American literary masters

by Leon H. Vincent

AMERICAN
LITERARY MASTERS

BY LEON H. VINCENT

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT 1906 BY LEON H. VINCENT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published March 1906

TO
GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY

PREFACE

The nineteen men of letters whose work is reviewed in this volume represent an important half-century of our national literary life. The starting-point is the year 1809, the date of “A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker.” No author is included whose reputation does not rest, in part, on some notable book published before 1860.

Readers of modern French criticism will not need to be told that the plan of dividing the studies into short sections was taken from Faguet’s admirable “Dix-Septième Siècle.”