HARLEKENDEN HOUSE, THE HOME OF WINSTON CHURCHILL IN CORNISH, N.H.
MUSIC ROOM IN HARLEKENDEN HOUSE
OWEN WISTER
Mr. Wister has the gift of picturing real, vital characters, and his stories are full of a brilliant and moving life. His people are not only alive, but intensely and actively alive. A man bred in the best social traditions, a graduate of the oldest American university, Mr. Wister was fortunate enough to know the frontier at the very moment when the forces of business and the second great Western movement were about to destroy it. Most men who wrote about the old frontier, either in fiction or in plays, were concerned with its melodramatic aspects,—its guns, and shirts, sombreros, and bucking broncos. Mr. Wister saw the character behind these stage costumes; he recognized the fiber of the men,—their courage, their spirit of comradeship, their rough but genuine humor, their passion for wide horizons and the freedom of the life of the plains. In “The Virginian,” and the short stories from the same hand, our fiction has a series of studies of types of character now almost extinct, and of a stage of life which has disappeared. When “Lady Baltimore” appeared, Mr. Wister had passed from society in an elemental stage to a Southern community which has preserved its oldtime qualities of refinement of manner, dignity of habit, and a hospitality which is the very flower of high breeding and ease of condition. And Mr. Wister was as much at home in Charleston as on the old frontier; a fact highly significant of the quality and fiber of the man. Among American novelists he will hold a place of his own by reason of the vitality and artistic skill of his work.
OWEN WISTER’S FAMILY PLACE, IN GERMANTOWN, PA.
EDITH WHARTON