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, and which, beginning almost at once after the Civil War, gradually broadened out until it saw priests in every state and followers in every county. Obedient to the example of the prophet, most of the practitioners of the mode chose to be episodic rather than epic in their undertakings; the history of local color belongs primarily to the historian of the short story. Even when the local colorists essayed the novel they commonly did little more than to expand some episode into elaborate dimensions or to string beads of episode upon an obvious thread. Hardly one of them ever made any real advance, either in art or reputation, upon his earliest important volume: George Washington Cable, after more than forty years, is still on the whole best represented by his _Old Creole Days_; and so--to name only the chief among the survivors--after intervals not greatly shorter are Mary N. Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") by _In the Tennessee Mountains_, Thomas Nelson Page by _In Ole Virginia_, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman by _A Humble Romance and Other Stories_, James Lane Allen by _Flute and Violin_, and Alice Brown by _Meadow-Grass_.