BIRTHPLACE OF THOMAS NELSON PAGE
Oakland Plantation, Hanover County, Virginia.
In these moving tales, told with unobstrusive artistic skill, the long-suspended literary tradition of Virginia received an impulse which has since given the country a group of stories of original quality.
JAMES LANE ALLEN
Never did pioneers carry into a new country a finer blending of the daring which moves the frontier farther from the old centers, and the chivalry of romance for women and idealization of emotion and experience, than went into the fertile and beautiful Kentucky country in the days which followed Boone’s adventurous career, and produced the types of character which appear in James Lane Allen’s “The Choir Invisible.” The Blue Grass country found in him a lover who was also an artist, and the background of his stories is sketched with exquisite skill. “The Kentucky Cardinal,” “Aftermath,” and the stories in “Flute and Violin” have not been surpassed in beauty of diction in our fiction. If one might venture to predict long life for any contemporary writing, he would not hesitate to put the short stories of these two Southern writers among American classics.
BIRTHPLACE OF JAMES LANE ALLEN, NEAR LEXINGTON, KY.
Mr. Page and Mr. Allen have written long stories as well; in several instances dealing with contemporary life and manners. Mr. Allen has kept in the field of character study with increasing emphasis on the influence of environment. The title of one of his later stories, “The Mettle of the Pasture,” suggests the relation of the actors in the drama to the soil on which they live, while the lifelike study of the horse-breeder in “The Doctor’s Christmas Eve” is a portrait which could not have been drawn outside the boundaries of Kentucky. Mr. Page in his later stories has dealt with the spread of the commercial spirit, the conditions in which women work, political corruption, and social changes.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Mr. Wister and Mr. Churchill have one great interest in common,—they are deeply concerned with American character and experience. Mr. Churchill has dramatized our history in a series of works, beginning with “Richard Carvel” of the Colonial period; continued in “The Crossing,” of the period of the first great westward emigration through the passes of the Alleghenies; in “The Crisis,” a picture of struggles between the old North and the old South, between 1861 and 1865, localized in St. Louis; and in “Mr. Crewe’s Career,” a study of the “machine” in politics and the beginnings of the struggle for popular government which has become a national movement. Mr. Churchill draws with a free hand on a large canvas, and his works have epic quality, emphasizing large and significant movements and defining the place of individuals in them, rather than presenting delicately sketched portraits of men and women in the narrower range of personal experience.