Library of the best American literature / Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers

by Unknown

I move thee yet (though how I may not know)

Beyond the skies.

---

MISS ALICE FRENCH.

(Octave Thanet).

THE REPRESENTATIVE NOVELIST OF THE SOUTHWEST.

S one of the most prominent among our modern women novelists stands the name of Octave Thanet. The real owner of this widely known pen-name is Miss Alice French. Though Miss French is recognized as the representative novelist of Missouri, Arkansas, and the Southwest generally, where she has lived for many years, she is by birth and education a genuine Yankee woman, and on both sides a descendant from old Puritan stock. Her ancestors came over in the Mayflower. They count among them many Revolutionary heroes and not a few persecutors of the witches one hundred and fifty and two hundred years ago, and they, also, number to themselves some of the modern rulers and prominent ministers of Massachusetts.