Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920)

Proofed and corrected from the scanned original edition.

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PREFACE:

"The American Novel", published last year, undertook to trace the progress of a literary type in the United States from its beginnings to the end of the nineteenth century; "Contemporary American Novelists" undertakes to study the type as it has existed during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Readers of both volumes may note that in this later volume criticism has tended to supplant history. Only in writing of dead authors can the critic feel that any considerable portion of his task is done when he has arranged them in what he thinks their proper categories and their true perspective. In the case of living authors he has regularly to remember that he works with shifting materials, with figures whose dimensions and importance may be changed by growth, with persons who may desert old paths for new, reveal unsuspected attributes, increase or fade with the mere revolutions of time. All he can expect to do in dealing with any current type as fluid as the novel, is, seizing upon it at some specific moment, to examine the intentions and successes of outstanding or typical individuals and to make the most accurate report possible concerning them. Whatever general tendency there may be ought to appear from his examination.

The general tendency appearing most clearly among the novelists here studied is, of course, the drift of naturalism: initiated a full generation ago by several restless spirits, of whom E.W. Howe and Hamlin Garland are the most conspicuous survivors; continued by those young geniuses Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, all dead before their time, and by Theodore Dreiser, 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

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CONTENTS:

I. OLD STYLE
Local Color
Romance

II. ARGUMENT
Hamlin Garland
Winston Churchill
Robert Herrick
Upton Sinclair
Theodore Dreiser

III. ART
Booth Tarkington
Edith Wharton
James Branch Cabell
Willa Cather
Joseph Hergesheimer

IV. NEW STYLE
Emergent Types
Ellen Glasgow
William Allen White
Ernest Poole
Henry B. Fuller
Mary Austin
Immigrants
The Revolt from the Village
Edgar Lee Masters

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Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920)