The Project Gutenberg EBook of Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920)
by Carl Van Doren

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Title: Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920)

Author: Carl Van Doren

Release Date: June 8, 2004 [EBook #12563]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS

1900-1920

BY

CARL VAN DOREN

1922

To

FREDA KIRCHWEY

PREFACE

_The American Novel_, published last year, undertook to trace the
progress of a literary type in the United States from its beginnings to
the end of the nineteenth century; _Contemporary American Novelists_
undertakes to study the type as it has existed during the first two
decades of the twentieth century. Readers of both volumes may note that
in this later volume criticism has tended to supplant history. Only in
writing of dead authors can the critic feel that any considerable
portion of his task is done when he has arranged them in what he thinks
their proper categories and their true perspective. In the case of
living authors he has regularly to remember that he works with shifting
materials, with figures whose dimensions and importance may be changed
by growth, with persons who may desert old paths for new, reveal
unsuspected attributes, increase or fade with the mere revolutions of
time. All he can expect to do in dealing with any current type as fluid
as the novel, is, seizing upon it at some specific moment, to examine
the intentions and successes of outstanding or typical individuals and
to make the most accurate report possible concerning them. Whatever
general tendency there may be ought to appear from his examination.

The general tendency appearing most clearly among the novelists here
studied is, of course, the drift of naturalism: initiated a full
generation ago by several restless spirits, of whom E.W. Howe and Hamlin
Garland are the most conspicuous survivors; continued by those young
geniuses Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, all dead before their
time, and by Theodore Dr