One of the most conspicuous characteristics of our contemporary native
fiction is an increasing tendency to subordinate plot or story to the
bold and realistic portrayal of some of the types of American life and
manners. And the reason for this is not far to seek. The extraordinary
mixing of races which has been going on here for more than a century has
produced an enormously diversified human result; and the products of
this "hybridization" have been still further differentiated by an
environment that ranges from the Everglades of Florida to the glaciers
of Alaska. The existence of these conditions, and the great literary
opportunities which they contain, American writers long ago perceived;
and, with a generally true appreciation of artistic values, they have
created from them a gallery of brilliant _genre_ pictures which to-day
stand for the highest we have yet attained in the art of fiction.

Thus it is that we have (to mention but a few) studies of Louisiana and
her people by Mr. Cable; of Virginia and Georgia by Thomas Nelson Page
and Joel Chandler Harris; of New England by Miss Jewett and Miss
Wilkins; of the Middle West by Miss French (Octave Thanet); of the great
Northwest by Hamlin Garland; of Canada and the land of the _habitans_ by
Gilbert Parker; and finally, though really first in point of time, the
Forty-niners and their successors by Bret Harte. This list might be
indefinitely extended, for it is growing daily, but it is long enough as
it stands to show that every section of our country has, or soon will
have, its own painter and historian, whose works will live and become a
permanent part of our literature in just the degree that they are
artistically true. Some of these writers have already produced many
books, while others have gained general recognition and even fame by the
vividness and power of a single study, like Mr. Howe with The Story of a
Country Town. But each one, it will be noticed, has chosen for his field
of work that part of our country wherein he passed the early and