The Mentor: Makers of American Fiction, Vol. 6, Num. 14, Serial No. 162,

.

Contents

---

FICTION

There is a popular notion that anyone can write a story. A good novel is easy reading, and it seems, on that account, to be easy writing. Many a reader, in the comfortable enjoyment of good fiction, misses the genius of it altogether. He is like the skeptical young man who could see nothing difficult in the art of sculpture. “All you need to do,” he said, “is to get a block of marble, then take a hammer and chisel, and knock off the parts you don’t want.” So stated, sculpture does seem very simple. But, after all, there is some importance in knowing what parts of the marble to knock off.

Many of us feel, at times, an inward stir that prompts us to express ourselves in the written word. We are quite sure that we could write a novel or a play. That we don’t do so is simply because we are so busy—or something else. “I could write plays as well as Shakespeare if I’d a mind to,” said someone years ago to Charles Lamb. “Yes,” answered the gentle humorist, “anyone could write plays as well as Shakespeare—if he had the mind to.”

Some take their pen in hand to prove to themselves how easy it all is. When they have tried out several of the productions that they have dashed off so readily, they sometimes discover that what was easy writing for them was hard reading for others, and the wise ones then come to realize that the good fiction that makes such easy reading is often the finished and refined product of double and re-doubled labor.

For those that are determined to win their way in fiction, the means for study and observation are ample. There are many books on the art of writing to inform and guide the aspiring author, and there is a wealth of fiction literature ever at hand to supply him with examples of good story writing. In a helpful, informing book on the technique of fiction, Professor Charles F. Horne makes clear the essential elements of the novel—which he finds to be six in number: (1) Plot, (2) Motive or Verisimilitude, truth to life, (3) Character Portrayal, (4) Emotional Quality—Sentiment, Passion, (5) Background, (6) Style. “A novel,” Professor Horne writes, “cannot consist simply of a fixed picture, a description of a man in repose. It must show him acting and acted upon. In other words, it deals with man in his relation to his environment. Hence it must have two essentials: the man and his movements; that is, the characters and the story. The causes and effects of these two essentials give us two more. The man can only move as he is swayed internally by his emotions; and the movement can only be seen externally in its effect on his surroundings, his background. These four form the positive elements or content of the novel, and they must be presented under the limitations set by man’s experience of life or verisimilitude, and by his modes of conveying ideas, his style of speech.”

W. D. M.

The Mentor Association

ESTABLISHED FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A POPULAR INTEREST IN ART, LITERATURE, SCIENCE, HISTORY, NATURE, AND TRAVEL

THE MENTOR IS PUBLISHED TWICE A MONTH

BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION. INC., AT 114–116 EAST 16TH STREET, NEW YORK, N Y. SUBSCRIPTION, FOUR DOLLARS A YEAR. FOREIGN POSTAGE 76 CENTS EXTRA. CANADIAN POSTAGE 50 CENTS EXTRA. SINGLE COPIES TWENTY CENTS. PRESIDENT, THOMAS H. BECK; VICE-PRESIDENT, WALTER P. TEN EYCK; SECRETARY, W. D. MOFFAT; TREASURER, J. S. CAMPBELL; ASSISTANT TREASURER AND ASSISTANT SECRETARY, H. A. CROWE.

Entered as second-class matter, March 10, 1913, at the postoffice at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1918, by The Mentor Association, Inc.

---

MAKERS OF MODERN AMERICAN FICTION

Booth Tarkington
ONE

Towards the close of the last century Booth Tarkington wrote “The Gentleman from Indiana.” It is as the Gentleman from Indiana that Mr. Tarkington has been widely known ever since. There was a time, some fifteen or twenty years ago, when every native Hoosier was supposed to have the manuscript of a “Best-Selling” novel concealed somewhere about his person. Some of the authors died, and some of them went into other occupations, and the state has managed to live the belief down. But Mr. Tarkington remains the most conspicuous living figure linking Indiana with letters.

Born in Indianapolis on July 29, 1869, he studied at Phillips-Exeter, and later at Princeton. In both places he was recognized as one likely to go far. Princeton he entered as a junior, but “made” the editorial boards of both college publications, the Tiger and the Lit—his sketches for the former being rather better than his literary contributions to the latter. He wrote the play for the Triangle Club, and, at graduation, was voted the most popular and promising man in the Class of 1893. There followed, however, lean years, when the prophecies seemed unlikely of fulfillment. That was a period, when, like the John Harkless of his own story (“The Gentleman from Indiana”), he was figuratively “sitting on a rail fence in Indiana.” Always a hard worker, he toiled unremittingly at invention and rewriting, only to have the manuscripts that he submitted with bright hopes come back to him with disheartening regularity. That was the story of the five or six years after 1893. His first tale to be sold was “Cherry,” a whimsical romance of the country about Princeton and undergraduate life at the College of New Jersey in pre-Revolutionary days. Accepted by Harper’s, it was not published until long after. Then, suddenly, success came. Almost simultaneously “The Gentleman from Indiana” and “Monsieur Beaucaire” appeared, the first a full-length novel of mid-western life, the second a charming little romance of eighteenth-century manners at Bath when Beau Nash reigned and a Prince of the Blood came over from France in the guise of a barber in the French Minister’s train. The recognition won with those two books has widened with the years. After the “Gentleman” and “Beaucaire” came “The Two Van Revels,” the germ of which had been a short tale of two thousand words written in the author’s undergraduate days. As a result of a brief fling at political life Mr. Tarkington wrote the stories collected under the title “In the Arena.” That was followed by “The Conquest of Canaan,” the story of a discredited boy who leaves his native town under a shadow, and returns to win its reluctant admiration. The years spent about that time in Europe suggested “The Guest of Quesnay,” and two shorter stories with scenes laid in Italy, “The Beautiful Lady,” and “Mine Own People.” The chief distinction of “The Flirt,” in which the author returned to the Indiana setting of the earlier books, was the picture of the heroine’s impish brother, Hedrick Madison. “The Turmoil,” dealing with the evolution of one of the great mid-western cities, showed Mr. Tarkington in the full maturity of his power. After that book he struck a new and rich vein in his sketches delineating boy life, the stories dealing with Penrod Schofield and William Sylvanus Baxter having found a response in every corner of the land. Mr. Tarkington has also to his credit considerable achievement as a playwright. “The Man From Home,” written in collaboration with Harry Leon Wilson, was one of the most successful plays of the American stage of recent years. Other plays from his pen are “Cameo Kirby,” “Springtime,” “Mister Antonio,” “The Country Cousin,” and “Seventeen.” Calling Indianapolis his home town, Mr. Tarkington spends much of his time at Kennebunkport, Maine, and usually passes a month or two every year in Princeton, New Jersey.

Robert W. Chambers
TWO

What impresses one most about Mr. Robert W. Chambers is his amazing versatility. In addition to being a popular novelist, he is an expert on rare rugs; an artist, and so well qualified a judge of fine art that he can talk intelligently to the curators and directors of museums about the old masters on exhibition there; equipped with an understanding of Chinese and Japanese antiques so that he can detect forgeries in that art; an authority on mediæval armor; a lover of outdoors, of horses, dogs, and an ardent collector of butterflies; and, in addition, a thorough man of the world, who knows Paris and Petrograd, and many of the out-of-the-way corners of the earth. These are the qualities that come to mind readily, but the list is far from complete. The longer one knows Mr. Chambers, the more varied the knowledge he finds in him.

Out of such rich mental resources Mr. Chambers draws his material for fiction. He writes two novels a year for a large public that eagerly devours them. Mr. Chambers’ life is a full and active one.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 26, 1865, and in his youth he aspired to be a painter. He studied art in Paris at Julien’s Studio from 1886 to 1893, then returned to New York, and for a while contributed illustrations to the current publications. Then one day a novel, “In the Quarter,” appeared with his name as author. From that time on his life was given largely to writing fiction, and the record of the years has been a brilliant one. In 1893 he published the haunting, uncanny, but fascinating “The King in Yellow,” a collection of stories of art life. He turned to France first as a background for romance. At irregular intervals from 1894 to 1903 appeared “The Red Republic,” “Lorraine,” “Ashes of Empire,” and “Maids of Paradise.” They all had the France-Prussian War as their setting, and dashing young Americans as their heroes. Then in 1901 with “Cardigan” and other books he gave expression in fiction to the spirit of the American Revolution. It has not been simply as an historical or a semi-historical novelist, however, that Mr. Chambers has made his widest appeal. In the foibles, extravagances, superficialities and eccentricities of contemporary American society, he has found his richest vein. It does not matter whether the background of a particular tale be New York, or Washington, or Palm Beach. The underlying social and ethical problems are of real importance. Marriage, the giving or selling in marriage, the reasons of heredity that make for or against a certain marriage: these are fundamentals common to all humanity. In “The Younger Set” and “The Firing Line” hero and heroine have unwisely married, and the story hinges largely on problems raised subsequently by divorce. In “The Fighting Chance” (1906), and “The Danger Mark” (1909) the problem is that of unfitness to marry. In the former it is the man who inherits a craving for alcohol, and the woman for sentimental philandering; in the latter the woman is given to intemperance and the man to excessive gallantry. In one of his later books, “The Hidden Children” (1915), Mr. Chambers returns to a favorite setting of the earlier years, upper New York of the Colonial period.

On a basis of solid fact, it would seem impossible for one man to do all this work. Where does he ever find time to do it? The answer lies in the fact that Mr. Chambers keeps regular hours—office hours, almost—for his writing, all of which is done in long hand. At that he is not a rapid writer, frequent revision is essential, and a passion for the verification of details consumes much time. Yet the bulk and excellence of the accomplished performance remains an established fact; and in many ways it is little less than marvelous.

Richard Harding Davis
THREE

In 1890 there appeared in Scribner’s Magazine a short story entitled “Gallegher.” It gave an account of a smart young office boy employed on one of the newspapers, who succeeded in “beating the town” by bringing home a big, sporting story to his paper. It was held at once as one of the best newspaper tales ever printed. When the name of the author, Richard Harding Davis, was mentioned, the reading public recognized him as the son of Rebecca Harding Davis, a fiction writer of established reputation. Davis’ fifty-two years of life were full of color and manly achievement. He was a novelist, short story writer, war correspondent, editor and playwright. He began as newspaper reporter, a pursuit most natural, for his father, L. Clarke Davis, was a brilliant journalist and editor.

Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864, and attended the Episcopal Academy and afterwards Lehigh and Johns-Hopkins Universities. In his college days he was weak in mathematics, but strong in all that made life full, joyous and vital. He entered eagerly into sports and wrote stories for the Lehigh magazines.

In 1887 he began newspaper work on the Philadelphia Record, also occasionally contributing to the Press and other Philadelphia papers. His first big assignment was in connection with the Johnstown Flood in 1889. It was in the Press office that Davis discovered the original Gallegher—the office boy who was immortalized in Davis’ famous story, just as the mongrel dog was vindicated in Davis’ later story “The Bar Sinister.” In 1889 he made a trip to London as correspondent to the Philadelphia Telegraph, and while there wrote of the Whitechapel murders in a way that attracted attention. He got his first job in New York in this way. In London he came to know Arthur Brisbane, who was then English correspondent of the New York Sun, and afterward editor of the Evening Sun. On his return to America he sought a newspaper job in New York, and Brisbane took him on the Evening Sun. His first experience was strikingly characteristic. A bunco man accosted him near the ferry. Davis gave him some marked money, then had him arrested and walked him boldly into the Evening Sun office, showed him up for the crook he was—and then wrote him up in the form of a news story for the paper. Aside from his regular assignments as a reporter, Davis busied himself with pictures of various types of New York life. Among these the most famous were the Van Bibber stories, in which Davis presented types of New York society. In 1891 Davis went to Harper’s Weekly and remained there for three years as managing editor. Then he became a free lance. It was not necessary for him to “hold down a job.” All magazines and book publishers were eager for his work. His first engagement as war correspondent was on the battlefields of the Greco-Turkish War. He was a prominent figure among newspaper correspondents in all the great wars that followed. He made a genuine sensation by his war letters written from Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898. In that war Davis formed a friendship with Theodore Roosevelt that remained firm through life.

In 1898, with the publication of “Soldiers of Fortune” in Scribner’s Magazine, the reputation of Davis as a novelist became established, and, thereafter, the fiction that flowed from his pen found an eager and growing audience. His extensive travels enabled him to set his stories in widely varied scenes. “Soldiers of Fortune” told of revolution and political intrigue in a South American republic. That also was the vein and atmosphere of “Captain Macklin” and later of “The White Mice.” In “The Exiles” he invaded Morocco for his background and characters. Later, in “The King’s Jackal,” he laid his scenes in Tangier. “Ranson’s Folly” is a story of American army life—afterwards dramatized, as was “Soldiers of Fortune.” “Princess Aline” is a romantic story of the “Graustark” kind. Besides fiction, Davis wrote many books of adventure and travel impression, such as “Rulers of the Mediterranean,” “Three Gringos in Venezuela,” “The West from a Car Window,” “A Year from a Reporter’s Note Book,” “The Congo and Coasts of Africa.” His later books, based on war correspondence, include “With the French,” “Somewhere in France,” and “With the Allies.”

We have named scarcely half the titles of Davis’ work. He was busy always with his pen, and, as one of his fellow craftsmen in literature observed, he “never penned a dull line.” In all his stories he left a record of his sturdy Americanism and his passionate devotion to a just cause, wherever he found it.

He died suddenly of heart disease on April 12, 1916. The loss to literature was great and was keenly felt in a history-making time like this that demands an eloquent chronicler. Davis will always be remembered as one of the most buoyant, brave, heroic and industrious workers in the field of American literature, a man who saw life fully and clearly, and who reflected it truly, in healthy, ringing, inspiring tones.

Jack London
FOUR

Jack London’s stories were written largely out of his own life. If they were not actual experiences cast in fiction form, they were narratives spun out of the fiber of his own experiences. Life was never certain for London. He was always on the go, and his life was an ever vigorous, vital present, with the future undetermined and unguessed. He was born in San Francisco on January 12, 1876. When he was eleven years old he left his ranch in the Livermore Valley and set out to satisfy his longing for a knowledge of the world and an expression of himself. He first went to Oakland, where, in the public library, he came under the romantic influence of such fiction writers as Washington Irving, Ouida and others. Out of Irving’s “Alhambra” he built castles in the air for himself, and launched upon a great literary career with a strong under-current of romance and an irresistible longing for adventure. He left home and joined the oyster pirates in San Francisco Bay. Then, tiring of the excitement of piracy, he turned with equal enthusiasm to the prosecution of it by joining the Fish Patrol, and was entrusted with the arrest of some who were his former comrades. Thrilling accounts of this life appeared under the title of “Tales of a Fish Patrol.” In them is a wild buccaneer spirit, and the savor of the sea. Those of us that read the “Sea Wolf” can find there a passionate expression of the author’s own experiences before the mast while seal hunting in Behring Sea or along the coast of Japan. It is full of strong appealing character and strange sea lore. The same wild breath of adventure is to be found in “The Mutiny of the Elsinore,” in which London describes thrilling experiences in a trip around the Horn. London was a worker, and labored hard among the rougher elements of life—with longshoremen and shovellers in San Francisco; in factories and on the decks of coastwise vessels. He was as good a tramp, too, as he was a laboring man. He walked the Continent over from ocean to ocean, gathering the materials for a “vast understanding of the common man.” Out of these experiences came “The Road,” which is an appealing record of sympathy with the vagrant poor, and an absorbing narrative of adventurous journeying.

London tried schooling at different times in his early life, working between hours to pay for his education. After several months of stern, hard application, in which he covered about three years’ preparatory work, he entered the University of California. The strain, however, of work and study combined was too much for him, and after three months he had to give up. Turning to things quite different, and with a desperate hope that he might find fresh inspiration in a new kind of life, he set off for the widely advertised Klondike to seek for gold. In the Klondike “nobody talks; everybody thinks; you get your true perspective; I got mine,” he says. After a year of hard toil in the north, London returned home and assumed the burden of supporting his family, his father having died while he was away. He wrote story upon story, and finally gained acceptance and success. As book after book came out, the public grew to know and recognize Jack London as one of the strongest figures in American fiction.

He passed away on November 22, 1916, in the full swing of his intellectual vigor, and it will be long before his splendid achievement is forgotten, or the last of his books is consigned to the high shelves that spell oblivion. No matter how sparing one may be in the use of the word genius, for him it could be claimed. His name is one of the few among those of the writing men of our time with which the magic word is, without hesitation, to be linked. There was genius in his invention, in his imagery, in his nervous style. To him was given to know the moods of Arctic wastes and California valleys. The struggles of his own soul and mind and body he dissected and portrayed in “Martin Eden” (1909) and “John Barleycorn” (1913). He was practically the only American writer to invade magnificently the prize-ring as a field for romantic narrative. Its seamy side, its sordid corruption, its driftage, as well as its brutal heroism, are reflected in such tales as “The Game,” “The Abysmal Brute,” “The Shadow and the Flash,” and “The Mexican.” “The Call of the Wild” (1903) challenges the very best dog-stories of all time. “The Sea Wolf” (1904) is an epic of salt brine, and creaking rigging, and man’s inhumanity to man, and the “blond masters of the world.” There followed “Burning Daylight” (1910), and “The Valley of the Moon” (1913), and “The Mutiny of the Elsinore” (1914), which is “The Sea Wolf” “in a lower key,” and “The Strength of the Strong” (1914), and a dozen more. Whatever the field, there was a sureness of touch, and a power of graphic description that made the man always a figure and a force.

Rex Beach
FIVE

It was in Alaska—the field of “The Forerunner,” the Kipling poem that was for so many years lost and entirely forgotten by its author, the field of Robert W. Service’s “Songs of a Sourdough,” the field of so many of the tales of Jack London and Stewart Edward White, that Rex Beach first found literary expression. He did not set out in life to be a literary man. He was a husky youth, full of vitality and, even in his teens, a giant in strength. He was born in Atwood, Michigan, September 1, 1877, and he left his native place for the city of Chicago when he was eighteen years of age. He meant to study law, but, as he said, he “had no money—therefore had to find a place to eat.” In those days the athletic associations of several of the large cities maintained football teams of giant gladiators to entertain the multitude. Young Beach had seen just one game of football, but when he presented himself, his physical architecture was so imposing that he was engaged without hesitation, as tackle, by the athletic association football manager. The college teams used to play an annual series with these huge professionals. Later they gave it up, because the “truck-horse professionals” hired by the athletic associations could not be hurt by anything short of an ax, while the college players, as Beach said, were apt to “tear under the wing.” Beach played through the season, taking part in the games by which his team won the championship of America. Then, being desirous of eating regularly, he attached himself to the athletic association’s swimming team and broke an indoor record at water polo. That was in 1897, when the Klondike excitement broke out. He stampeded with the rest. It was the spirit of adventure and no thought of finding material for fiction that took him to the Yukon.

With two partners from Chicago, Beach was dumped off the boat at Rampart, on the Yukon, one rainy night. The three hadn’t a dollar amongst them, but they had plenty of goods. Then things began to happen. “We prepared to become exorbitantly rich,” in the words of Beach, “but it was a bad winter. There were fifteen hundred rough-necks in town, very little food and plenty of scurvy. I soon found that my strength was my legs. I could stampede with anybody. So I stampeded faithfully whenever I heard of a gold strike, all that winter.” He became dissatisfied with his two Chicago partners, because they preferred to sit around the cabin cooking tasty messes to tearing through blizzards at the tail of a dog team. They wanted to wait for their million dollars until spring, but Beach wanted his by Christmas at the latest. And so he set off, and quickly fell under the spell of the Yukon. The glare of the white Arctic night, the toil of the long trail, the complicated struggle for existence, the reversion to primitive passions inevitable in a new civilization in process of formation, made an imperative call to him, and held him fascinated. The life about him moved him to write, and before long he was embarked on a literary career. “Pardners,” his first story, appeared in 1904, and this was followed by the novel that gave him reputation—“The Spoilers,” which appeared in 1906. Then came “The Barrier” in 1907, and “The Silver Horde” in 1909. They are all virile stories of Alaskan life that have stirred many thousands of readers. Some have gone into dramatic form, “The Barrier” having attained a new and distinguished success as a film picture. In “The Ne’er Do Well” and in “The Net” Beach sought Southern scenes, the former novel having Panama as its background, and “The Net” New Orleans during the Mafia days. “The Auction Block,” published in 1914, deals with the favorite activities of modern Metropolitan life, and the sale of young girls into the marriage tie.

Mr. Beach was christened “Rex E. Beach,” and he retained the middle initial for some time, but when correspondents who had read his books sent letters to him in which they addressed him as “Rev. E. Beach,” he dropped the middle initial. He lives in New York City and has a summer residence at Landing, Lake Hopatcong, N. J.

Stewart Edward White
SIX

Readers often link the name of Jack London and Stewart Edward White. The men were of the same literary stature, though different from each other in almost every respect. Both found inspiration in the same theme—the struggle of man with primeval forces. In their technique we find the difference. There is a sharp contrast between the fire of Jack London and the held-in strength of Stewart Edward White. White was once asked if it was not possible to lay hold of the heart and imagination of the public through a novel which had no human love interest in it—whether man matched against nature was not, after all, the eternal drama. White considered for a moment and then said: “In the main, that is correct. Only I should say that the one great drama is that of the individual man’s struggles toward perfect adjustment with his environment. According as he comes into correspondence and harmony with his environment, by that much does he succeed. That is what an environment is for. It may be financial, natural, sexual, political, and so on. The sex element is important, of course—very important. But it is not the only element by any means; nor is it necessarily an element that exercises an instant influence on the great drama. Anyone who so depicts it is violating the truth. Other elements of the great drama are as important—self-preservation, for example, is a very simple and even more important instinct than that of the propagation of the race. Properly presented, these other elements, being essentially vital, are of as much interest to the great public as the relation of the sexes.” These words express clearly the trend of Stewart Edward White’s work.

From the beginning, Mr. White’s career has been one of prompt recognition and well-ordered prosperity. He was born at Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 12, 1873. He attended no school until he was sixteen years of age, and yet, far from being behind his schoolmates, he entered the high school in the junior class with boys of his own age and graduated at eighteen, president of his class. He excelled in athletics and held the long distance running record of his school. He graduated a few years later from the University of Michigan, and then spent two years in the Columbia Law School, New York.

With private tutors, and then amidst the best university surroundings, Stewart Edward White’s education was obtained under advantageous auspices. He read and traveled a great deal, and had time to indulge his love of outdoor life. His first production was a story entitled “A Man and His Dog,” and under the advice of Professor Brander Matthews, of Columbia, he offered it for publication. It was bought by Short Stories for $15. This was Mr. White’s first income from literary work. Then, after a trip to the Hudson Bay country, he wrote a story entitled “The Claim Jumpers,” which was published in 1901 and met with an encouraging reception. “The Westerners,” which was finished later, was bought for serial publication for about $500. This was a distinct advance in his literary affairs, and when “The Blazed Trail” was published in 1902, Mr. White came truly into his own. “The Blazed Trail” was written in a lumber camp in the depth of a western winter, and it was composed during the early hours from four A. M. till eight, before he put on his snow-shoes for a day’s lumbering. “The Conjurer’s House” came out in 1903, and in that same year “The Forest,” which Mr. White regards as one of the most instructive books he has written. It is the story of a canoe trip. The immediate success of “The Forest” led to the writing of “The Mountains,” which told the adventures of a camping trip in the Sierras. Then “The Mystery,” “Camp and Trail,” “The River Man,” “The Rules of the Game,” “The Call of the North,” “The Rediscovered Country,” “The Adventures of Bobby Orde,” “The Gray Dawn,” “The Leopard Woman,” and other books followed. In all his books he told the vigorous story of life in its primitive forms. “Gold” is a picture of the madness of ’49. “The Dawn” is a story of California, “The Leopard Woman” a romance of the African wilds. In his later books, Africa became to Mr. White a very real and commanding subject—and one that still holds him in its lure.

Mr. White produces his books fast and in highly finished form. He is essentially a realist. Human achievement, with all its vital interest and meaning, laid hold early on his imagination and gave to his stories their all-pervading sense of truth to life. As a critic has said, “One puts down a book by him with a feeling of having read through experiences, dramatic and full of romance, yet never breaking the bounds of probability—and that is fine art.” Mr. White’s home is in Santa Barbara, California, and his field of active experience includes a substantial part of the whole surface of the earth.

Mr. White entered the U. S. Service shortly after war was declared. The picture on the opposite side of this sheet shows him in uniform as Major of U. S. Field Artillery.

PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 6, No. 14, SERIAL No. 162
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.

---

THE MENTOR · DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE

Entered as second-class matter March 10, 1913, at the postoffice at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1918, by The Mentor Association, Inc.

MAKERS OF MODERN AMERICAN FICTION
(MEN)

By ARTHUR B. MAURICE

Former Editor of The Bookman, author of “New York of the Novelists”

MENTOR GRAVURES

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS · BOOTH TARKINGTON · STEWART EDWARD WHITE
JACK LONDON · ROBERT W. CHAMBERS · REX BEACH

EDITORIAL NOTE.—In this number of The Mentor the men that are making modern American fiction are considered. The women fiction writers will be considered in a later number.

Now and again we are privileged to touch hands with some literary figure of the older generation, who was of the earth when Poe and his Virginia lived in the Fordham cottage; when Fenimore Cooper, returned from his long stay in Europe, was disputing with his neighbors on the shores of Lake Oneida, when Irving was looking down upon the noble Hudson from the slopes of his Sunnyside estate; and Holmes was babbling wise philosophy over his coffee cup at the Boston breakfast table. But there are not many of these links with the past left, and the number is diminishing rapidly. Far beyond the Biblical three-score and ten, Mr. William Dean Howells, as the dean of our literature, is a figure upholding its richest traditions; turning three-score and ten is Mr. James Lane Allen, whose name recalls the rare style and the throbbing life of the books dealing with the Blue Grass region of Kentucky. They are almost the last of the surviving great literary figures of yesterday. These men and their work have been covered in Mentor Number 25, “American Novelists.” The writing men of today, the men with whom this article has to do, are for the most part those that have not traveled beyond late youth or early middle age. Their hats were flung into the ring in the present century; or, at the earliest, in the nineties of the last century. Finding the field of the novelist a broader one than it was in their fathers’ time, they have blithely ventured, in their search for themes and material, to the four corners of the real or the imaginary earth. The following pages present a general review of the work of our well known fiction writers of the day. The works of Owen Wister, Winston Churchill, Thomas Nelson Page and George W. Cable are also considered fully in Mentor Number 25, so we lead off this article with a simple mention of these distinguished story-writers. In Wister’s work there is a primal bigness and strength and, in certain passages, great tenderness and romantic charm. Two of his best known books, “The Virginian” and “Lady Baltimore,” reveal these qualities.

Mr. Winston Churchill began with the somewhat trivial “The Celebrity” (1898), regarded when it appeared as a satirical hit at the personality of Richard Harding Davis. Books that followed were, “Richard Carvel,” “The Crisis,” “The Crossing,” “A Far Country,” “Coniston,” “Mr. Crewe’s Career,” “The Inside of the Cup,” “The Dwelling-Place of Light.” It is to a splendid persistence, an inexhaustible patience, a rigid adherence to his own ideals both in style and substance, that Winston Churchill owes the high position among American contemporary writers of fiction that he holds and has held for nearly two decades. Thomas Nelson Page and George W. Cable attained fame long ago as interpreters, in fiction, of Southern life, Mr. Page by his tender and beautiful “Marse Chan,” “Meh Lady” and other stories, Mr. Cable by his romances of “Old Creole Days” and “John March, Southerner.”

Norris’ Realism and McCutcheon’s Romanticism

More than fifteen years have passed since Frank Norris died, yet no one has yet come to take quite his place as an apostle of American realism. Before he fell under the spell of Émile Zola, with “McTeague,” and began his Trilogy of the Wheat, he had been the most ardent of romanticists. His earliest ventures in literature were tales of love and chivalry, written when he was a boy in his teens in Paris. “McTeague” was begun in the undergraduate days at the University of California. It began to assume shape in his year of student work at Harvard; but was elaborated and polished for four years before the public was allowed to see it. In the meantime “Moran of the Lady Letty” had been dashed off in an interval of relaxation, and became Norris’ first published book. Then came to Norris what he considered “the big idea,” that summed up at once American life and American prosperity. He would write the Trilogy of the Wheat. In the first book, “The Octopus,” he told of the fields and elevators of the Far West. “The Pit” showed the wheat as the symbol of mad speculation. With “The Wolf,” to picture the lives of the consumers in the Eastern States and in Europe, the Trilogy was to end. But before the tale was written Frank Norris died, at thirty-two years of age.

A few years ago, Mr. George Barr McCutcheon was asked the question, “Where is Graustark?” Whimsically he attempted to jot down on paper directions for journeying to the imaginary mountain kingdom, starting from a railway station in Indiana. Someone rather ill-naturedly suggested that Mr. McCutcheon had originally discovered this country in Anthony Hope’s “The Prisoner of Zenda.” But then someone else pointed out that Anthony Hope in turn had found his inspiration in Stevenson’s “Prince Otto,” and that R. L. S. himself had certainly owed something to the Gerolstein of M. Eugène Sue’s “The Mysteries of Paris.” So neither the exact whereabouts of Graustark nor its ultimate source is of great importance. What really counts is that hundreds of thousands of readers have found delight in following the adventures of Mr. McCutcheon’s stately heroines and somewhat irreverent heroes.

Every one of his romantic tales has met with generous welcome—“Graustark,” “Beverly of Graustark,” “Truxton King” and “The Prince of Graustark.”

But Graustark, if the first string to Mr. McCutcheon’s bow, is far from being the only one. Quite as wide in its popular appeal as any of the Graustark tales was “Brewster’s Millions,” with its curious starting problem. “Nedra” dealt with a desert island. “The Rose in the Ring” was the story of a circus. Other books not to be overlooked are “Jane Cable,” “The Daughter of Anderson Crow,” “The Man from Brodney’s,” and in shorter form, “The Day of the Dog,” “The Purple Parasol,” “Cowardice Court” and “The Alternative.”

John Fox and Harold McGrath

Someone recently spoke of John Fox, Jr., as a writer who never misses fire. Certainly he has staked a definite claim to the Cumberland Range and the primitive people who dwell in its valleys and along its mountainsides. As early as 1894, “A Mountain Europa” appeared. It was followed by “A Cumberland Vendetta,” “Hell-for-Sartain,” “The Kentuckians,” “Crittendon,” and “Blue Grass and Rhododendrons.” But it was not until 1903, with “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come,” that Mr. Fox came fully into his own. Incidentally, his fellow-craftsman, Mr. George Barr McCutcheon, considers the title the best title in all American fiction. The high standard established in “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come” has been maintained in “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” and “The Heart of the Hills.” Into that imaginary Central Europe which lies somewhere east of Dresden, west of Warsaw, and north of the Balkans, Harold McGrath went for such early books as “Arms and the Woman” and “The Puppet Crown.” Those tales were in the first rank among the thousands of stories that about that time were being written about the fanciful kingdoms and principalities, and the natural gift for story spinning that the author showed then has been in evidence in his subsequent tales in other fields. From among the twenty odd books that now bear his name, it is not easy to make a selection. Perhaps those most conspicuous on the score of popularity have been “The Man on the Box,” “Half a Rogue,” “The Goose Girl,” “The Carpet of Bagdad,” and “The Voice in the Fog.”

A Group of Popular Story-Tellers

While still an undergraduate, Mr. Jesse Lynch Williams wrote several of the tales that went to make up his first published volume, “Princeton Stories.” In his second volume, “The Stolen Story and Other Stories,” Mr. Williams struck an entirely new note. Of the tale from which the book drew its title, Richard Harding Davis, himself the author of “Gallegher,” once said that it was “the very best of American yarns of newspaper life.” Two others of the collection of striking ingenuity were “The Great Secretary of State Interview” and “The Cub Reporter and the King of Spain.” Among Jesse Lynch Williams’ later books are “The Day-Dreamer,” “My Lost Duchess,” and “The Married Life of the Frederick Carrolls.”

It was along the road of anonymity that Basil King finally found the way to pronounced success. In “Griselda,” “Let Not Man Put Asunder,” “In the Garden of Charity,” “The Steps of Honor,” and “The Giant’s Strength” he had won recognition as an accomplished story-teller. But still his audience was a comparatively limited one. Then, in 1910, appeared “The Inner Shrine,” a story of Franco-American life. It was read from one end of the land to the other, and greatly piqued curiosity as to the authorship, which, for many months, was carefully concealed. A dozen different names were suggested and accepted before it became an open secret that the story was the work of Basil King. The success of “The Inner Shrine” was perhaps largely responsible for the success of the subsequent “The Wild Olive” and “The Street Called Straight.”

In by-gone years it was Brand Whitlock, the Mayor of Toledo; in recent times it has been Brand Whitlock, the American Minister to Belgium, that has obscured Brand Whitlock, novelist. Yet despite the height he has attained in the fields of politics and of diplomacy, he is, and is likely always to remain, at heart a man of letters. Some day it may be given to him to “write the book as he sees it, for the God of things as they are.” Meanwhile he claims recognition here on the basis of such works of fiction as “The Thirteenth District,” “The Happy Average,” “The Turn of the Balance,” and “The Gold Brick,” a collection of short stories that appeared in 1910.

Samuel Hopkins Adams’ first essay in the field of sustained fiction was “The Mystery,” written in 1905, in collaboration with Stewart Edward White. The following year appeared “The Flying Death,” a tale of Montauk Point. Subsequent novels by Mr. Adams have been “Average Jones,” “The Secret of Lonesome Cave,” “Little Miss Grouch,” and “The Clarion,” the last named being a story involving newspaper life and the sinister influence of the tainted money of patent medicine advertisers on the liberty of the press.

Despite a career of literary activity that goes back twenty years, it is almost entirely to the books of the past four or five years that Rupert Hughes owes his present position as a popular novelist. In this later work, in such books as “What Will People Say?” “Empty Pockets” and “We Can’t Have Everything,” he has found his theme in modern Gotham: New York in the grip of the latest follies, the insensate, all-day and all-night pursuit of pleasure, the dance, the eating and drinking, and the squandering. Mr. Hughes’ novels reveal a range of knowledge of even the remote corners of the great city that has been painstakingly acquired, and that is used with the sense of selection of the accomplished story-teller. Only a few months beyond undergraduate life Owen Johnson published “Arrows of the Almighty” and “In the Name of Liberty.” They were read by a limited audience, mildly applauded, and then forgotten. Later, showing the Balzacian influence, came “Max Fargus,” dealing with the seamy side of New York law offices. In the point of material success, it could hardly be considered an improvement on the earlier books. Then, one day, in a whimsical mood, the author turned back to memories of his schoolboy years in Lawrenceville. The road that led to success and recognition had been found. From one end of the land to the other, growing boys, and boys that had grown up, and boys with gray beards laughed over every fresh exploit of “The Prodigious Hickey,” and “Dink Stover,” and “Doc McNooder,” and “The Tennessee Shad,” and “The Triumphant Egghead,” and “Brian de Boru Finnegan.” Motor parties traveling between New York and Philadelphia acquired the habit of breaking the journey at Lawrenceville for the purpose of visiting “The Jigger Shop,” where Hungry Smeed established the Great Pancake record. Then Mr. Johnson took one of his heroes from the school to the university, and “Stover of Yale” was the most talked-of book of a month. Turning to a broader field, the author found, in the turbulent life of twentieth-century New York, the background for “The Sixty-first Second,” “The Salamander,” “Making Money,” “The Woman Gives,” and “Virtuous Wives.”

It is no disparagement of Edwin Lefevre as a workman to say that one short story, written at a single sitting before breakfast, is of more permanent importance than all the rest of his production combined. For that story is “The Woman and Her Bonds,” which, without any hesitation, is to be ranked among the really big short tales of American fiction. It is the first of the collection known as “Wall Street Stories,” a book which brought to Mr. Lefevre quick recognition. Wall Street is the author’s particular field, and many of his characters are easily recognized by those in intimate touch with the money mart of the Western world. Besides “Wall Street Stories,” Mr. Lefevre has written “Samson Rock of Wall Street,” “The Golden Flood,” and “To the Last Penny.”

Dreiser and Dixon

A vigorous, if undeniably crude, figure in contemporary American fiction, is Theodore Dreiser. Lacking style and literary distinction, frequently bordering on the ridiculous, he nevertheless, by a rigid devotion to a certain kind of realism that omits no details, has built up a following that chooses to regard him as something of a great man. His first book, written a dozen years or more ago, was “Sister Carrie.” It introduced a soiled, unsentimental, rather sordid, but pathetic and very human heroine. After a career in Chicago, Sister Carrie made her way to New York, and eventually climbed to comfortable heights of worldly success. “Jennie Gerhardt” (1911) was in much the same vein and manner. “The Financier” (1912) gave a picture of American business life as it was or as Mr. Dreiser conceived it to be during the Civil War and the Reconstruction Period. Whatever its merits or demerits may be, “The Genius,” his latest novel, owes its chief prominence to its much debated morality.

After a life of activity in many fields, Thomas Dixon entered the writing lists with “The Leopard’s Spots” (1902), in which, powerfully if somewhat unevenly, he depicted conditions in certain states of the South under the carpet-bag and negro domination of the late sixties. Following up the same phase of history, he introduced, in “The Clansman,” the Kluklux Klan, and showed the work accomplished by that mysterious organization in bringing about the redemption of the afflicted district. Among Mr. Dixon’s later books are “The Traitor,” “The One Woman,” and “The Sins of the Father.”

Harrison and Bacheller

Henry Sydnor Harrison’s first novel, “Captivating Mary Carstairs,” was published anonymously, but in 1911 “Queed” appeared under the author’s own name, and at once took a place in the front rank of the year’s successful novels. There was a reminiscence of Dickens in the tale. Queed, “the little doctor,” as he is known to his associates in the story, is redeemed from over-acute egotism through the agency of two young women. At two years’ intervals following “Queed,” came “V. V.’s Eyes” and “Angela’s Business.”

Back in the nineties of the last century there was a corner of New York City known as Monkey Hill. It was in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and crowning it, standing far back from the street, was a kind of chalet that served as a club for certain writing men. Among these men was Irving Bacheller, and to pleasant evenings in the club may be traced “Eben Holden” (1900), the most popular of Mr. Bacheller’s many popular books. As early as 1893, he had written “The Master of Silence;” “The Still House of Darrow” appeared in 1894. But it was “Eben Holden” that made the author’s name for a time a household word. That book was followed by “D’ri and I,” “Darrel of the Blessed Isles,” and “Vergilius,” a tale of ancient Rome. In his later books, such as “Keeping Up With Lizzie” and “Charge It,” Mr. Bacheller plays whimsically with the problems of modern extravagance. His latest novel is “The Light in the Clearing.”

Fiction Notes in Varied Keys

If one novel can make a novelist, Ernest Poole earned the right to be considered one of the makers of modern American fiction when he wrote “The Harbor” (1915). Although the end of the story was somewhat marred by over-insistence on sociological problems, in the first part of the book the author struck a reminiscent note as charming as that struck by Du Maurier in “Peter Ibbetson.” No one had paid much attention to Mr. Poole’s earlier novel, “A Man’s Friends,” but in the general recognition of “The Harbor,” as a work of far more than ephemeral significance, there was hardly a dissenting voice. Not so widely popular, but marked by the same high quality of workmanship, is Mr. Poole’s later book, “His Family.”

Of the same generation at Princeton as Ernest Poole was Stephen French Whitman, and as mention of Mr. Poole’s name inevitably suggests “The Harbor,” so the name of Mr. Whitman calls up at once memories of “Predestined.” Unlike “The Harbor,” “Predestined” was not, speaking materially, a success. It was too grim, its ending was too pitiless. But very few who read the story of the degeneration of Felix Piers were able soon to forget it. In such later stories as “The Isle of Life” and “Children of Hope,” Mr. Whitman has forsaken New York for Italy and Sicily.

It is now almost twenty years since Henry Kitchell Webster and Samuel Merwin began their writing careers in collaboration. Together they wrote “The Short Line War” (1899), “Calumet K” and “Comrade John.” All these were well-told tales, and the later years, when each man has been working alone, have shown that neither one carried an undue share of the burden. Mr. Webster’s books include “The Whispering Man,” “A King in Khaki,” “The Ghost Girl,” “The Butterfly” and “The Real Adventure.” Mr. Merwin’s work has been unusual in the variety of its themes. Washington and the Constitution of the United States were ingredients of “The Citadel.” The adventures of an American girl in China were narrated in “The Charmed Life of Miss Austen.” Musical theories, the segregated district of Yokohama, and incidents in Chinese hotels went to the making of “Anthony the Absolute.” “The Honey Bee” is the story of a woman whose life has been in an American department store, who makes a trip to Paris, and there falls in love with one Blink Moran, of the prize-ring.

Fiction of Adventure

There is no questioning the force that Hamlin Garland has been in the literature of our time. He has told his story of his own life and literary activities in “A Son of the Middle Border” (1917), a volume that was at once accepted as one of the foremost of American literary autobiographies. In no way detracting from the quality of Mr. Garland’s later work is the ventured opinion that he has never surpassed some of his earlier stories. His writing career began about 1890, when the first of the tales of “Main-Traveled Roads” struck a fresh note in fiction. Between 1895 and 1898 he wrote “Rose of Dutcher’s Cooley,” and, in 1902, “The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop.” These, with “Main-Traveled Roads” are still probably his most popular books. In 1900 “The Eagle’s Heart” appeared, and later “Hesper,” “The Tyranny of the Dark,” “The Long Trail,” “The Shadow World” and “Cavanagh, Forest Ranger.”

Writing men of our generation have begun under the magic spell of Stevenson. To Lloyd Osbourne it was given to serve his apprenticeship to R. L. S., as Maupassant served his apprenticeship to Flaubert, and, while yet an apprentice, to be accepted as a collaborator. Together the stepfather and the stepson worked out “The Wrong Box” (1889), “The Wrecker” (1892), and “The Ebb Tide” (1894). Then Stevenson passed on into Shadow Land, and some years later Osbourne began alone with “The Queen Versus Billy” and “Love the Fiddler.” In the first decade of the present century the motor-car was still something of a novelty, and as such almost a virgin field for fiction. It was of its then baffling problems and incomprehensible moods that Lloyd Osbourne told in “The Motor-maniacs,” “Three Speeds Forward,” and “Baby Bullet.” Later books are “Wild Justice,” “The Adventurer,” and “A Person of Some Importance.”

A certain letter of the alphabet for a time seemed to exert a cabalistic influence on Louis Joseph Vance. “The Brass Bowl” appeared in 1907. The book of the next year was “The Black Bag.” In 1909 it was “The Bronze Bell.” There ended the use of the double B, but in 1912, Mr. Vance wrote “The Bandbox.” In the meantime had appeared “The Pool of Flame,” “The Fortune Hunter,” “No Man’s Land,” and “Cynthia-of-the-Minute.” Among the books that have followed “The Bandbox” are “The Day of Days,” “Joan Thursday,” showing Mr. Vance at his best, “The Lone Wolf,” and very recently, “The False Faces,” in which the Lone Wolf returns to play a great part in the World War.

Each Holds a Place of His Own

The Law has ever had countless stories to tell. There is hardly a tale by Arthur Train that does not, in some way, lead back to one of the offices that cluster about the Criminal Courts Building facing Centre Street, on the lower end of Manhattan Island. In that neighborhood swung the shingle of the law firm of Gottlieb & Quibble, as related in “The Confessions of Artemas Quibble.” Mr. Train’s first book, “McAllister and His Double” (1905), began in a Fifth Avenue club, but before a dozen pages had been finished, fate had carried McAllister to the Tombs Prison. The thrice-told tales of Pontin’s Restaurant in Franklin Street, where the lawyers gather at the noon hour, went to make “The Prisoner at the Bar,” “True Stories of Crime” and “Courts, Criminals and the Camorra.” Like Mr. Train, William Hamilton Osborne has also achieved a place in Literature as well as Law.

There are readers who regard the very facility of Gouverneur Morris as a curse, believing that if writing to him had been harder work, his present achievement would be considerably greater. His first book, “A Bunch of Grapes,” dates back to his undergraduate days at Yale. Four years later, in 1901, “Tom Beauling” appeared, to be followed the next year by “Aladdin O’Brien.” “Yellow Men and White” showed what he could do in the vein of “Treasure Island.” Of more enduring quality was “The Voice in the Rice.” It is not surprising that many of our novelists have begun with tales of undergraduate life. “Princeton Stories” was the first book of Jesse Lynch Williams. “Harvard Episodes” of Charles M. Flandrau. Will Irwin’s first fling at the game of writing was “Stanford Stories” (1910). That book was done in collaboration. Also in collaboration, this time with Gelett Burgess, the creator of “The Purple Cow,” the editor of The Lark, and a humorist of rare whim, were written Mr. Irwin’s next two books. It was a short sketch of the old San Francisco before the earthquake, called “The City That Was,” that first made Will Irwin’s name widely known. Of more substantial proportions were “The House of Mystery,” “The Readjustment” and “Beating Back.”

Of a certain genuine importance has been the work of Robert Herrick. The author, like his heroes, has been finding the threads of life’s web in a rather sorry tangle, and groping for a solution of the world’s real meaning. It was of problems big and vital in our American civilization that Mr. Herrick wrote in “The Memoirs of an American Citizen,” “The Common Lot,” “The Web of Life,” “The Real World,” “The Gospel of Freedom,” and “Together.” In “The Master of the Inn” he has achieved an exceptional short story. Also deserving of high attention is Meredith Nicholson, who began in 1903 with “The Main Chance,” and achieved unusual popular success somewhat later with “The House of a Thousand Candles” and “The Port of Missing Men.” Among Mr. Nicholson’s more recent books are “The Lords of High Decision,” “Hoosier Chronicle,” “Otherwise Phyllis” and “The Siege of the Seven Suitors.” For tales breathing the spirit of the West and intricate mystery stories, Zane Grey and Burton Egbert Stevenson are known respectively. Mr. Grey’s best known books are “The Heritage of the Desert,” “The Light of Western Stars,” “The Lone Star Ranger,” “The Heart of the Desert” and “The U. P. Trail.” Wherever a well-told yarn of intricate mystery is appreciated, such books as Mr. Stevenson’s “The Marathon Mystery,” “The Destroyer” and “The Boule Cabinet” have found generous welcome. Will Payne is the author of “Jerry the Dreamer,” the striking “Story of Eva,” “Mr. Salt” and “The Losing Game”; Edward W. Townsend in writing of Chimmie Fadden did not forfeit the place as a novelist to which he is entitled by reason of such books as “A Daughter of the Tenements,” “Days Like These” and “Lees and Leaven”; and Harry Leon Wilson, who years ago made a definite impression with “The Seeker” and “The Spenders,” and who of late has been moving a continent to laughter by the dexterity with which he confronted the very British Ruggles with the complicated problems of social life in the town of Red Gap—somewhere in America.

Besides all these there are Joseph C. Lincoln and Cyrus Townsend Brady, the first one in high favor for his breezy stories of Cape Cod life and character, redolent of the salt sea air, the latter for his many entertaining tales of plain and desert; and Sewell Ford, who created the slangy but very human “Shorty McCabe” and “Torchy”; and those two pungent writers of Western episodes, Peter Kyne and Charles E. Van Loan. Emerson Hough has given us rousing tales of the Middle and Far West, of the Kentucky mountains and Alaska. Holman Day’s excellent stories breathe of the Maine woods, and Roy Norton has rendered tribute to the sea. Harris Dickson, a son of Mississippi, has woven into story form some throbbing incidents of Southern history, and has depicted numerous sunny corners of every-day existence below the Mason and Dixon line. James Branch Cabell is a spinner of charming romances; some of the best have a medieval French flavor. Harold Bell Wright is well known as the author of “Barbara Worth” and several other books whose sales have climbed into the hundreds of thousands. Richard Washburn Child is a young American who wields a vigorous pen in the portrayal of national character, and James Oppenheim, not to be confused with the Englishman, E. Phillips Oppenheim, represents vital phases of present-day city life. Joseph Hergesheimer has won a place among writers by reason of his picturesque style and original invention. A comprehensive list of American-born novelists must also include the names of Leroy Scott, Henry B. Fuller, Frank H. Spearman, Earl Derr Biggers and Arthur Reeve, all of whom have within late years produced popular successes.

The roll of the makers of modern American fiction is a long one, yet none can gainsay that the average of achievement is high.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

---

THE OPEN LETTER

As you finish the foregoing review of fiction writers, you may ask, “Why do you make no mention of one of the best known and most widely read of all our modern story-tellers—O. Henry?” We have reserved a special place for him on this page. O. Henry occupied a position of unique distinction among fiction makers, and it is only fitting that he should have a place of his own in this number of The Mentor. As there is in literature only one Edgar Poe and one Maupassant, so there is only one O. Henry—and the gamut of life’s keynotes that his fingers swept was wider than that of Poe and Maupassant combined. Tragedy, Comedy, Mystery, Adventure, Romance and Humor—he knew them all, and it was with no uncertain, amateur touch, but with the strong, sure stroke of a master that he played in those varied keys. His Tragedy is grim, his Comedy light and skilful, his Mystery baffling, his Adventure absorbing, his Romance charming, and his Humor irresistible.

William Sydney Porter—for that was O. Henry’s real name—was born at Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1867. His father was a doctor of ability, and something of an inventive genius. His mother wrote poetry, and her father was, at one time, a newspaper editor. There was nothing unusual about this family outfit—it was quite ordinary, in fact, and in no way explained the genius of O. Henry. Nor did his school days, nor his term of employment as a clerk in a drug store. His boyhood was like that of thousands. But, as we read of him: “In those days Sunday was a day of rest, and Porter and a friend would spend the long afternoons out on some sunny hillside sheltered from the wind by the thick brown broom sedge, lying on their backs gazing up into the blue sky dreaming, planning, talking or turning to their books and reading. He was an ardent lover of God’s great out-of-doors, a dreamer, a thinker and a constant reader.”

At eighteen years of age he went to Texas and, as he put it, “ran wild on the prairies.” If he had any ambitions to write at that time, he did not show them. He lived in an atmosphere of adventure, and he loved to tell stories, but apparently just for the pleasure of it. He was a good singer, a clever mimic, and something of a sketch artist. But his pen had not yet begun to flow. From the Texas ranch he went to Austin, where he engaged in newspaper work. After that came a period of wandering—and then the New York life. He lived in two big rooms on quiet Irving Place, three doors from Washington Irving’s old home—and he found it lonesome. So he became a wanderer in New York, and he saw and noted many things in the life of that city that no other writer had taken account of. New York is better known to the world since O. Henry lived there. His stories were written under pressure and with great rapidity. He contracted to furnish the New York World one story a week for a year, and his product was so good that the contract was renewed. During the same period he was contributing to magazines. His total of stories amounts to two hundred and fifty-one, and they were written during eight years. Then, in 1910, he died, leaving the world enriched by a heritage of short stories that stand high among the classic productions of their kind.

The Mentor