Press Illustrating Service
JACK LONDON
Bust, by Finn Haakon Frolich, unveiled in Honolulu, after London had made his cruise in the Snark
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.[Pg 17] Cable by his romances of “Old Creole Days” and “John March, Southerner.”
Bradley studios, N. Y.
JOHN FOX, Jr.
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.