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 Dreiser, Robert Herrick, Upton Sinclair, happily
still alive; given a fresh impulse during the shaken years of the war
and of the recovery from war by such satirists as Edgar Lee Masters and
Sinclair Lewis and their companions in the new revolt. The intelligent
American fiction of the century has to be studied--so far as the novel
is concerned--largely in terms of its agreement or its disagreement with
this naturalistic tendency, which has been powerful enough to draw
Winston Churchill and Booth Tarkington into an approach to its
practices, to drive James Branch Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer into
explicit dissent, and to throw into strong relief the balanced