CHAPTER XVIII
THE FINEST SIDE OF “THE SUN”
Literary Associations of an Editorial Department That Has Encouraged and Attracted Men of Imagination and Talent.—Mitchell, Hazeltine, Church, and Their Colleagues.
The Sun’s association with literature, particularly with fiction, has been more intimate than that of any other daily American newspaper. Ben Day had a taste for fiction, else the moon hoax, a bit of good writing as well as the greatest of fakes, would not have appeared. In the time of Moses Y. Beach the balloon hoax and other writings of Poe were in the Sun. Moses S. Beach, who owned or controlled the paper for twenty years, brought popularity and profit to it through stories written exclusively for the Sun by Mary J. Holmes, Horatio Alger, Jr., and a dozen other authors whose tales compelled readers to burn the midnight gas.
Under Dana the Sun’s interest in literature became broader, more intense. Dana’s knowledge that the most avid appetite of the public was for the short story and the novel, led him to encourage his men to adopt, when feasible, the fiction form in news writing. In his four-page daily there was not much room for romance proper, but when the Sunday Sun was under way, its eight pages afforded space for tales of fancy.
In the first few years of Dana’s ownership the walks of American literature were not crowded. As late as 1875 the Sun lamented:
For younger rising men we look almost in vain. Bret Harte gives no promise of lasting fecundity. Howells does charming work, and will probably long remain in position as a dainty but not suggestive or formative writer. Aldrich is very slight. John Hay easily won whatever name he has, and it will easily pass away. Henry James the younger is one of the rising men, the youth of literature.
But of all these there is not one who has yet discovered the stuff out of which the kings and princes, or even the barons, of literature are made.
Harte, having written his most famous short stories, had come East. Howells, then thirty-eight, had published three or four novels, but “The Rise of Silas Lapham” was ten years ahead. John Hay, then on the Tribune editorial staff, had written his “Pike County Ballads” and “Castilian Days.” Henry James had put forth only “Watch and Ward.” To these budding geniuses the general public was rather inclined to prefer Augusta Evans’s “St. Elmo,” E. P. Roe’s “Barriers Burned Away,” and Edward Eggleston’s “Hoosier Schoolmaster.”
Notwithstanding the expressed doubt as to Harte’s fecundity, Dana admired his work and printed his stories in the Sun for years afterward. Late in the seventies he bought Harte’s output and syndicated it—probably the first successful application of the newspaper syndicate system to fiction. About the same period Robert Louis Stevenson’s earlier successes, such as “The Treasure of Franchard” and “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door,” were having their first American printing in the Sun, their original appearance having been in Temple Bar and other English magazines.