IV. Stephen Crane
The author of The Red Badge of Courage has lately been the subject of a brilliant biography. Mr. Thomas Beer’s Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters has the color and the abiding fascination of its subject, if sometimes a trifle too cryptic and oracular. The point of The Red Badge of Courage is its record of war as the experience of the individual, any war in any age. The book, a product of purely imaginative experience by a youth of twenty-two to twenty-four, lights up its single theme as completely as a Verrey flare exposes some small corner of a battle. Reading either Crane’s work or Mr. Beer’s study, one can no more doubt that Crane was a genius. He had the intense, piercing, personal vision of the isolated, unexplained (and unexplainable) artist. Such a figure is not to be produced by any sedulous process of education; it is not a triumphant burbank of literary cultivation. Although people remember, or, at least, generally have heard of, The Red Badge of Courage, there is a sharp need for republication of most of Crane’s work in a good edition; for The Open Boat and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky are of the utmost importance, the first on the evidence of Joseph Conrad, the second on the evidence of Stephen Crane. If one were asked to pick the American authors of most interesting significance to literature at large, one would do well, I think, to let both Poe and Hawthorne wait at one side while one weighed carefully Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Stephen Crane.
Other authors whose use of American history in fiction has interested huge audiences are Everett T. Tomlinson, Elmer Russell Gregor, Frederick Trevor Hill and Bernard Marshall. It is perhaps natural that their fiction should be spoken of, as Altsheler’s is often spoken of, as “stories for boys.” There is conclusive evidence, however, that about half of the readers of Altsheler are adults; and the percentage of adult readers for the books by Mr. Tomlinson, Mr. Gregor, Mr. Hill and Mr. Marshall is heavy. This might be inferred easily enough from the simple fact that between 1,250,000 and 1,500,000 copies of Mr. Tomlinson’s books have been sold.
Everett T. Tomlinson, born in 1859, had a boyish passion for natural history and another for baseball. From Williams College he went into teaching, becoming headmaster of a boys’ school, where he still played ball. For twenty-three years he was pastor of a church in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was appointed a member of the New Jersey Public Library Commission when it was formed in 1901, and became its chairman in 1921. His first book appeared thirty years ago. Besides many fictions, such as The Mysterious Rifleman and Scouting on the Border, he is the author of a Young People’s History of the American Revolution and such books as Places Young Americans Want to Know and Fighters Young Americans Want to Know. His new book (1924) is called Pioneer Scouts of Ohio.
Elmer Russell Gregor, born in 1878, was graduated from a military academy and spent twenty-four hours in the drygoods business, six months in real estate, and more successful periods as a farmer and stock raiser, and in lumbering, quarrying and mining. His real job since 1910 has been writing, but, as he says, his hobbies are Indians (foremost), ornithology, natural history, forestry, hunting and fishing, and breeding prize-winning dogs, chickens and pigeons, so “you see I don’t have much time for work.” He lives in Southport, Connecticut, but has traveled much and “my circle of intimate acquaintances includes cowboys, ‘sour-doughs’ (miners), Injuns, mountaineers, and lumberjacks—all good fellows.” The books that have been most popular with his readers are stories of young Indian chiefs, divided into two series, the Western Indian Stories and the Eastern Indian Stories, and, most recently, the Jim Mason series, which follows the fortunes of a white frontiersman in the days of the French and Indian wars. Captain Jim Mason (1924) is his latest work.
Frederick Trevor Hill, born in 1866, a graduate of Yale and a graduate in law at Columbia, on the staff of General Pershing and cited by Pershing, is the author of very widely-known books on the law, both as fact and as material for fiction. His interest in American history has led him to study the three or four outstanding figures in such books as On the Trail of Grant and Lee, On the Trail of Washington, and Washington The Man of Action. Why, it may be asked, two books on the Father of his country? And the response must be that On the Trail of Washington is, as the subtitle explains, “a narrative of Washington’s boyhood and manhood, based on his writings and other authentic documents,” and is concerned with the growth of early years; whereas Washington The Man of Action is an attempt to portray the mature man as he really was, not as the plaster saint of his earliest biographers.
Bernard Marshall was born on a farm twenty miles south of Boston, one of a family fond of books and music. Having resolved to be a writer, he thought he could play in orchestras and make a living until he had his foothold as an author. Thereupon twenty years were passed as a musician, a legal stenographer, a writer of technical articles and in advertising work. Then, after trying to help build ships to win the war, Mr. Marshall settled in Berkeley, California, a half mile from the university, and began to write historical romances, Walter of Tiverton, Cedric the Forester, and The Torch Bearers. The last two and his new American historical romance, Redcoat and Minute Man, form a Liberty Series, showing three crucial points in the history of the Anglo-Saxon struggle for popular liberties, Magna Charta (Cedric the Forester), Oliver Cromwell (The Torch Bearers), and the American Revolution (Redcoat and Minute Man).