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[Pg 16] 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.

JAMES LANE ALLEN

From photograph, copyright by Paul Thompson, N. Y.

WINSTON CHURCHILL