Our Short Story Writers

BfiiHCHE^CGIlrOHlI^LMS Library of the College of Liberal Arts Boston University Given in memory of Hortense Weed Taylor by Dean Ralph W. Taylor C. L. A. 1911 Ap>.\ \S- »94a. C^ MODERN AMERICAN WRITERS OUR SHORT STORY WRITERS Our Short Story Writers BY BLANCHE COLTON WILLIAMS, Ph.D. Instructor in Story Writing, Columbia University (Extension Teaching and Summer Session); Associate Professor of English, Hunter College of the City of New York. Autlwr of "A Handbook on Story Writing"; "How to Study 'The Best Short S'-ories' "; "Gnomic Poetry in Anglo-Saxon": Editor "A Book of Short S/orics." NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1929 , . ^ ov Copyright, 1920, By DODD, mead AND COMPANY, Inc 6^004- PRINTED IN THE U. S. A, BY Wbt ^uinn & goDtn Company BOOK MANUFACTURERS RAHWAY NEW JERSEY To FRANKLIN THOMAS BAKER Professor of English Columbia University TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I AOB ^ Alice Brown i CHAPTER II James Branch Cabell 22 CHAPTER III * Dorothy Canfield 41 CHAPTER IV Robert W. Chambers 55 CHAPTER V Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb 73 CHAPTER VI ^ Jam£s Brendan Connolly 85 CHAPTER VII Richard Harding Davis 105 ,^ CHAPTER VIII Margaret Wade Deland ^ 129 CHAPTER IX Edna Ferber 146 CHAPTER X Mary Wilkins Freeman 160 - TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER XI PAGB Hamlin Garland 182 CHAPTER XII William Sidney Porter C'O. Henry'*) • . • . 200 CHAPTER XIII Joseph Hergesheimer » . 223 CHAPTER XIV Fannie Hurst • • 237 CHAPTER XV Jack London o • • . 256 CHAPTER XVI James Brander Matthews . , • • 278 CHAPTER XVII Melville Davisson Post • . • 293 CHAPTER XVIII Mary Roberts Rinehart • 309 CHAPTER XIX Booth Tarkington •»**322 CHAPTER XX ^ Edith Wharton •«...••••• 337 CHAPTER XXI Maxwell Struthers Burt 358 CHAPTER XXII Wilbur Daniel Steele 372 FOREWORD the risk of supererogation I desire to state ATemphatically that these twenty authors are only representative of our short story writers. I labor under no delusion that they are all we have of high rank, rather am I inclined to suspect that the first prospective reader will find his favorite story teller missing. Some of my own preferred stylists are con- spicuously absent; and, although for the most part I have included those whom within prescribed limits I place first, I regretfully record the absentees. The short story is the literary medium that supersedes all others in America; one small volume is a container too exiguous for even its chief authors. According to the dominant principle working throughout the series of which this book is a unit, the writers discussed should be living or at least con- temporary. If, by request of the publishers. Jack London and "O. Henry" were to be replevined from the famous dead, I was of the opinion that Richard Harding Davis should not be omitted. Henry James, from a literary point of view, would precede any of these three. For reasons later forthcoming, however, he is not among those present. The seventeen FOREWORD living writers I have chosen on three counts : sig- nificance of work in time or theme or other respect; weight or actual value of work, and quantity of work measured by the number of stories or story volumes. It happens that certain significant writers may have been left out because of their having turned, after one momentous contribution to the short story, to the novel, or for other reason having failed to produce a corpus of short story material. George W. Cable's place in literature was established primarily through Old Creole Days; but in the opinion of the present writer the niche he occupies is that of novelist. "Octave Thanet" one might rightly expect to find here. But only her first volume had been pubHshed when Ham- lin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads appeared, and there were stronger arguments for his inclusion. Many recent writers have published in leading periodicals stories which have not yet found preservation between the covers of a book. There are enough of these writers alone to justify a volume of reviews. Herein are Alice Brown and Mary Wilkins Free- man, interpreters of New England; Irvin Cobb, humorist, Southerner and journalist successor to R. H. D. ; Edith Wharton, representative of culture and the Henry James school; Dorothy Canfield, lover of humanity and democracy; Robert W. Chambers, imaginative artist, superior to Chambers the novelist; Melville Davisson Post, detective story writer, and Brander Matthews, New York realist, technicians who FOREWORD have held out for the story; Mary Roberts RInehart, product of the motion picture era; James Brendan Connolly, author of sea stories pronouncedly individ- ual; Hamlin Garland, realist of the Middle West; Margaret Deland, witness through her Pennsylvania tales that religion and truth are not incompatible with dramatic effect; Booth Tarkington, satirist, argus- eyed reader of life; Fannie Hurst, stylist of distinc- tion and, with Edna Ferber, portrait painter of the middle class of New America; James Branch Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer seekers after beauty, per- formers of "the old gesture toward the stars." So ends the first score; and, on demand there are these toward a second : Mary Raymond Shipman An- drews, Wilbur Daniel Steele, George W. Cable, "Oc- tave Thanet'^ Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Rupert Hughes, Clarence Budington Kelland, Gouverneur Morris, "Charles Egbert Craddock", Annie Trumbull Slosson, Mary Synon, Will Allen White, Josephine Daskam Bacon, Mary Heaton Vorse, Lawrence Perry, Willa Gather, Henry Van Dyke, with your own prefer- ences to complete the twenty. This volume must conform, in a measure, to the series, of which several numbers have already appeared. But one difference will be noticed : there are, comparatively, fewer names of authors, and they are treated at proportionately greater length. An entire volume, by George Gordon, is devoted to The Men Who Make Our Novels, and another, by Grant Over- FOREWORD ton, to Tlie Women Who Make Our Novels. Forty- seven names are included in the first of these; thirty- five in the second. The biographical data have been secured from the highest available sources, and when I have drawn con- siderably upon one source as I have done in Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis (Edited by Charles Belmont Davis), or Dr. C. Alphonso Smith's O. Henry Biography, I have been scrupulous to in- dicate the fact. It is a pleasure here to express sincere thanks to my friend and colleague; Mrs. J. H. Temple, Jr. ("E. K. T."), who contributed the chapter on James Brendan Connolly. Blanche Colton Williams New York City, October 22, 1920. OUR SHORT STORY WRITERS CHAPTER I ALICE BROWN GRANT OVERTON in The Women Who MR.Make Our Novels says discriminatingly about the lady whose name heads this chapter: *lt is perhaps unfortunate that in a book dealing with American women novelists it should be necessary to confine the consideration of Alice Brown to her novels." Novelist, essayist, poet, dramatist, Alice Brown has done her best work in the short-story. On looking over certain of her earlier collections, however, one might well ask, *'Would the content of these tales not gain if organized into novel form?" Whether Miss Brown's first short-stories are to be regarded as tenta- tive efforts toward noveldom or whether her novels must be viewed as the work of a short-story writer straying afield is a moot question. Not inconceivably she is one of those rare authors destined to compara- tive success in two literary types. I 2 OUR SHORT STORY WRITERS The New Hampshire scenes and persons in Meadow Grass and Tiverton Tales, obviously direct from her memory and observation, occur and recur throughout the volumes. One lays them down and with slight effort constructs a neighborhood history. If not quite novels in embryo or even in the amorphous state, they are at least prophecies. Beginning with High Noon, Miss Brown entered into constructive fiction. Her previous building rested on the knowledge and inherit- ance of childhood. The High Noon accomplishment is that of an artist finding herself, uncertainly, grop- ingly, in her chosen form. For this reason the stories are not real nor convincing as are those in the earlier volumes. They are trials toward a new goal. In The County Road, Vanishing Points, and The Flying Teu- ton the author has arrived. She is sure of her manner, her invention and her technic. She has mellowed to maturity. This is by no means to say that her first books may not be so valuable. From the point of view of literary history they are superior. No historian of New England writing henceforth may afford to neglect her studies—not more than he might omit those of Sarah Orne Jewett or the first work of Mary Wilkins Freeman. On the other hand, no account of the short- story would be complete without emphasis upon the greater art of her second and third periods. Had Alice Brown so elected she might have ranked higher as essayist or poet than story writer. It is not too much to add that she may be remembered as dram- ALICE BROWN 3 atist. Something of her own feeling about the medium of expression she probably put into the letter Zoe. Montrose wrote Francis Hume (in The Day of His Youth) : **Do not write verse until you fail to express yourself in prose. Verse should glide full-winged over the surface of the waters where the spirit of God lies sleeping." Her versatility has meant breadth and variety ; it has not favored, even if it has not hindered, her intensification in any one of the literary forms. If it has conduced to mixture rather than subtile dif- ferentiation of type, then the glory is greater to her short-stories that they have emerged triumphant.

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