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Till! STANDARD DICTIONARY OF FACTS 



logians; third, poets, novelists, essayists, critics. 

 Among the orators and statesmen of the first 

 group are Dan Kdward Everett, 



Kufus Choate. Wendell Phillips, Charles Sum- 

 ner, all orators of the anti-slavery days. Con- 

 temporaneous with these were the great orators 

 of the South: Henry Clay, Robert Hayne, John 

 ('. Calhoun. To the great orators of the nation 

 must be added the name of Abraham Lincoln, 

 who won an enduring place by his Gettysburg 

 speech. 



The second New Kni:land group includes 

 minor poets as well as the great theologian, 

 William Kllery Channing; the poet and painter, 

 Washington Allston. and Richard Henry Dana, 

 for many years editor-in-chief of the "North 

 American Review." The third group of New 

 England writers includes Emerson, Hawthorne, 

 Longfellow, Whittier. Lowell. Holmes, and to 

 these may be added Bronson Alcott and Louisa 

 it'. Henry Thoreau, William ElleryChan- 

 Thepdore Parker, George William Curtis, 

 George Ripley, ami .Margaret Fuller. Notable 

 among historical writers during this half of the 

 century are Richard Hildreth, George Bancroft, 

 Francis Parkman, John Lothrop Motley, William 

 Hickling Prescott, John Fiske, and John Bach 



The period since the close of the Civil War 

 has been one of great productiveness in literary 

 fields, and continues to show an increasing 

 rather than a diminishing tendency. To record 

 even the name of every writer who has been 

 thought worthy of favorable notice by competent 

 critics would be impossible in a short review. 

 The importance of trie monthly and other mag- 

 azines and reviews as vehicles for the first pub- 

 lication of all varieties of writing, has wonder- 

 fully developed and the success of those periodi- 

 cals which employ the art of illustration is 

 especially notable. While the greater part of 

 magazine writing has been of a quality to en- 

 gage chiefly the attention of desultory and 

 uncritical readers, there is now apparent a 

 decided development in the direction of greater 

 thoroughness, sounder scientific method, and 

 a more acute and delicate art. This is es- 

 pecially the case in historical and biographical 

 studies. 



With the dawn of the Twentieth Century we 

 have no promise of literature equal in quality to 

 the best that was produced in the middle of the 

 Nineteenth Century, but the number of those 

 who can write well is exceedingly large. Ameri- 

 can fiction of to-day is realistic and it has 

 utilized freely the large resources of this country. 

 The number of writers of realistic fiction can- 

 not be computed, for among them must be 

 included the writers of short stories with local 

 coloring. Two acknowledged leaders in this 

 field are William Dean Howells and Henry 

 James, Jr. Mr. Howells is a keen observer of 

 social life in our principal cities and has described 

 it in several novels with depressing accuracy. 

 Mr. James has given us a study of the American 

 abroad in what has been called the " international 

 novel." Contemporaneous with these are Thomas 

 Bailey Aldrich and Edmund Clarence Stedman, 

 both of them writers of poetry as well as prose. 

 With the death of Aldrich in 1907 and Sted- 



man in 1908, the last of the old school of Ameri- 

 can critics may be said to have passed away. 

 Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Stedman were not great 

 literary geniuses, they did not assume to be, 

 but they had fine literary taMes and as editors 

 and essayists they educated the reading public. 

 Other writers of attractive stories are Edward 

 Everett Hale, Frank R. Stockton, Elizabeth 

 Phelps Ward, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah 

 Orne Jewett. Among the essayists are Charles 

 Dudley Warner, John Burroughs, Richard 

 Henry Stoddard, Henry Van Dyke, Donald G. 

 Mitchell, Thomas Went worth Higginson, Rich- 

 ard Grant White, Moses Coit Tyler. Prominent 

 among literary journalists and critics, are Bar- 

 rett Wendell, Parke Godwin, Richard Watson 

 Gilder. 



Western -writers have added to our literature 

 an original vein of realism and humor; the 

 poems of Riley and the novels of Edward Eggle- 

 ston with their Hoosier dialect, Maurice Thomp- 

 son, Eugene Field, Lew Wallace, Helen Hunt 

 Jackson, Cincinnatus Miller ("Joaquin Miller"), 

 Francis Bret Harte, and greatest of all, Samuel 

 L. Clemens ("Mark Twain"), with his inimitable 

 humor, have not only given us a literature of 

 the West but a fund of laughter which is 

 international. 



The South, since the close of the Civil 

 War, has awakened to greater intellectual ac- 

 tivity. She has a right to be proud of the 

 writers she has already produced and to be 

 hopeful of her future. In these years, when 

 poetry has been so rare and prose essay and 

 the novel have so multiplied, the South has 

 given us two poets with unusual poetic 

 power, Sidney Lanier and Paul Laurence 

 Dunbar. Sidney Lanier was both poet and 

 musician and had the rare power of interpreta- 

 tion. In his "Marshes of Glynn," as he saw 

 and felt them, he has made us see and feel 

 them too. Paul Laurence Dunbar, the poet 

 of the colored race, had the lyric charm that 

 belongs to true poetry. Some of his exquisite 

 poems will be accounted among the best 

 that America has produced. Nowhere is 

 there a finer dialect poem than Dunbar's 

 "When Malindy Sings," a poem written as 

 a delicate tribute to his own mother who 

 was a negro slave. Fiction has been every- 

 where the favorite form of writing during 

 the last few decades, and the South may 

 well take satisfaction in the fine literary 

 work of such writers as George W. Cable, 

 James Lane Allen, Thomas Nelson Page, 

 Richard M. Johnston, Mary N. Murfree ("Charles 

 Egbert Craddock"), F. Hopkinson Smith, Joel 

 Chandler Harris ("Uncle Remus"), Winston 

 Churchill. 



Three stages in American literature have 

 been considered, the Colonial period, lasting 

 two hundred years and more, when literary 

 efforts were confined to feeble imitation of 

 European models; the second, the period 

 of the Revolution, when there was great un- 

 rest and no creative literary genius; the third 

 period, that of the Republic, in the midst of 

 which we are to-day working out our ideals, 

 which will appear in future American litera- 

 ture. 



