It is no small triumph to win all kinds of readers, as Mr. Phillips has. The reason he has achieved it is because he writes about life as we live it ourselves, in our hearts and in our homes and in our dealings with each other—the familiar yet startling and always fascinating truth about life.
Mr. Phillips is an Indiana man in the early forties. He graduated from De Pauw University and then from Princeton. He has had a career giving him unusual opportunities to observe the life of all kinds of people, high and low, rich and poor, town and country, here and abroad. As he watched the struggle of humanity to live—the concealment and subterfuge, the extraordinary mixture of good and bad in everyone—all the conflict in the jungle which we call life impressed itself on him, and he gradually found that fiction—the novel—was presenting to him the best medium for him to express to everyone what he had found in his work so far. The result has been that in the last few years Mr. Phillips has gathered together an audience of thousands, who watch each book as it appears. It is interesting to see what he has produced.
Mr. Phillips's novel just preceding the present work is
The Fashionable Adventures of
JOSHUA CRAIG
Concerning this story, the London Times said: "Until the modern Balzac actually arrives, perhaps Mr. David Graham Phillips may be permitted to fill the gap"; and of the hero it said: "Joshua Craig, a Lincoln adapted for the use of latter-day Americans."
It is the story of a strong, virile personality set among the frothy superficialities of society life in Washington. Joshua Craig, a young Western lawyer, is striving to make a name for himself in national politics, and carries everything before him by his cyclonic forcefulness. In spite of his bourgeois birth, he tears down the barriers of society, and his utter disregard of conventionalities makes him the sensation of the season. And yet, for all his frank contempt of the methods of Aristocracy, their plots and littleness, he finds among them one "woman," Margaret Severance. He lays siege to her with all his impulsiveness and the assurance of success, and makes her own honest self do battle with the scheming smallnesses of her aristocratic bringing up. He carries her away with a masterfulness that is characteristic of him, and marries her before she can get her breath. Big and rough and crude, repelling and yet compelling, he fights for the supremacy of his fundamental ideas, and step by step the "lady" in her gives way to the "woman," always struggling, always battling. She finally yields to his will—to become the quiescent wife of a candidate for governor.
Just preceding this book, Mr. Phillips published
OLD WIVES FOR NEW
Many, many critics have called this novel immoral and gross. It is not so. It tells the naked truth—not brutally, but frankly. It is not romance. It is real life. It deals with a wife who cannot keep pace with her husband, and who becomes slothful and unclean and low-minded because she does not realize that to live and move forward she must keep herself physically and mentally clean and fresh. It is the truth. It hits many a woman to-day hard. Women do not like this truth. It bites too deep and so they called it disgusting and immoral. And yet more than 200,000 people have read it. Of this novel it is said: "If the husband reads it he gives it to his wife. If the wife reads it first, she is very likely to hide it from her husband." A woman said of it: "While I was reading it, I stopped one night just after the train wreck. It was so vivid that as I took up my morning paper, the next day, I glanced at the head-lines for news of Murdock's condition, and to find whether the scandal had come out." "Old Wives for New" is a picture of married life—when the blinds are drawn and the servants out of the way, and the husband and wife become their real selves. The St. Paul Pioneer Press says: "It contains things about women that have never seen the light of day before." It might have added: and things about men also. The book teems with good characters, each with a haunting resemblance to ourselves. There are women of respectability and women of the other world, wise men and fools, people that are more good than bad, people that are more bad than good, but nobody that is unhuman enough to be either all good or all bad. The keynote is that of a good story which searches for the truth.