Longfellow. Life, by Higginson, in American Men of Letters; by Carpenter (brief), in Beacon Biographies; by Robertson, in Great Writers; by S. Longfellow, 3 vols. (the standard biography). Essays by Stedman, in Poets of America; by Mrs. Fields, in Authors and Friends; by Curtis, in Literary and Social Essays; by Higginson, in Old Cambridge; by Howells, in Literary Friends and Acquaintance. Whittier. Life, by Pickard, 2 vols.; by Carpenter, in American Men of Letters; by Higginson, in English Men of Letters; by Burton (brief), in Beacon Biographies; by Perry, by Underwood. Mrs. Claflin, Personal Recollections of Whittier; Hawkins, the Mind of Whittier; Fowler, Whittier: Prophet, Seer and Man; Pickard, Whittier Land. Essays, by Woodberry, in Makers of Literature; by Stedman, in Poets of America; by Higginson, in Contemporaries; by Hazeltine, in Chats about Books; by Mrs. Fields, in Authors and Friends. Lowell. Life, by Greenslet; by Scudder, 2 vols.; by Hale (brief), in Beacon Biographies; by Underwood. Edward Everett Hale, James Russell Lowell and his Friends. Essays, by Higginson, in Old Cambridge; by Woodberry, in Makers of Literature; by Stedman, in Poets of America. Holmes. Life, by Morse, 2 vols.; by Crothers, in American Men of Letters. Essays, by Stedman, in Poets of America; by Haweis, in American Humorists; by Noble, in Impressions and Memories; by Stearns, in Cambridge Sketches; by L. Stephen, in Studies of a Biographer. Lanier. Life, by Mims, in American Men of Letters; by West; by Ward, in Preface to Lanier's Poems (1884). Essays, by Baskerville, in Southern Writers; by Higginson, in Contemporaries; by Gilman, in South Atlantic Quarterly (1905); by Ward, in Century Magazine (1888); by Northrup, in Lippincott's (1905). Whitman. Life, by Perry; by Carpenter, in English Men of Letters; by Platt (brief), in Beacon Biographies; by Binns, by Bucke. Essays, by Stedman, in Poets of America; by Stevenson, in Familiar Studies of Men and Books; by Dowden, in Studies in Literature; by Santayana, in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Emerson. Life, by Woodberry; by Cabot (Memoir of Emerson, 2 vols.); by O. W. Holmes, in American Men of Letters; by Garnett, in Great Writers; by Sanborn (brief), in Beacon Biographies. E. W. Emerson, Emerson in Concord; Conway, Emerson at Home. Essays, by Stedman, in Poets of America; by Mrs. Fields, in Authors and Friends; by Lowell, in Literary Essays; by Stearns, in Sketches from Concord and Appledore; by Everett, in Essays Theological and Literary; by Beers, in Points at Issue; by Chapman, in Emerson and Other Essays. Hawthorne. Life, by Woodberry, in American Men of Letters; by Henry James, in English Men of Letters; by Fields (brief), in Beacon Biographies; by Conway, in Great Writers. A more intimate but doubtful biography is Julian Hawthorne's Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife. Bridge, Personal Recollections of Hawthorne. Essays, by Brownell, in American Prose Masters; by Perry, in A Study of Prose Fiction; by Gates, in Studies and Appreciations; by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by Higginson, in Short Studies of American Authors. Thoreau. Life, by Salt, in Great Writers; by Sanborn, in American Men of Letters. Page, Thoreau: his Life and Aims. Essays by Higginson, in Short Studies of American Authors; by Stevenson, in Familiar Studies of Men and Books; by Lowell, in Literary Essays. Parkman. Life, by Fiske; by Farnham; by Sedgwick. Essays, by Fiske, in introduction to Parkman's works and in A Century of Science and Other Essays; by Vedder, in American Writers of To-day; by Whipple, in Recollections of Eminent Men. CHAPTER IV THE ALL-AMERICA PERIOD Thou Mother with thy equal brood, Thou varied chain of different States, yet one identity only, Whitman, "Thou Mother" Some critics find little or no American literature of a distinctly national spirit prior to 1876, and they explain the lack of it on the assumption that Americans were too far apart and too much occupied with local or sectional interests for any author to represent the nation. It was even said at the time of the Centennial Exposition that our countrymen had never met, save on the battlefields of the Civil War, until the common interest in Jubilee Year drew men and women from the four quarters of America "around the old family altar at Philadelphia." Whatever exaggeration there may be in that fine poetic figure, it is certain that our literature, once confined to a few schools or centers, began in the decade after 1870 to be broadly representative of the whole country. Miller's Songs of the Sierras, Hay's Pike-County Ballads, Harte's Tales of the Argonauts, Cable's Old Creole Days, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Miss Jewett's Deephaven, Stockton's Rudder Grange, Harris's Uncle Remus, a host of surprising books suddenly appeared with the announcement that America was too large for any one man or literary school to be its spokesman. It is because of these new voices, coming from North, South, East or West and heard with delight by the whole nation, that we venture to call the years after 1876 the all-America period of our literature. We are still too near that period to make a history of it, for the simple reason that a true history implies distance and Contempo- perspective. No historian could read, much less rary History measure and compare, a tenth part of the books that have won recognition since 1876. In such works as he might select as typical he must be governed by his own taste or judgment; and the writer was never born who could by such personal standards forecast the judgment of time and of humanity. In a word, contemporary or "up-to-date histories are vain attempts at the impossible; save in the unimportant matter of chronicling names or dates they are all alike untrustworthy. The student should bear in mind, therefore, that the following summary of our recent literature is based largely upon personal opinion; that it selects a few authors by way of illustration, omitting many others who may be of equal or greater importance. . We are confronted by a host of books that serve the prime purpose of literature by giving pleasure; but what proportion of them are enduring books, or what few of them will be known to readers of the next century as the Sketch Book and Snow-Bound are known to us, these are questions that only Father Time can answer. The Short Story. The period after 1876 has been called the age of fiction, but "the short-story age" might be a better name for it, since the short story is apparently more popular than any other form of literature and since it has been developed here more abundantly than in any other land, possibly because America offers such an immense and eversurprising field to an author in search of a strange or picturesque tale. Readers of the short story demand life and variety, and here are all races and tribes and conditions of men, living in all kinds of “atmosphere" from the trapper's hut to the steel skyscraper and from the crowded city slums to the vast open places where one's companionship is with the hills or the stars. Hence a double tendency in our recent stories, to make them expressive of New World life and to make each THE MODERN SHORT STORY 513 story a reflection of some peculiar type of Americanism, — one of the many types that here meet in a common citizenship. The truth of the above criticism may become evident by reviewing the history of the short story in America. Irving began with mere hints or outlines of stories (sketches he called them) and added a few legendary tales of the Dutch settlers on the Hudson. Then came Poe, dealing with the phantoms of his own brain rather than with human life or endeavor. Next appeared Hawthorne, who dealt largely in moral allegories and whose tales are always told in an atmosphere of mystery and twilight shadows. Finally, after the war, came a multitude of writers who insisted on dealing with our American life as BRET HARTE it is, with miners, immigrants, money kings, mountaineers, planters, cowboys, woodsmen, -a host of varied characters, each speaking the speech and typifying the customs or ideals of his particular locality. It was these post-bellum writers who invented the so-called story of local color (a story true to a certain place or a certain class of men), which is America's most original contribution to the world's literature. |