Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920)

Contemporary American
Novelists (1900-1920)
by Carl
Van Doren

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(1900-1920)
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Title: Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920)
Author: Carl Van Doren
Release Date: June 8, 2004 [EBook #12563]
Language: English
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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 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 independence of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. The year
1920, marking a peak in the triumph of one or two species of
naturalism and in some ways closing a chapter, affords an admirable
occasion to take stock. This book, indeed, was planned and begun at
the close of that year and has firmly resisted the temptation to do more
than glance at most of the work produced since then--even at the price
of giving what must seem insufficient notice to The Triumph of the Egg
and Three Soldiers and of giving none at all to that still more recent
masterpiece Cytherea. While criticism pauses to take stock, creation
steadily goes on.
Acknowledgments are due The Nation for permission to reprint from its
pages those portions of the volume which have already been published
there.
CARL VAN DOREN.
March, 1922.

CONTENTS
I OLD STYLE
1. Local Color 2. Romance
II ARGUMENT
1. Hamlin Garland 2. Winston Churchill 3. Robert Herrick 4. Upton
Sinclair 5. Theodore Dreiser
III ART
1. Booth Tarkington 2. Edith Wharton 3. James Branch Cabell 4. Willa
Cather 5. Joseph Hergesheimer
IV NEW STYLE
1. Emergent Types
Ellen Glasgow, William Allen White, Ernest Poole, Henry B. Fuller,
Mary Austin, Immigrants.
2. The Revolt from the Village
Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, E.W. Howe, Sinclair Lewis,
Zona Gale, Floyd Dell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Canfield, 1921.

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS
CHAPTER I
OLD STYLE
1. LOCAL COLOR
A study of the American novel of the twentieth century must first of all

take stock of certain types of fiction which continue to persist, with
varying degrees of vitality and significance, from the last quarter of the
century preceding.
There is, to begin with, the type associated with the now moribund cult
of local color, which originally had Bret Harte for its prophet,