The files of the Sun for 1891 contain writings of Stevenson that are omitted from most, if not from all of the collections of his works. These are parts of his articles on the South Seas, an ambitious series which he was unable to finish. Some of them were printed in the London Black and White. All of them appeared in the Sun. Through the Sun’s literary syndicate the American public gained some of its earliest acquaintance with Harte and Henry James. Kipling’s “Light That Failed” had its first American appearance in the Sun in the autumn of 1890. It may interest Mr. James’s admirers to know that one of the Middle Western newspapers, having bought a James novel from the Sun, played it up with a gingery head-line:
GEORGINA’S REASONS!
HENRY JAMES’S LATEST STORY!
A Woman Who Commits Bigamy and Enforces Silence on Her Husband!
Two Other Lives Made Miserable by Her Heartless Action!
Among the literary men given less to fiction and more to history, sociology, and philosophy who have yielded to the Sun’s columns from their treasure, sometimes anonymously, were Jeremiah Curtin, the translator of Sienkiewicz and Tolstoy and an authority on folk-lore; George Ticknor Curtis, jurist and writer on the Constitution; Goldwin Smith, whose views on the subject of the destiny of Canada coincided with Dana’s, and who contributed to the Sun hundreds of articles from his store of philosophical and political wisdom; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who wrote on railway management; General Adam Badeau, one of Grant’s biographers; William Elliot Griffis, probably the most authoritative of all American writers upon Japanese affairs; and Francis Lynde Stetson, the distinguished authority on corporation and railway law.
