Americans All

Americans All, by Various

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Title: Americans All Stories of American Life of To-Day
Author: Various
Editor: Benjamin A. Heydrick
Release Date: October 26, 2007 [EBook #23207]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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AMERICANS ALL ***

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AMERICANS ALL

STORIES OF AMERICAN LIFE OF TO-DAY
EDITED BY BENJAMIN A. HEYDRICK Editor "Types of the Short
Story," etc.
[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY. N. J.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For permission to reprint the stories in this volume, acknowledgement
is made to the owners of the copyrights, as follows:
For "The Right Promethean Fire," to Mrs. Atwood, R. Martin and
Doubleday, Page & Company.
For "The Land of Heart's Desire," to Messrs. Doubleday, Page &
Company.
For "The Tenor," to Alice I. Bunner and to Charles Scribners' Sons.
For "The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop," to William Allen White and
The Macmillan Company.
For "The Gift of the Magi," to Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Company.
For "The Gold Brick," copyright 1910, to Brand Whitlock and to The
Bobbs, Merrill Company.
For "His Mother's Son," to Edna Ferber and the Frederick A. Stokes
Company.

For "Bitter-Sweet," to Fannie Hurst and Harper & Brothers.
For "The Riverman," to Stewart Edward White and Doubleday, Page &
Company.
For "Flint and Fire," to Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Messrs. Henry
Holt & Company.
For "The Ordeal at Mt. Hope," to Mrs. Alice Dunbar, Mrs. Mathilde
Dunbar, and Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Company.
For "Israel Drake," to Katherine Mayo and Messrs. Houghton Mifflin
Company.
For "The Struggles and Triumph of Isidro," to James M. Hopper.
For "The Citizen," to James F. Dwyer and the Paget Literary Agency.

PREFACE
In the years before the war, when we had more time for light pursuits, a
favorite sport of reviewers was to hunt for the Great American Novel.
They gave tongue here and there, and pursued the quarry with great
excitement in various directions, now north, now south, now west, and
the inevitable disappointment at the end of the chase never deterred
them from starting off on a fresh scent next day. But in spite of all the
frenzied pursuit, the game sought, the Great American Novel, was
never captured. Will it ever be captured? The thing they sought was a
book that would be so broad, so typical, so true that it would stand as
the adequate expression in fiction of American life. Did these tireless
hunters ever stop to ask themselves, what is the Great French Novel?
what is the Great English Novel? And if neither of these nations has
produced a single book which embodies their national life, why should
we expect that our life, so much more diverse in its elements, so
multifarious in its aspects, could ever be summed up within the covers
of a single book?

Yet while the critics continued their hopeless hunt, there was growing
up in this country a form of fiction which gave promise of some day
achieving the task that this never-to-be written novel should
accomplish. This form was the short story. It was the work of many
hands, in many places. Each writer studied closely a certain locality,
and transcribed faithfully what he saw. Thus the New England village,
the western ranch, the southern plantation, all had their chroniclers. Nor
was it only various localities that we saw in these one-reel pictures;
they dealt with typical occupations, there were stories of travelling
salesmen, stories of lumbermen, stories of politicians, stories of the
stage, stories of school and college days. If it were possible to bring
together in a single volume a group of these, each one reflecting
faithfully one facet of our many-sided life, would not such a book be a
truer picture of America than any single novel could present?
The present volume is an attempt to do this. That it is only an attempt,
that it does not cover the whole field of our national life, no one
realizes better than the compiler. The title Americans All signifies that
the characters in the book are all Americans, not that they are all of the
Americans.
This book then differs in its purpose from other collections of short
stories. It