHAPTER I

OLD STYLE

1. LOCAL COLOR

A study of the American novel of the twentieth century must first of all
take stock of certain types of fiction which continue to persist, with
varying degrees of vitality and significance, from the last quarter of
the century preceding.

There is, to begin with, the type associated wi