CONTENTS

PAGE
[Any Little Boy]1
[Culture in the Air]29
[Neale Begins to Be Neale]85
["To-day Shall Be the Same as Yesterday"]129
[An Education in the Humanities and the Liberal Arts]209
[Birthdays in Several Languages]317
[The End of All Roads]379

ANY LITTLE BOY

CHAPTER I

In the spring of 1893 Strindberg had just published "A Fool's Confession," D'Annunzio was employing all the multicolored glory of his style to prove "The Triumph of Death"; Hardy was somberly mixing on his palette the twilight grays and blacks and mourning purples of "Jude the Obscure"; Nordau, gnashing his teeth, was bellowing "Decadent" at his contemporaries who smirked a complacent acceptance of the epithet ... and, all unconscious of the futility and sordidness of the world, Neale Crittenden swaggered along Central Avenue, brandishing his shinny stick.