23] METHOD OF INVESTIGATION 23 



became necessary to adopt a definition and develop a gen- 

 eral conception applicable to American conditions. The 

 complete definition finally adopted was: American men of 

 letters are men of letters, within the meaning of Odin's 

 terms, both men and women, born and brought up within 

 the present borders of continental United States and Can- 

 ada, in homes and schools where English was spoken, 

 who did their work in the English language. 1 This defini- 

 tion was still somewhat arbitrary, but a more liberal one 

 would have been subject to the criticism of admitting to the 

 roll literati who were not born and brought up in an essen- 

 tially American environment, a fatal defect in a study of 

 American authors. 2 



There have been many thousand American men of letters 

 as defined above. Obviously only a portion of them could 

 be studied. The most important were naturally to be pre- 

 ferred, for data concerning them were found to be much 

 more abundant than in the case of minor literati. The 

 compilation of a roll of their names presented a problem 



1 To avoid monotony the terms men of letters, literati, literary per- 

 sons, authors, and writers, are hereafter used as synonyms. 



3 A litterateur might of course be foreign born and yet be essen- 

 tially American, because of having lived in an American environment 

 from infancy. Desirable as it would have been to include such literati 

 in the study, there were counter considerations which made the 

 attempt seem inadvisable. It would have been necessary to decide at 

 what age a person must come to this country in order to be brought 

 up in an American environment. No age could have been chosen 

 which would not be arbitrary. On the other hand, it would have been 

 impossible to decide in the case of each foreign-born litterateur 

 whether he was brought up in an essentially American environment. 

 The remedy for the exclusion of the foreign-born would therefore 

 have been worse than the evil to be cured. 



The number of writers thus excluded is so small as to be negli- 

 gible. The reader will probably miss only the names of Audubon, 

 Hamilton and Parton. More recent names were automatically ex- 

 cluded by the fact that no authors born after 1850 have been included 

 in this study. 



