as of South America and the ancient world; of Katherine Fullerton
Gerould, with her grim tales and her petulant conservatism; of those
energetic successors of O. Henry, Edna Ferber and Fanny Hurst; of the
late Charles Emmet Van Loan, with his intimate knowledge of sport; of
the schools and swarms of men and women who write short stories for the
most part but who occasionally essay a novel? How shall the worried
critic dispose of the more or less professional humorists who have
created characters and localities: Irvin S. Cobb, who, capable of better
things, prefers the paths of the grotesque and rolls his bulk through
current literature laughing at his own misadventures; Finley Peter
Dunne, inventor of that Mr. Dooley who makes it clear that the American
tradition which invented Poor Richard is still alive; Ring W. Lardner,
master of the racy vernacular of the almost illiterate; George Ade,
easily first of his class, fabulist and satirist?

Perhaps it is best for the baffled critic to leave all of them to time
and, singling out the ten living novelists who seem to him most
distinguished or significant, to study them one by one, adding some
account of the school of fiction just now predominant.

CHAPTER II

ARGUMENT

1. HAMLIN GARLAND

The pedigree of the most energetic and important fiction now being
written in the United States goes unmistakably back to that creative
uprising of discontent in the eighties of the last century which brought
into articulate consciousness the larger share of the aspects of unrest
which have since continued to challenge the nation's magnificent,
arrogant grand march.

The decade had Henry Adams for its bitter philosopher, despairing over
current political corruption and turning away to probe the roots of
American policy under Jefferson and his immediate successors; had the
youthful Theodore Roosevelt for its standard-bearer of a civic
conscience which was, plans went, to bring virtue into caucuses; had
Henry George for its spokesman of economic change, moving across the
continent from California to New York with an argument and a program for
new battles against privilege; had Edward Bellamy for its Utopian
romancer, setting forth a delectable picture of what human society might
become were the old iniquities reasonably wiped away and co-operative
order brought out of competitive chaos; had William Dean Howells for its
annalist of manners, turning toward the end of the decade f