distinguished or significant, to study them one by one, adding some
account of the school of fiction just now predominant.




CHAPTER II

ARGUMENT


1. HAMLIN GARLAND

The pedigree of the most energetic and important fiction now being
written in the United States goes unmistakably back to that creative
uprising of discontent in the eighties of the last century which brought
into articulate consciousness the larger share of the aspects of unrest
which have since continued to challenge the nation's magnificent,
arrogant grand march.

The decade had Henry Adams for its bitter philosopher, despairing over
current political corruption and turning away to probe the roots of
American policy under Jefferson and his immediate successors; had the
youthful Theodore Roosevelt for its standard-bearer of a civic
conscience which was, plans went, to bring virtue into caucuses; had
Henry George for its spokesman of economic change, moving across the
continent from California to New York with an argument and a program for
new battles against privilege; had Edward Bellamy for its Utopian
romancer, setting forth a delectable picture of what human society might
become were the old iniquities reasonably wiped away and co-operative