That memorable year of fiction which saw so many superior books produced saw them successful beyond any reasonable expectation; and it is scarcely to be wondered at that the year following--with which this chronicle does not undertake to deal--should have responded to such encouragement. If Dorothy Canfield challenged the tendency, Booth Tarkington saw it and ventured _Alice Adams_. Sherwood Anderson in _The Triumph of the Egg_ and Floyd Dell in _The Briary-Bush_ proceeded to other triumphs. Half a dozen competent novelists followed naturalism into the "exposure" of small towns or cramped lives: particularly C. Kay Scott with the hard, crisp _Blind Mice_ and Charles G. Norris, rival of his brother Frank Norris in veracity if not in fire, with _Brass_. John Dos Passos in _Three Soldiers_, the most controverted novel of the year, dealt brilliantly with the unheroic aspects of the American Expeditionary Force. Evelyn Scott in _The Narrow House_ and Ben Hecht in _Erik Dorn_ attempted, as Waldo Frank had already done in _The Dark Mother_ and as some others now did less notably, to find a more elastic, a more impressionistic technique, breaking up the "gray paragraph" and quickening the tempo of their narratives. At the same time romance once more showed its perennial face, suggesting that the future does not belong to naturalism entirely. Donn Byrne in _Messer Marco Polo_ played in a bright Gaelic way with the story of Marco Polo and his quest for Golden Bells, the daughter of Kubla Khan. Robert Nathan wrote, in _Autumn_, an all but perfect native idyl, grounded well enough in local color, as suggestive of the soil as an old farmers' almanac, and yet touched with the universal fingers of the pastoral. If American fiction cannot long escape the village, at least here is a village of a sort hardly thinkable before the revolt began. No matter what a flood of angry truth _Spoon River Anthology_ let in, beauty survives. Many waters cannot quench beauty. What truth extinguishes is the weaker flames. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920), by Carl Van Doren