2 oo AMERICAN LITERATURE 



The influence of the newspaper on popular forms of literature is increasing. The 

 Sunday supplement has developed into a Sunday magazine which is issued in connection 

 with a very large number of newspapers all over the country. The standards of Sunday 

 journalism have become the standards of the cheaper magazines, so that the distinction 

 now is hardly more than that the magazines are published monthly instead of weekly, 

 and are of greater bulk. The methods of the newspaper '' story " are imposing them- 

 selves upon the special articles and fiction of American magazines as a whole. A 

 cheapening of the national sense of humour through the coarse ministrations of the 

 comic supplement may be held responsible in part for the small amount of genuinely 

 humorous writing now being done in America. One humorist of the first order, Finley 

 Peter Dunne (" Mr. Dooley ") (b. 1857), continues to hit off the foibles of the hour, and 

 to scrutinize its idols, with unflagging keenness and kindness. 



In poetry as in other forms of expression " workmanship " improves. The younger 

 performers are prone to experiment with odd metres, which they manage with ingenuity. 

 Two of the older singers have been heard from, but with increasing faintness, " Joaquin 

 Miller" (Cincinnatus Heine Miller) (1841-1913), and J. Whitcomb Riley (b. 1854). 

 The latter published two new books of verse in 1911. Edith Matilda Thomas (b. 1854) 

 has not exhausted her pure if slender vein of song, and among younger women, Josephine 

 Preston Peabody and Anna Hempstead Branch have each re-expressed, in recent books 

 of verse, a genuine and delicate lyrical power. In The Town Down the River (1910) 

 Edward Arlington Robinson (b. 1869), perhaps more indisputably a poet than any of 

 his generation, shows increased strength. Percy Mackaye (b. 1875), with a true poetic 

 impulse, betrays in his later verse the effects of divided allegiance; he is determined to 

 be a playwright against nature, which meant him for a singer. 



In fiction the activity is very great. Every season outdoes its predecessor in the 

 actual number of novels issued. With barely one or two exceptions, the best of them 

 have been by authors already known. Margaret Deland (b. 1857) still adds to her 

 delightful group of " Old Chester " stories, which have a place of their own in the 

 American fiction of the past quarter-century. 



Other writers of genre stories, Ruth McEnery Stuart with her tales of the South, 

 Mary Noailles Murfree (" Charles Egbert Craddock ") (b. 1850), the earliest interpreter 

 of the mountain whites, Mary Hallock Foote (b. 1847) and Owen Wister (b. 1860), 

 exponents of the Western miner and ranchman: these and other story-tellers of their 

 generation are still doing strong and characteristic work. Volumes of both prose and 

 verse from Henry van Dyke (b. 1852) and Silas Weir Mitchell (b. 1829) bear witness to 

 the continued productiveness of two writers who have been sure of their audience for a 

 generation. Robert Herrick (b. 1868) is a novelist of powers which he has not yet 

 succeeded in getting under full control. In his latest stories there is still a wealth of 

 unassimilated material: he writes too much and too often. This is in direct contrast 

 to his contemporary, Winston Churchill (b. 1871), who restricts himself to a novel every 

 two years, and whose work, crude at first, has shown a steady growth in quality as well 

 as a steady improvement in form. The recent novels of Meredith Nicholson (b. 1866) 

 and of Mary Johnston (b. 1870) have also shown a striking advance in power. Miss 

 Johnston's Civil War stories, written from the Southern point of view, while not free 

 from exuberance of manner, have a panoramic quality which gives them a place of their 

 own in the literature dealing with that period. The art of Mary Stanbery Watts (b. 

 1868) is of finer texture, and her Nathan Burke (1910) is a war-time story likely to out- 

 last Miss Johnston's more emotional narratives. Among all the novels of recent date 

 by new writers none stands out more distinctly as of merit, both in substance and in 

 form, than The Squirrel-Cage (1911) of Dorothy Canfield. 



In Sydney Porter (" O. Henry ") (1867-1910) America lost her acknowledged 

 virtuoso of that most popular of American literary forms, the short story. His range 

 and versatility were remarkable, and his handling of the chosen form had much of the 

 precision and orderliness which belong to the playwright rather than the writer of 

 narrative. Among his chief successors are Jack London (b. 1876) and Edna Ferber. 



