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.”
BRAND WHITLOCK
THOMAS DIXON
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.”
